May forever ba sa LDR?

WHEN people talk about long distance relationships or in millennial parlance, LDR, almost always, many people say it will never work out. This conclusion is based on experience which is either their own, their friend’s, their friend’s friend, their neighbor, their neighbor’s cousin and the web of information goes on and on.

Actually, as far as I know, there is no statistic available that recorded the number of successful LDRs against the failed ones. That Is why the conclusion that all LDRs fail is not true to a certain extent. But the question is, why do people have this assumption?

People make their conclusions based on the available information that they were provided. For these kind of topics, people rarely or even never verify them or make deeper or further research to support their claim. But people talk about it all the time so it must be true? Well, that what makes the available information flawed. Human nature dictates that people would like to talk about their problems and failures all the time, like ALL the time. This same sad drama is also transmitted, circulated and proliferated, never the good story with the happy ending.

We’re such fans of the victim stories, maybe because the happy endings are boring. They won’t sell. No conflict, no sense talking about it. So, we should not be surprised why many people would say that LDRs do not last. I could even hear the bitter ones, “WALANG FOREVER!!!”

The most common reason and source of conflicts in long distance relationships, or in relationships, in general is communication, or the lack of it. One or both choose to withhold some information to make one thing sound true, or withhold information altogether to make that thing to disappear or to make it appear that it didn’t happen at all.

I was thinking, how can Economics explain this phenomenon known as LDR? Can Economics find ways in order to make an LDR to work and actually succeed?

One way to analyze this situation is using the concept of INFORMATION ASYMMETRY. From the two words, this market failure describes an economic transaction where there is an imperfection in the process involved in the creation, encoding, transmittal, receipt and decoding of information. The imperfection or imbalance happens when one individual or party has more or better information than the other individual or party of the transaction. It is sometimes called information failure.

Asymmetric information may be classified either as Adverse Selection or Moral Hazard.

Adverse Selection occurs when one party has more relevant information than the other party. For example, a seller has more information on the products being sold than the buyer. This puts the buyer at a more disadvantaged position, and prone to making bad decision making. This information failure happens before the transaction is actually established.

This also happens to the people entering a relationship. One of the parties does not divulge complete information about him/herself, and would make the other party think that the other person whom he/she is about to have a relationship with is a great person. This is a risk-leading behavior because this would lead the uninformed party to make bad decisions.

The second type of asymmetric information is Moral Hazard. In this situation, the transaction has already been entered into. One of the parties, usually the buyer would be at a more advantaged position. In cases where insurance are involved, the insured, just because he is already insured, may become too careless, knowing that the insurance will take care of the damage anyway.

In relationships, this can be illustrated when two people enters a relationship and commits to love each other, be faithful and honest with each other. However, when one leaves, say for another country and their relationship becomes a long distance relationship, the other person will now be abusing the other person whether financially, when the one abroad sends remittances, or emotionally, when the one left here becomes unfaithful or dishonest, just because the one abroad cannot see him/her.

In both cases, the bottomline is there is imperfect information that is being relayed, encoded and decoded. Relationship, per se, is already difficult as it is, knowing that there will always be asymmetric information.

It can be particularly difficult when the two parties are apart from each other. There is never a guarantee that one will take advantage of the situation where he/she has more relevant information over the other, choosing what to divulge and keeping the other person in the dark.

Because again, each one is a rational economic being where one’s best self-interest takes precedence over others, even if the other person is one you are in a relationship with.

Sad, but there is truth to this.