1. Marry the first person you meet whom you could happily be married to. Don't settle; make sure you could happily be married to the person, but don't pass up an acceptable partner.
2. Stop worrying about whether you could have met someone better.
Satisficers are happier than maximizers. Don't be a maximizer.
Yes, and that threshold is the boolean I'm talking about. He says
"Marry the first person you meet whom you could happily be married to"
Which implies that for each person, either you could be happily married to them or you could not be happily married to them. My point is that there are probably many people who you could marry and increase your happiness, but that doesn't necessarily mean you should marry the first one you encounter, because of the significant opportunity cost.
Worrying about "opportunity cost" is maximizing, and people who maximize are less happy than people who satisfice because instead of enjoying what they have, they worry about the possibility of getting something better.
It seems that satisficers would only be happier if they are good both at setting their threshold and at predicting the happiness of each option. And of course, setting a threshold requires a consideration of opportunity cost, so you don't get to hand wave that away.
Satisficers don't care whether there's a potentially better option though. That's the definition of satisficing, and it makes most consideration of opportunity cost go away.
It's a little hard to apply in practice because a.) nobody knows just how many candidates there will be in their lifetime and b.) your idea of who the "best" candidate will be changes over time, based on your life experiences. Someone who you thought annoyingly plain in college may be a great life partner 10 years later, while the girl who was fun and exciting in college seems more than just a little crazy if she's still doing the same stuff a decade later.
There's also the question of evolving mate quality. Are the people who are available at 30 worse in quality than at 20, as most people tend to believe ("all the good ones" are or get "taken")? Or are they better (which is possible, too)?
It did seem, as a man, that women with good personalities improved with age, but that women with average or bad personalities became worse. Age seems to spread people out, in that way, but the well-adjusted people being selected out tended to push down the mode. There were a lot of women I dated in their late 20s who had way too many psychological cigarette burns from Biffs and Jedds ("two D's because..."). Partners of low moral character definitely do lasting damage-- that's obvious in all genders-- and women have more opportunity to get fucked up (and fucked literally) than men in college and their early 20s.
That said, "all the good ones are taken" is probably more panic than reality. I remember in college, people used to descend on the freshman girls "before they get snapped up". It's a fucked-up way to think and maybe it actually has the opposite effect of taking bad people out of the market, because only a fucked-up person would think that for a college senior to stalk September-frosh ("froshing", it was called) is OK.
I'm 29, turning 30 in a few weeks, but I'm meeting more women now, and in general it seems that most have grown up, so much so that I wonder where these women were in my early 20's. I mean I had my growing up to do as well, but I was never big into the college party scene etc.
Hmm... I think it's probably (at least) a bimodal distribution. Some of the untaken ones are untaken because they have issues that render them unappealing for a long term relationship (physical attractiveness is far from the only criterion, by the way). Others may be highly appealing, but have such high standards of their own that they haven't yet met anyone who qualifies.
If you like active, professional women, you also have the phenomena of many women entering the "serious relationship" pool around age 30 because they spent their twenties traveling, or concentrating on their career, or getting advanced degrees, all of which take a significant amount of focus and often involve life changes which tend to end existing relationships.
This is a topic that's really sensitive, and what kinds of experiences "permanently ruin" someone, and which can be bounced back from, are subjective and hotly debated, so... I'll try to tread lightly. And I really hate the stud/slut dichotomy. If a woman who hung out with typical frat boys in college and got flash-lighted is untouchable, then why aren't those frat boys, who did the flash-lighting, likewise? They should be. The idea that horrible men are "cool" because they "got away with it" is revolting. That double standard makes me angry.
The problem isn't physically abusive partners alone. There's more to it than that. If dating a jerk or a crazy person or even a physically abusive person made someone "permanently damaged" there'd be almost no one left.
The main issue that is gendered is that women have more opportunities, when they're young, to involve themselves with really terrible people and for things to go seriously wrong. We're all bad judges of character when we're really young. The typical 15-year-old boy isn't any morally better than a 15-year-old girl, and would probably make choices that would destroy him if given the chance... but typical 15-year-old boys are considered unattractive (even to girls of the same age) and don't get those opportunities. I was a fucking idiot at that age, but no one wanted to be a fucking idiot with me. For women... it's a different story. The opportunities to make really bad choices and ruin yourself, if you're a young woman, are quite available.
I don't think it's even sex itself that does the damage. I used to think that, but I think casual social contact is what erodes the person's values. Being around bad people makes a person bad. What makes college casual sex evil isn't the sex itself (the sex is vanilla) but the acquisitive, manipulative, and dishonest culture around it. I have no problem with swingers or people in open relationships or above-board promiscuous adults, because there's nothing gross or wrong about sex itself. But the culture around college casual sex (the alcohol abuse, the focus on man as conquerer and woman as defeated, the "gray rape" that isn't "gray" at all, the fights, the "pickup artist" nonsense, and the reward of bad behavior in both sexes) is pretty disgusting.
The traditional solution to this problem is that the father and/or brother would protect the young woman and maim or kill the louts who would try manipulate and take advantage of her. Colleges also had the power of "In loco parentis" to prevent parties that were full of alcohol abuse and casual sex. All such powers were stripped by law in the late 60's and 70's with the results you see now. So if you want to see this problem fixed you would need either to return to patriarchy, or invent some novel way of guiding the young down the right path.
The 1/e concept doesn't quite apply. First of all, the "Secretary Problem" assumes a binary payoff structure: +1.0 for getting the absolute best and 0.0 for getting anyone else (and maximizes the EV at 1/e). However, for most people, getting the 2nd-best theoretical potential mate is quite a bit better than ending up alone (especially because people and preferences change, making the concept of "best potential mate" sketchy; the person you want most at 17 is probably a bad lifelong match.)
Let's look at it, though. For the first 15-20 years (subject to debate) you don't know anything about this problem. You don't know who you are, everyone's changing fast, you're blinded by sexual desire, etc. For the last 30 years, your reproductive viability is reduced for men and zero for women. This puts the "choosing window" at, say, 20 to 50. That would mean that one doesn't settle down until 32 at the absolute earliest, and that most people would do so in their 40s (and have only a few years to bear children). Most people don't want to wait that long to settle down, and for good reasons.
One major one is that the pool of available singles declines in quality as you get older. The Secretary Problem assumes a uniform distribution of quality over time. It's not true (and, in fact, insulting) to say that "all the good ones are taken", but I definitely noticed a change in the average quality of dates from 20 to 26 (when I met my wife and left the dating game). You still can find great people at any age, but the distribution evolves. Because people improve with age (fuck VCs and how they think about that) there's some push at the high end, but that's not offset by the disproportionate rate at which either (a) "the good ones" are taken, or (b) the messed-up people become better at hiding themselves, which is my preferred theory.
(I have no idea whether that decline of available mate quality continues after 26, or if it levels off or even reverses. I know some high-quality people who are single at 40, but have no concept of the aggregate dating scene at that age.)
Empirically, people don't "hold out" during 1/e of their window because, unlike with the Secretary Problem, the payoff in choosing the 2nd or 3rd-best theoretical match is quite high (maybe 0.8 to 0.99) compared to the payoff (0.0 by definition) of never meeting someone as good as the best during your hold-out period.
> Empirically, people don't "hold out" during 1/e of their window because, unlike with the Secretary Problem, the payoff in choosing the 2nd or 3rd-best theoretical match is quite high (maybe 0.8 to 0.99) compared to the payoff (0.0 by definition) of never meeting someone as good as the best during your hold-out period.
The 2nd or 3rd-best theoretical match could also have a negative payoff (divorces you, takes half your money + child support + alimony). You can lose a lot more marrying the wrong person than never marrying at all.
Wow if that's true then marriage is just a horrible bet. Let's say you would date 10 potential marriage partners - you're saying that only one of them would have an outcome better than divorcing you and taking half your money and your kids? I wouldn't even consider marriage as a possibility if the odds were that bad.
There is a variant of the secretary problem that assumes a different payoff structure - each secretary has a payoff which is uniformly distributed U(0,A) for unknown A. As I recall, the stopping time is O(sqrt(N)).
The bigger difference is that there is no set time where you have to choose whether to marry someone. You can, for example, go back to dating someone you dated previously and then decide to marry them.
1) n = number of people you could date in your lifetime
2) Date n/e people without stopping.
3) After dating n/e people, marry the first person who is better than everyone you've dated previously.
This method selects the best candidate about 37% of the time, which sounds bad but is superior to other systematic methods.
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimal_stopping
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem