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Mathematician Peter Backus once calculated that there were only 26 perfect women in London. And, surprisingly, he got married. Does this mean that mathematical methods are applicable to love seeking? Yes, especially if you do not demand too much from a potential partner.
At first glance, love and math don’t go well together. However, love also follows patterns, whether it is the number of our sexual partners or the choice of a potential partner on a dating site. These patterns are as diverse, bizarre and confusing as love itself, and only mathematics is able to describe them, says University of London mathematics professor Hannah Fry (Hannah Fry)1. Here are some of them.
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- Do you know the art of seduction?
- How strong is your need for love?
Your chances of finding a soul mate
For those who have been alone for a long time, it may seem that it is impossible to find such a person. A series of fruitless dates, or no dates at all, gives rise to frustration, irritation, or the feeling that the Universe itself is up in arms against you. For example, in 2010, a mathematician from the University of Warwick (UK), a convinced bachelor, Peter Backus, suggested that there are fewer girls worthy of becoming his girlfriend than intelligent forms in the Universe.
In an article entitled “Why I don’t have a girlfriend. Using the Drake equation to study love in the UK, he tried to calculate how many women matched his potential girlfriends. To do this, Peter used a formula with which scientists at one time tried to find the answer to the question of why aliens have not yet visited Earth.
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- Find the perfect partner
The point is to divide the problem into smaller ones, and then into even smaller ones, and so on until a reasonable estimate can be made.
In the case of Backus, it looked like this (taking into account his requirements):
- How many women live near me? (There are more than 4 million women in London).
- How many of them are suitable for my age? (20%, i.e. > 800).
- How many of them are not in a relationship? (50% i.e. > 400).
- How many of them have higher education? (26%, i.e. > 104).
- How many of them might be attractive? (5%, i.e. > 5200).
- How many of them would find me attractive? (5%, i.e. > 260 women).
- How many of them could I get along with? (10%, i.e. > 26 women).
Thus, according to his calculations, there were only 26 women with whom he would consider it possible to meet. Obviously, his chances would have been better if he hadn’t been so fastidious.
In other words, the higher your “definitely” and “no way” list is, the less likely you are to find love. Instead, you should choose 1-2 points that are really important to you, and then give potential partners a chance. Perhaps you will be pleasantly surprised. After all, we all know couples whose “halves” could not imagine themselves together and nevertheless coexist very well. Perhaps Peter Backus could confirm this. After all, he finally got married.
Read more:
- We choose each other for a reason
Who are we really looking for?
Actually, the question can be rephrased: are we really looking for those whom we supposedly dream of? Let us explain the meaning using the example of the popular Western dating site OkCupid, founded by a group of mathematicians. It uses an original algorithm, the purpose of which is to make it easier for users to find the right partner. By processing the questionnaires of participants and comparing their preferences and wishes, the program displays for each potential couple a certain amount of points, showing how partners match each other.
But in fact, the electronic matchmaker is very often wrong in his predictions. OkCupid once admitted in a post titled “We’re experimenting on people!” that OkCupid has had only limited success in finding long-term couples.
To test the effectiveness of their algorithm, the programmers had the computer deceive a certain group of visitors. They were told that their compatibility with such and such a candidate was 90% (when in fact it was about 30%). Some of these visitors believed the recommendations of the site and began to exchange messages with those who did not meet their expectations. It would seem that they should have quickly figured out the error and ended the conversation. This is what happened in many cases. However, 15% of the “deceived” continued to communicate. And here is the paradox. For those to whom the algorithm, without any deception, promised an almost perfect match (about 90%), the percentage of continued communication was not much higher – only 17%. That is, these “ideal” couples did not do much better than everyone else!
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- How strong is your need for love?
The algorithm is not to blame
He honestly gives you a list of those who, in principle, meet your requirements. The problem is that a person usually does not really know what (whom) he wants. What we formulate as requirements often does not match our unconscious expectations.
However, we may not be far from creating a more accurate pair matching algorithm. And that’s what it can be based on.
If during a date a spark runs between the partners, each of them, with their gesture and all their behavior, unconsciously signal to the partner about the connection that has arisen with him.
Our body language is designed in such a way that we mirror the movements and gestures of a person we like. Our pupils dilate, we involuntarily begin to reproduce the words and phrases of the interlocutor, imitate his manner of speech, and even begin to laugh synchronously.
Eli J. Finkel, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University in Chicago who has worked extensively on the problem of this “unconscious synchronicity,” believes that a new algorithm for finding suitable partners will be based on it. For example, a person will have a series of online dates on Skype, after which the computer will give him compatibility statistics with each of the potential partners.
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- Do other people like you?
What is the best photo to post on a dating site?
It would seem that everything is clear here: the best, showing me in a favorable light. But the answer is not as obvious as it seems.
For more than a decade, OkCupid co-founder Christian Rudder has been studying how people behave on dating sites. He published very interesting data on various aspects of this behavior. In particular, he came to unexpected conclusions about the importance of the appearance of users. According to him, an attractive appearance is not at all the determining factor (as many people think) of popularity on such sites. It’s not just the most beautiful people who get the most messages.
But how does appearance and popularity correlate? It turns out that those who are controversially rated for appearance end up with higher ratings than those who are rated as “pretty pretty.” Using regression analysis, the OkCupid team even came up with an equation to tell how many messages per month a user can expect, depending on how many points (from 1 to 5) others rate their appearance.
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- Find your love
Such interesting conclusions follow from it. Getting the lowest rating – “1” – is not bad at all: one in four of those who gave it will write to you. But a score of “4” works against you: every hundred fours reduces the total number of messages you received by ten.
In other words, it’s much better if some people think you’re beautiful and others think you’re ugly than if everyone unanimously judges your appearance as “quite good.” Of course, people with exceptional external data, always getting 5 out of 5, will be ahead. But for everyone else, polar opinions are preferable. This is better than if you are considered outwardly ordinary, like “that nice guy over there” or “that nice girl over there” from the next entrance.
That is why those who choose photos for the site that mask their external flaws are wrong. For example, overweight people post a cropped photo of their face, bald men post a picture in a headdress. This is exactly what not to do! When choosing a profile photo, you should play on what makes you different from others, even if someone finds it unattractive.
People who might like you in principle will pay attention to you one way or another. And the opinion of others should not matter to you, especially since they will unwittingly play along with you one way or another. On the Web, to stand out, you must not be afraid to be yourself. Who would have thought, right?
1 For more details, see H. Fry’s book “The Mathematics of Love. Patterns, evidence and the search for an ideal solution” (AST, 2015).