The Dating Game, Part Two

Here's your weekend reading assignment, 4ECon:

Three things related to pairing up that I'm going to bullsh... er, talk about, I mean, in this post:

1. People are generally unaware how to maximize their dating success - Many people are often too hopeful, decreasing their odds of a landing a successful relationship, while others are "settling" too often.

2. Your instincts on who to date must, by definition, lead you in the wrong direction.

3. There's a way, possibly, that you can override your instincts, extract brutal honesty from yourself and solve the problems in #1 and #2.



First, some background:

Without being too obvious, I'd say there's a difference between getting a date and finding a mate. Dates only require some version of some form of attraction to go forward, but pairing up for longer periods - finding a mate - will succeed or fail based on a wider variety of prerequisites: Desire to start a family, age, expectations of future dating success (desperation, really), and very importantly, your perceptions of the dating pool.

A lot of the people I know that are paired up did so with minimum conscious strategy and maximum luck - even my parents who've been married for 33 years. Almost entirely before any of the prerequisites I listed set in, they'd already started dating. As far as I know, the desire to start a family was not consciously why they initially got together. They were young, not desperate, with high expectations of both themselves and, I'm sure, their possible alternatives (the dating pool.)

So the way it worked for my parents was that they coupled, they liked each other, and the bigger reasons for staying together kicked in over time, after years of dating. This is a pretty common story, I think.

But what are the odds that relationships between these types of couples last for as long as, say, a highly calculated and formulaic match between two people with similar perspectives on things like starting a family, age, dating alternatives, etc? Well, the filtering process in the first case happens like this:

You date one person and then you break up if it doesn't work. You date another, end it if it's bad. You date another and end it if it's not "meant to last," etc. You keep dating until you find someone that either has the same perspective as you or morphs into the preferred perspective along the same time frame as you.

Filtering partners this way has a problem. I would compare it to trying to find the answer to a math problem by guessing and checking - only in this scenario checking involves significant bias. In other words, it's hard to rationally compare your current choice of mate to alternative options after you've invested so much time in him or her. ...In econospeak: the transaction costs of switching partners are high enough to prevent efficient allocation. (Sorry, couldn't resist.)

But does this really mean the probability of success using this method is lower than it otherwise could be? Consider a possible second method:

You take a test, determine your personality traits, your desire to start a family, your perception of the dating pool, your level of desperation (essentially) and then a computer uses a complex algorithm to match you with a partner that should maximize your probability of long-term success. This is also known as eHarmony - though I'm not sure they come right out and ask how desperate you are (but I'd bet they can get at it indirectly).

Now how could an algorithm that knows more information about you than you'd normally release by the 15th date, that sufficiently solves the problem of getting information into a centralized location, that takes potential pairs from the largest [possible] pool and matches them possibly offer you a lower probability of success than the first method, the guess-and-check?

Well, maybe because the type of people who put themselves in the centralized database are exactly the kind of people who have given up in the real world. The type of person that has not given up in the real world is most likely young, optimistic, confident and believes (likely with sufficient reinforcement) that the real world dating options are acceptable. These are exactly the kind of people that other people want to date, and thus they have not given up on the real world - it is not incredibly obvious that your dating options are severely limited when you're getting easy dates, albeit with second rate partners. ...Not to mention the fact that people often date, and even get married, for reasons of claiming (or pinning down, if you will) the best partners, regardless of overall "fit."





So what's the lesson to be learned here, Dave?

Let's get technical. EMH - Efficient Market Hypothesis, in finance, states that prices of assets will reflect all available information and it is therefore impossible for a single person to beat the market. The same rule should apply for all markets provided there is no barrier or limit on information.

The way this applies to the dating market is that it suggests that, within the multiple realms of date-matching (the real world or online), you will be paired with someone who is equally as "dateable" as you, in theory, over the long term. If you have the same information about the dating market as everyone else, you can't really exploit the market to your advantage - or, in relevant terms - you can't trick a '10' (from our scales in Part One, and from the "general scale" too) into a long term relationship with you if you're a '5', at least for any considerable amount of time.

There are, of course, exceptions to this general rule. One of them is that as long as divorce is socially or literally expensive, we'll get distortions. This is a lot less common now than it was 50 years ago, but it's still there, obviously.

Another exception is apparently (according to Tim Harford and others) a person's perception of the overall dating market, mostly due to the size of the available dating pool. If someone perceives their options as severely limited, they will be more likely to "settle." If this isn't obvious, here's a long argument that seems to prove it. Basically, people really do respond to supply and demand in the dating marking, and they decide to date and get married using the information available to them at the time. Perfectly normal.

So this means that a '5' could conceivably trick a '10' into a longer-term relationship for some amount of time given a significant and relatively permanent imbalance of the dating pool. Provided the '10' is not aware that he or she could be dating other '10's, the relationship should and probably would continue without too many problems.

Here's the more important question, though: If your goal is a long term relationship - even marriage - is it really the best strategy to try to exploit the market? Even if a '10' is actively choosing partners from a sea of '5's, the probability that a '10' will discover his or her error at some point and try to undo the deal (AKA breakup or divorce) is substantially higher than the probability of a '6' (dating a '5') discovering his or her potential.

So, assuming that the goal is a long-term relationship, doesn't it make sense to avoid your natural instincts - to not chase the best available mate, AKA avoid people who are "above" your dateability level?

I know, I know, it's an vague idea, but there is some way to figure out whether or not you are matched with your partner in terms of overall desirability to the opposite sex.

This is, in fact, one of those things that people just know. For a small example, if you're constantly worried about your partner cheating on you then it means the odds that you've unknowingly (or knowingly) exploited a dating market loophole are quite high. It's not a sure thing, of course - you could just be completely paranoid. But then being completely paranoid is also a sign that your partner might be more well-adjusted (less crazy/paranoid), and perhaps therefore more desirable than you.


(This post's link is unrelated, like usual, but I think it's pretty interesting)


All this might be pretty obvious to you. It also might just be useless if you're happily dating/engaged/married/dying of cancer. Otherwise it just may be helpful - if you're looking for that perfect match, or if you're just really desperate for a "LTR" (See: Any Craigslist ad in a random city for women in their late 30s), taking the scientific approach - the economic approach - just might be the best strategy.

If eHarmony and other online dating algorithm-based databases can, in theory, maximize your probability of a long-term success with a partner in the second-rate online world, shouldn't there be a way to do it in real life - where the first-rate people have yet to give up - as well? If all the most desirable people are facing substantial bias and asymmetrical information about their alternatives in the real world, shouldn't there be some way to find the "perfect" match that takes into consideration your individual market circumstances?

There should be - and maybe I'll be able to make some crap up by the next excruciatingly long post.

For now, arrivederci.