Is love just a numbers game?
Two nights ago, when a friend asked me what I was doing, I told him that I was thinking about an equation to explain love, to which he responded, “You definitely had a drink”.
Can you blame him? No… neither can I.
I wasn’t drinking that night. I was just (soberly) spiraling down my love for mathematics by attempting to understand the mathematics behind love.
It shouldn’t be that surprising that we can use math to predict love though. After all, we use equations to model the most unpredictable phenomena around us. We use Numerical Weather Prediction to estimate the future state of the atmosphere based on the current climate. We use the Lotka-Volterra equations to describe the predator-prey interactions in a given ecosystem. We use the Random Walk model to predict stock price movements.
Love, like the weather, biological interactions and stocks, is full of uncertainty. But love, like the weather, biological interactions and stocks, is also full of patterns. Mathematicians can capitalize on these patterns to quantitate this qualitative emotion.
In my search of the literature, I first stumbled upon a talk of Peter Backus ‘Why I don’t have a girlfriend: An application of the Drake equation to love in the UK’ at the 2011 Warwick Economics Summit . The Drake equation was developed to estimate the number of extraterrestrial civilizations with whom we might communicate in the Milky Way (G) by applying a list of increasingly restrictive criteria (G = R.fp.ne.fl.fi.fc.L). In an incredibly entertaining talk, Dr. Backus walks us through how he adapted the Drake Equation to estimate the number of potential girlfriends for him in the UK. After applying this equation, Dr. Backus finds that he has a 0.00035% chance of finding a partner (significantly worse than the odds of dying). Yikes, poor Peter… I don’t know about you, but for someone who hopes to NOT die alone, this is pretty depressing. So, I decided to crunch the numbers for my own life. Here are my calculations:
- Men living in Philadelphia or Lebanon
— Total pool of 4,800,000
- Men living in Philadelphia or Lebanon between the ages of 19 and 28
— Total pool of 850,000
- Men living in Philadelphia or Lebanon between the ages of 19 and 28 who I find attractive
— I could not use census data for this one, so I had to get creative!
— I opened Facebook, chose two friends at random: one in Philadelphia and one in Lebanon, went through their friends’ list and counted the number of men who seemed in the appropriate age range who I found attractive based on their profile picture.
— I only looked at men who I did not know so that I would not let character interfere as to not bias the results.
— I ended up with a proportion of 1/10.
— Total pool of 85,000
- Men living in Philadelphia or Lebanon between the ages of 19 and 28 who find me attractive
— I just went with an estimate of 1/15 which brings down my total pool to 5,500.
- Men living in Philadelphia or Lebanon between the ages of 19 and 28 who I could get along with
— I had to get creative for this one too. So, this time, I went through my Facebook friends and selected men in the appropriate age range who I could imagine myself with.
— I ended up with a proportion of 1/25 (which is definitely an overestimate given that I went through a list of men I am already friends with on Facebook).
— Total pool of 220
- Men living in Philadelphia or Lebanon between the ages of 19 and 28 who I could get along with, I find attractive, they find me attractive and are single
— Assuming 40% are single, total pool of 88 men!
— 88 men >>> “The one” so tbh this is quite promising.
Now that we’ve settled that I have approximately 88 potential matches. Can I mathematically tell when to stop dating? Mathematician Hannah Fry believes so. She uses the optimal stopping theory as an algorithm to know with who to settle down. She explains that to have the best possible chance of finding the ideal partner, you should reject everyone in the first 37% of your dating life and then give a chance to the next person you meet who you prefer over all previous partners.
Let’s apply it to my life.
I started dating at around 15 years old and I hope to settle down by 33 years old. So, my dating life would ideally last for a total of 18 years. The optimal stopping theory says that I should reject everyone I meet in the first 18/e years of my dating period (37%): this means I should reject everyone I meet before 22 years old. I’m in luck because I am 22, I am single and “my rejection period” is over. This means that now I should continue meeting people and use my experience from “my rejection period” to pick the man who comes along and is better than everyone else I’ve met before.
But is love just a numbers game? I don’t think so. While these models are incredibly interesting, we can’t find love in an equation, nor should we hope to. Because so much is lost in the algorithms like the excitement of meeting someone who understands the complexity of your thoughts, the frustration of being unable to think of anything or anyone else, the anxiety that comes with being vulnerable and sharing your feelings and the peace in your mind when you’re together. To me, things get exponentially scarier when I can’t represent them in a graph, when there is no clear solution, when I can’t play with numbers to make sense of them but if this is the price to pay for love, I’ll risk it any day.
In Computer Science Professor Emma Pierson’s words: “So those are the twin and opposite warnings I’d pass on to those who would reduce love to a line graph: You don’t know what you’re missing, and you don’t know what you’ll find. Perhaps the moments that count most can’t — or shouldn’t — be counted.”