The love formulas
Yes, this is another post about love.
Despite what can sometimes be thought, love is a serious matter. Just think about the amount of time, money, and effort one has to invest in a relationship, let alone in a marriage. If these end up in a failure (and even more time, money, and effort expandures to repair the damage), then the result is a bittersweet waste of resources you will never get back. I am no business student, but my bet is that such a deal involves a lot of sunk costs.
On many levels, love is a problem, and we are not all eqaully good at solving it. And although math is definitely not something we all love (or even like), it can come in handy in the love problem. Consider this: could you predict your chances of finding true love with math (and therefore knowing whether you should even try to invest in a potential relationship)? What about whom you should decide to marry? Let’s consider both of these separately.
The test of love probability
Have you ever wondered whether you had a soulmate? Where is that person, and how much probability is there that you will ever meet him or her?
Now, imagine that there was a test for you to answer these burning questions. A little bunch of questions and computations that will reveal how picky (or not) you really are and how many people will meet your expectancies and potentially be a match.
Obviously, this is what online dating sites do all the time: they ask you questions and select people who match your aswers. But these only include people who have an account on the same web site. This issue was addressed by a film writer and director, Art Perez, who developped a little test to go with his short movie titled “Less Than One”. The test allows you to know the exact number of potential soulmates that exist in your city, but you can also take the test considering any other population of your choice (such as the McGill student body). This test is only 7 questions long (which might be far from covering all the possible criterions you have in choosing a girlfriend or boyfriend), and I would certainly question its validity. However, it might be interesting to know what are the odds! (Apparently, the narrow constraints of mine lead to a total of 12 potential soulmates over the entire population of Montreal… sad story).
You can take the test here: http://www.lessthanone.com/
The marriage problem
Marriage happens to also be an interesting math problem. How does one know that their current partner is the right one for the big move? More importantly, how to know whether we will not meet someone better sometime in the future? On the other hand, once a partner has been ruled out, one can never go back on the decision.
Psychological tests that investigate the compatibility of a couple that considers marriage are sometimes administered to help people make such choices. However, this problem has been also (partially) solved with a single formula.
Also known as the secretary problem, it goes as follows: a boss has to choose the best secretary candidate, while having to reject candidates before meeting the remaining ones, and wanting to minimize the costs of the hiring procedure. In the case of marriage, one faces the same dilemma.
The answer to the problem is to chose the n/e th candidate, where n is the overall number of candidates and e is the base of the natural logarithm (about 2.71828). This formula leads to the selection of the overall best candidate 37% of the time (which might not seem like a lot, but hey calculus shows it is the best that can be done). In the case of marriage therefore, math suggests you settle at the (whathever approximate amount of potentially suitable husbands or wives you meet in your life)/e th potential mate. The explanation for why this is is quite involved so no attempt to explain it here will be made. But, what is the test in this case you might ask? I guess simply whether you have met the n/e th potentially marriable person or not.
At the end of the day, however mathematically or psychometrically, objectively and scientifically we approach love, one question still remains
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