Who To Marry?

I previously discussed an economic strategy of how to maximize the chances of one-night-stands. Today I will attempt to do the same thing when it comes to choosing the best spouse to have children with. In my case I ask the question: What can I do to filter out the best possible women, who I can have children with? First I will present the stopping theory set out by Gilbert and Mosteller (1966). Next I will argue that this strategy is implemented by people without knowing about it. This could provide more evidence for the theory of homo economics, the rational agent.

Gilbert and Mosteller in their paper “Recognizing the Maximum of a Sequence” (1966) set out the beauty contest problem. Imagine the show “Next” from MTV times. You date 100 girls for 2 minutes each. At the end of the 2 minutes you have 2 options: (1) you scream “NEXT”, and a new date starts, or (2) you say “Hell Yeah” and the game is over and you get a second date with that girl. Also you have to choose one at some point, and once you say “Next” you cannot chose her at a later point. So how do you find the best girl in this crowd?

A simple strategy could be to say “Hell Yeah” and just pick the first girl! OK, there is a 1% chance she is the best one. But there is also a 1% chance she is the worst one. So not great. Can we increase our probability of her being the best one out o the 100?

There is an optimal strategy: “Next” the first 37 – remember the best one in the first 37- whenever anything better comes along than the best one in the first 37, “Hell Yeah” her. This gives you a 37% chance of getting the best one. Why so?

37 is 100/e (where e= natural number=2.72). Here 4 scenarios occur (FIGURE 1). In the first 2 the best is within the first 37 so you lose. In the 3rd you will strictly win. And in the 4th you have some chance of winning if the best comes before the second best (and for that matter any number that is better than the first 37 but worse than the best). In total this adds up to a probability of 37% of you choosing the absolute best out of the 100.

So we know what the optimal strategy is for a beauty contest… “But Kruxi, life isn’t like that”. I disagree: I think it might be very close to it. Let’s think about average dating behaviour. People don’t marry their childhood love. And those that do, are probably proportional to lifelong bachelors. It equals out. So what do people do? They start dating in school. Uni is dating Mecca. And at some point you settle. Depending on how many possible dates you could have, you will settle earlier or later. Imaging living in a rural area, where you don’t get out much and population density isn’t very high. You can date maximum 50 girls. So what you do is you date the first 18 (50/2.72) – remember the best one- if there is a better one within the next 32 you immediately marry her. Now what if you are a very urban Tinderella. You can have a lot of dates: You estimate that you could go on 1000 dates. So, what you should do is go on 370- say no to all of them – and then take whatever is better than anything before. This obviously takes longer than the rural scenario. This is a valid observation: Urban people marry later than rural people.

Think of your own dating life. I have heard so many people say: “It was a great relationship, he was a great guy, but you know we were 19 and things didn’t work out.” This describes the optimal strategy without even knowing about it. It means that both would have never settled for this relationship; They were in the “NEXT” phase of the first 37%. Since that relationship no one better came along but they know it was the right decision.

Think of social lights versus introverts. Presumably social people meet more potential spouses, thus their neglection number is higher, which leads to more dates and sexual partners before even considering settling compared to the introverts. People who rather focus on work, or non-social hobbies are less likely to meet a lot of potential spouse material. They will settle earlier with less sexual partners prior to marrying.

What comes to mind is the term Fuckboy. This person is mostly a very social person who goes out a lot. Because of it he has a high number of potential dates, and will thus have “exclusionary sex” (“Next” sex with the first 37%) for a long time. He will therefore behave like a “teenager” until his late 20s in order to cycle through the mass of “Nexts” in a the fastest way possible.

This theory obviously has its flaws: One cannot date an ex, one must chose a person, and a person must be able to determine who is strictly better, independent of changing preferences over time. That being said: It’s a start. I feel like this post speaks to the economic approach of explaining human behavior. Economists assume that people are rational agents that utility maximize. If you want to find the best possible spouse (and don’t settle for anything less) economists predict that you will go for the optimal stopping strategy described above. My observation is that most people do just that, without knowing it. This is what Econ is all about: Identify incentives, maximize for them in a mathematical way, see if people adhere to the optimal strategy (if they don't: re-identify incentives, loosen assumptions). This is called the RAT (Rational Action Theory)

(I have previously written an essay arguing against the idea of incorporating emotions in RAT. I also mentioned the stopping problem then)

(My previous blog post on “Why I don’t see a therapist” argues that people do things without knowing why they do them. I argued that the post-hoc rationalization of humans on their actions is mostly horribly wrong. I think this is also a good case for such an example. Ask anyone why they got married. I highly doubt they will say: “He was slightly better than the best in the first 37% of my total potential spouses which I had to reject.” I think this, and only this, is the correct answer. Sure, it might be a derivative of it where one can loosen the assumption of not being able to date exes, or allowing for a person to look for a spouse in the top 10% rather than THE BEST ONE. I think these types of explanations are superior to emotional responses that are hard to quantify and mostly wrong)

I first encountered the stopping problem in “Chance: The science of secrets of luck, randomness and probability”- Chapter 2, “The Chips are dows” by Helen Thompson.

Also Hanna Fry mentions this in her Ted talk.