number of matches, number of replies to messages, number of dates, number of longterm relationships
I personally don’t have a desire to maximize any of these numbers. Do you know anyone who explicitly wants to maximize “number of longterm relationships?”
I was being Socratic but the point I was trying to make is that I don’t think there exists *any* metric that can adequately capture what people are looking for in a relationship. Hence, it becomes difficult to conclude that anyone is being “suboptimal”, either.
Interesting-ness of message exchange, enjoyability of dates, satisfaction in long-term relationships. All can be improved if the earlier filters have more candidates. But each stage is itself only satisficing, and doesn’t directly improve with quantity (in fact, it may degrade).
Maximizing proportion of time spent in an enjoyable relationship seems to be the dominant metric for success at dating. It predicts a wide range of behaviors related to dating:
Partners rarely break up unless one of the following factors are met
They don’t enjoy their relationship
They believe they can quickly go from their current relationship to another enjoyable relationship (i.e. cheating, breaking up, and then dating their paramour)
When people are single they often attempt to get into an enjoyable relationship
People express that they don’t want their partners to break up with them
People complain about being single
People complain about being in a bad relationship
People don’t complain about being in an enjoyable relationship
It also accounts for what I believe are the dominant subjective valuations we give to other’s dating ability.
We think that a man who dates many different women is a successful dater, unless we think his relationships are mostly unenjoyable. We consider a woman who has been in a single long-term marriage to be a successful dater, unless we think she hates her husband.
Most of the other proposed dating metrics measure our ability to shorten periods of companionlessness or being stuck in a bad relationship. This is done mostly by giving more options.
I personally don’t have a desire to maximize any of these numbers. Do you know anyone who explicitly wants to maximize “number of longterm relationships?”
I was being Socratic but the point I was trying to make is that I don’t think there exists *any* metric that can adequately capture what people are looking for in a relationship. Hence, it becomes difficult to conclude that anyone is being “suboptimal”, either.
Interesting-ness of message exchange, enjoyability of dates, satisfaction in long-term relationships. All can be improved if the earlier filters have more candidates. But each stage is itself only satisficing, and doesn’t directly improve with quantity (in fact, it may degrade).
Maximizing proportion of time spent in an enjoyable relationship seems to be the dominant metric for success at dating. It predicts a wide range of behaviors related to dating:
Partners rarely break up unless one of the following factors are met
They don’t enjoy their relationship
They believe they can quickly go from their current relationship to another enjoyable relationship (i.e. cheating, breaking up, and then dating their paramour)
When people are single they often attempt to get into an enjoyable relationship
People express that they don’t want their partners to break up with them
People complain about being single
People complain about being in a bad relationship
People don’t complain about being in an enjoyable relationship
It also accounts for what I believe are the dominant subjective valuations we give to other’s dating ability. We think that a man who dates many different women is a successful dater, unless we think his relationships are mostly unenjoyable. We consider a woman who has been in a single long-term marriage to be a successful dater, unless we think she hates her husband.
Most of the other proposed dating metrics measure our ability to shorten periods of companionlessness or being stuck in a bad relationship. This is done mostly by giving more options.