Equation for love
FINDING (AND KEEPING) MR OR MS RIGHT MAY COME DOWN TO APPLYING THE RIGHT MATHEMATICAL FORMULA!
If you thought all math was good for was calculating compound interest or the third angle of a triangle or balancing equations — Dr Hannah Fry will tell you otherwise. The mathemati- cian and TED speaker has been winning rave reviews for her new book, The Mathematics of Love, through which she provides a “by the numbers” guide to finding (and keeping) your Mr or Miss Right. In her TED talks and in her book, Dr Fry has divided the process of finding love into three “mathematically verifiable” tips. We’re breaking them down for you here:
KEEP YOUR PARTNER
After
finding Mr or Miss Right, Dr Fry says math can even help you avoid divorce and stay together for life! She points to the studies by psychologist John Gottman and mathematician James Murray, who recorded hundreds of couples having 15minute conversations about sensitive issues (money, sex, inlaws etc). On a chart, they plotted the “positivity” in a couple’s interactions versus the “negativity”. Unsurprisingly, they found that they could predict with over 90 per cent accuracy the couples who would stay together, and those who would divorce. Low risk couples had more positivity, the high risk ones were caught in a spiral of negativity in their responses to each other.
But here’s the really interesting part: He found that the husband or wife’s reaction (positive or negative) was determined by three factors: their mood when alone, their mood when with their partner, and how much of an influence their partner had on them. They also found that the “influence” a husband/wife had on the other depended on something they called the “negativity threshold” — Dr Fry explains it as “how annoying the husband can be before the wife gets irritated” (or vice versa). While you might imagine that the most successful marriages would be ones in which the couple had a high negativity threshold — that is, they wouldn’t make an issue out of anything expect what is a really big deal, the numbers showed otherwise. Apparently, couples who have a low negativity threshold — who don’t let things go, give each other room to complain and don’t wait until small irritations snowball into major frustrations — are the ones who have a greater chance of staying together.
REJECT THE FIRST 37 PER CENT OF YOUR
DATING PARTNERS
Dr Fry offers a rather precise formula for picking your perfect partner. Suppose you start dating from the age of 18 and want to settle down by the age of 35: She suggests rejecting
everyone who falls into the first 37 per cent of that dating window and picking the best person
from among the ones you date next (after the “rejection window”) as your Mr or Miss Right.
The mathematical theory this is based on is called the “Optimal Stopping Theory”. While the strategy doesn’t have a 100 per cent success rate, the numbers say that this is the best possi
ble strategy to follow. Even without knowing the math behind it, most of us do unconsciously follow this principle, says Dr Fry, with most people waiting until their mid to late-20s to pick a partner from among the people we’ve been
seeing and then settling down.