In my view, marriage—and love—isn’t about you. It is about honoring, protecting and encouraging another person, no matter what.
Exactly, in your view. Not only are there as many views on marriage as there are people who know of the concept (depending on how finely you granularize), but worse, those views aren’t time invariant either. Should a precommitment override a person being miserable, as his/her stance on marriage changes? Each lost year never comes again, who are we to decide his former partner is in the wrong for pursuing her happiness over a loveless marriage?
Even regarding the negative consequences for others, there is much to be said about not staying in an unhappy marriage, e.g. not setting a bad example for the kids: an unhappy spouse who sticks around the “family business” will invariably make for an unhappy mother/father and for a bad role model regarding relationships.
she is plainly wrong here
Who cares? The blame game, while highly popular, has only marginal utility while doing a great deal of harm.
Assigning blame relies on vague and ill-defined fleeting societal ideas du jour (who “owes” whom what) and rarely ends up in anything but “at least, in my personal life story, I can keep on being my own hero”.
Looks like they never had true chemistry, staying with him (after he “woo’ed” her) seemed like a rational choice in the bad sense of the word, like her heart wasn’t in it. I’m glad for her that she found a spark again (even if it may be an infatuation), and at least he gets a chance to experience the same when it’s genuinely reciprocated. We shouldn’t confuse the resolution of a previously hidden (or ignored, overlooked) flaw with the creation of said flaw.
ETA: Interesting that Gunnar’s own response mirrored this comment so closely (both were written simultaneously).
Hm. I notice we have very different ideas on this.
As a male in my early 30′s, I’ve observed myself go through these iterations between commitment and freedom. I’ve got a strong grass-is-always-greener streak in me. When I’m with someone in a relationship, I can feel bored and discontent. When I’m single, I can feel lonely and unfulfilled. I know of many people who feel similar, to some extent.
My view is that it is wise to recognize this about our nature and make commitments accordingly. I see lifelong commitment as exactly that. It makes certain things possible and other things impossible. It provides some opportunities and it requires the sacrifice of others. It is a choice. And it involves ongoing choices. For life.
I’m not particularly concerned with society’s views on the issue. I’m speaking about two consenting adults who entered into such a commitment. It is my view that it is very clear she defected when they had made an agreement to always cooperate. That is all I meant. She wins and he loses because she chose to defect and he never stopped cooperating.
I’m very sensitive to the possibility of “falling out of love” with somebody. I worry about it. I must say, however, the older I get, the more I think that love is choice more than a particular feeling. It is a conscious choice, even sometimes despite your feelings, to place someone else’s needs above your own. In turn, you make yourself reliant on them to do the same, though you do nothing to enforce that they follow through. You simply hope and trust. It leaves you incredibly vulnerable (See Gunnar’s story).
I’ve had people love me this way and I took advantage of it. And I’ve loved people this way and they took advantage of it.
I perhaps should have said it that way, instead of saying she was wrong. She took advantage of him. And that is okay. But that was not the commitment they shared, and her breaking that agreement lead to serious consequences for several parties.
I think that love is choice more than a particular feeling. It is a conscious choice, even sometimes despite your feelings, to place someone else’s needs above your own. In turn, you make yourself reliant on them to do the same, though you do nothing to enforce that they follow through. You simply hope and trust.
I completely agree with this. Assuming that “place someone else’s needs above your own” means that the other person’s higher-priority needs are placed above my lower-priority needs (not that any their need is automatically placed above any my need). Sometimes we even do it explicitly with my girlfriend; when we want different things, we ask each other to express how strongly we care about this issue on a scale from 1 to 10; and then we usually follow the choice with the higher number. Of course this system also requires trust.
Assuming that “place someone else’s needs above your own” means that the other person’s higher-priority needs are placed above my lower-priority needs (not that any their need is automatically placed above any my need).
I suppose I do mean that, though I’ve never thought of that distinction. Hm. Thanks—I think you’ve improved the model in my mind.
I’m very sensitive to the possibility of “falling out of love” with somebody.
I wonder a bit about this “falling our of love”.
Obviously it is not that the ‘chemistry’ no longer matches. Do you mean infatuation wearing off? Which it obviously does for most people withing months. Or is it a bonding (which seems to have a strong neurophysiological basis) that is breaking?
To clarify: For us chemistry didn’t match very well. I fell heavily in love with her so I assume that was infatuated. And also obviously I bonded very strongly.
But I could rekindle the feeling of infatuation at will at any time. I could willingly flood myself with happiness. But I used it sparingly. I feared that it’d wear off if used too much or would bind to the wrong triggers. To keep it during crisis I reattached it to the children and I can still call it. So I say yes. Obviously at least that part is subject to will,
My bonding on the other hand didn’t seem to wear off with time and only broke under extreme pressure..
So “falling out of love” doesn’t really make sense to me.
I think of it now as the result of the failure to maintain a shared sufficient intentional conscious effort to the relationship by each partner.
The infatuation wears off. Felt affection isn’t always consistent—there are mornings when you wake up and don’t even like the person lying next to you, let alone feel in love with them.
Yet, you keep putting effort into love. Into being creative and helpful and courteous, etc. When that stops, there is the possibility for the relationship to wither.
In that sense, I don’t really think about “falling out of love” in the same way anymore. I still have a sense of worry about what that might feel like. But as I get older, I’m more aware of how fickle feelings can be. I’m aware love has a lot to do with choice.
The other thing is this: There is some huge chunk of the “successful” relationships out there that are functioning nowhere near what you would see as successful. Just because two people share a mortgage and have kids doesn’t mean they are fulfilled or happy.
Along time ago we consciously noticed that and tried to work around it. And we saw some improvements. But not enough to counter her dissatisfaction. And surely not enough to counter infatuation esp. as it was mutual.
at least he gets a chance to experience the same when it’s genuinely reciprocated.
Now that I know much more about these processes I wonder how I can hack them such as to maximize the chance of finding someone to mututally fall in love with. And I mean genuinely.
I tried to estimate the likelihood two ‘random’ people match in chemistry and ‘infatuability’. I came up with numbers in the range of 1:20 to 1:150 for each and wonder about the correlation. As I carefully kept the ability to trigger feelings of infatuation (at least a psychophysical fragment of it) I hope that I can improve chances. Maybe I will write a post on that some time.
I find it interesting that on The Bachelor/ette, it’s quite rare for any of the women (or, on The Bachelorette. the men) to say “Meh, I’m not into you”. Maybe they just don’t show it, but it seems like all of the women want to stay. And the bachelor usually finds it difficult to send the women home. It’s a highly artificial situation, and the women may be confusing their competitive drive to “win” for an interest specific to the man, but it does seem like a large percentage of pairings, in the right situation, can become infatuated.
The brain must have some way to make high level valuations influence the altimate emotion-circuit ‘click’ into infatuation. Otherwise you would just become infatuated just by randomly sitting next to someone matching ‘physically’
(that obviously also happens but is less frequent and probably caused by a correspondingly stronger physical component).
So whatever the pathway is leading from high level to low level it needs learned patterns like “is smart”, “can provide”, “controls the show”, “makes nice compliments”, And the decomposition of these patterns. And therefore you can surely influence these parts by hacking e.g. a compartment were someone matches such patterns.
And then there is the trick to enhance the physical component. As most low level signals show linear correlation of magniture (classical: shouting louder gets more attention) you can also enhance signals by exposing each other to stronger physical signals (being closer, more physical work).
I’ve never watched the show, but if it works anything like the mental model of it that I’ve built through cultural osmosis, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were filtering for compatibility in some way before they finalize the selections. Closer competition makes for good TV; the network’s essentially throwing away free money if a non-trivial number of the contestants give it up as a bad job before they can cause drama.
I tried to estimate the likelihood two ‘random’ people match in chemistry and ‘infatuability’.
That assumes that people fall in love based on their intrinsic attributes. I believe that it has much more to do with how they interact with each other.
The idea was not to estimate the posterior probability of falling in love.
The idea was the prior probabilities I do not have (much) control over.
Checking for a match in chemistry is relatively easy. There even used to be social protocols to that end (involving e.g. handkerchiefs). Nowadays I goes the simplest approach would be to go out jogging together.
Checking for a match in infatuation also seems to be doable. Infatuated people can be spotted easily and I think I can notice early when I am falling. Maybe even speed up that.
Note I know that I’m sounding totally unromantic here. To make this clear: I do not intend to run a checklist on a date. That wouldn’t be a winning strategy either. It is more an analything getting a feel for the complexities involved. As I lack practical experience with dates I can use some spare time to resolve some statistical and ‘decision theoretic’ aspects that passibly couldn’t even be learned by simply doing dates. Sure I will not get around those.
Consider this: How many dates would you guess are needed before you find an acceptable match? Obviously this depends on ‘acceptable’. But I do have quite a lot control over the conscious ‘acceptable’ criteria. But much less so over the physical. What is the lower bound on the number of dates before you could e.g. expect a match in chemistry?
Knowing this could significantly alter my motivation to continue looking. If the number is higher than say 100 traditional dating would be out for example (at least for me as I’m not after sex for which a high match obviously isn’t required).
Checking for a match in chemistry is relatively easy. There even used to be social protocols to that end (involving e.g. handkerchiefs). Nowadays I goes the simplest approach would be to go out jogging together.
I do have a large dataset of person experience in dancing where I probably danced with >1000 different women in the last years. While I haven’t written down numbers I think the amount of data is large enough that the observations that come out of it aren’t due to chance but “real” patterns.
I think the amount of physical intimacy that a woman finds enjoyable would be a good proxy for what”s commonly understood as chemistry. In my experience that has a lot to do with my state at a particular day.
If you are dating a stranger that hasn’t already formed an opinion about yourself then I suspect the state that you have at the particular day has a lot to do with date success.
Jogging is probably relatively good as a date. It pushes the pulse of the woman up, and to the extend that I can trust the physiology textbooks that I read, a high pulse means that the woman is more likely to feel “chemistry”. It also matches my dancing experiences that high energy high pulse dancing leads to higher intimacy.
But you are dating a human that’s more complex than their amygdala which can be fooled into thinking there’s chemistry by giving it other reasons for making the heart beat higher.
In the end you don’t get a good connection to another person by treating them as a system to optimize. As far as my dancing is concerned I also don’t try to consciously push the pulse but instead try to choose the level based on music, my mood and how my dance partner reacts to what I’m dancing.
That’s even when I know that dancing at high pulse would also be good for my heart.
Knowing this could significantly alter my motivation to continue looking.
Instead of looking at the numbers, I would focus on making the activity of looking fun. If you have fun while you are looking, you are more likely to have success. Even if you don’t have success while you look, you at least have fun.
Invite woman to jog with you because jogging together is more fun than jogging alone and because making the commitment helps you to actually go out jogging. Be open that something more happens but don’t count on it and be fine with having good company while jogging.
But you are dating a human that’s more complex than their amygdala which can be fooled into thinking there’s chemistry by giving it other reasons for making the heart beat higher.
You got me wrong on both points. I know very well that humans are lots more complex than any simple scheme can optimize. And correspondingly I surely don’t just want to raise her heartbeat to fool her. Fooling anybody is no working long-term strategy. And we are talking loooong term strategy here. Remember: I’m a Beta optimizer. What I do want to optimize is the likelihood that we ‴notice‴ that we are ‴autentically‴ compatible. And I’m interested in how much resources I have to rationally allocate to physical (more dancing/jogging), psychological (more alpha/beta) and social aspects (more talking) aspects.
And correspondingly I surely don’t just want to raise her heartbeat to fool her. Fooling anybody is no working long-term strategy.
Emotional reactions do have meaningful long-term effects. If a girl feels good when she thinks about you that matters.
People do tell themselves stories to justify their emotions and those stories in turn strengthen the emotions for the long term.
If every times the woman thinks of you that thought makes her feel better the brain learns that there a connection between the stimulus of the thought and feeling better. That means the positive emotion get’s stronger when it reliably follows after the women starts thinking of you.
Getting a person to associate the emotion of love with a person might be more complicated than installing a phobia through a single traumatic event. On the other hand both are just emotions and there are processes that when a human goes through them, they end up with the emotional reaction to a stimulus.
The more I learn about how the human mind works the more I think that falling in love on first sight isn’t that much different than developing a phobia in a single experience. Once the emotional bond is there it has long-term effects.
It’s well above my ability to engineer the experience but I can see how people can fall in love on first sight in a way that allows a lasting relationship based on a few random variables being just right at a specific moment.
What I do want to optimize is the likelihood that we ‴notice‴ that we are ‴authentically‴ compatible.
I don’t think noticing that you are authentically compatible is the prime factor for a relationship for most woman. “Noticing” sounds like a very intellectual process.
And I’m interested in how much resources I have to rationally allocate to physical (more dancing/jogging), psychological (more alpha/beta) and social aspects (more talking) aspects.
I don’t see how those are different area’s. If you sign up for a dance course you have physical activity. You have psychological covered as you learn to lead woman. If you go dancing in clubs you also cover rejection therapy. Lastly dancing is interaction with woman so it’s also social and there nothing preventing you from talking with the woman.
Inviting a woman to go jogging with you is also at least physical and social but probably also psychological when you aren’t used to inviting woman besides your wife to go to activities with you.
And if you want to add social and psychological aspects to solo jogging just greet every person that you pass while jogging.
I don’t think it makes sense to see physical, psychological and social as separate things that you could allocate time.
I considered dancing but from my previous experiences I’d tentatively guess that even though your arguments are sound the likelihood to find a woman of the right kind there might be lower than elsewhere.
I don’t think it makes sense to see physical, psychological and social as separate things that you could allocate time.
Not allocate in the sense of doing 20% this (dacing) and 30% (talking) that. More like dancing has 20% this and 30% that.
Look for example nowadays dating sites are en vogue. I could come to the conclusion that matching expectations plays a large role and use e.g. okcupid as primary filter for matches. And then try to get a date with those.
Or I could conclude that physical attration is the critical path, then I might consider dancing because it has a high number of contacts. Or clubbing—even more contacts but even shorter time to evaluate. And probably even less really prospective candidates there.
One current idea it to take up part-time study on the local university.
OK. I have to get off this dry mode. This will be read and a turn off.
I’d tentatively guess that even though your arguments are sound the likelihood to find a woman of the right kind there might be lower than elsewhere.
What do you consider to be “the right kind”? I think there are quite a few well educated people who do dance. It might be that you have stereotypes about who dances that aren’t accurate. But of course if you don’t want to dance I don’t want to talk you into it.
I especially don’t want to encourage you to put your chips on any one card.
I could come to the conclusion that matching expectations plays a large role and use e.g. okcupid as primary filter for matches. And then try to get a date with those.
I don’t think there anything wrong with going on okcupid and trying your luck. Writing a profile and writing a few messages isn’t going to cost too much time.
Optimizing a Okcupid profile and writing optimal messages to get a date is however not my idea of authentic human interaction. I consider online dating to be quite artificial.
One current idea it to take up part-time study on the local university.
If you enjoy being at university I don’t think there anything wrong at it. However I consider dancing to be more physical, provide better psychological benefits and be more social than being at university.
OK. I have to get off this dry mode. This will be read and a turn off.
If you want to reply to something privately, feel free to PM. It’s certainly a topic where there are things that are better left unsaid in public.
Exactly, in your view. Not only are there as many views on marriage as there are people who know of the concept (depending on how finely you granularize), but worse, those views aren’t time invariant either. Should a precommitment override a person being miserable, as his/her stance on marriage changes? Each lost year never comes again, who are we to decide his former partner is in the wrong for pursuing her happiness over a loveless marriage?
Even regarding the negative consequences for others, there is much to be said about not staying in an unhappy marriage, e.g. not setting a bad example for the kids: an unhappy spouse who sticks around the “family business” will invariably make for an unhappy mother/father and for a bad role model regarding relationships.
Who cares? The blame game, while highly popular, has only marginal utility while doing a great deal of harm.
Assigning blame relies on vague and ill-defined fleeting societal ideas du jour (who “owes” whom what) and rarely ends up in anything but “at least, in my personal life story, I can keep on being my own hero”.
Looks like they never had true chemistry, staying with him (after he “woo’ed” her) seemed like a rational choice in the bad sense of the word, like her heart wasn’t in it. I’m glad for her that she found a spark again (even if it may be an infatuation), and at least he gets a chance to experience the same when it’s genuinely reciprocated. We shouldn’t confuse the resolution of a previously hidden (or ignored, overlooked) flaw with the creation of said flaw.
ETA: Interesting that Gunnar’s own response mirrored this comment so closely (both were written simultaneously).
Hm. I notice we have very different ideas on this.
As a male in my early 30′s, I’ve observed myself go through these iterations between commitment and freedom. I’ve got a strong grass-is-always-greener streak in me. When I’m with someone in a relationship, I can feel bored and discontent. When I’m single, I can feel lonely and unfulfilled. I know of many people who feel similar, to some extent.
My view is that it is wise to recognize this about our nature and make commitments accordingly. I see lifelong commitment as exactly that. It makes certain things possible and other things impossible. It provides some opportunities and it requires the sacrifice of others. It is a choice. And it involves ongoing choices. For life.
I’m not particularly concerned with society’s views on the issue. I’m speaking about two consenting adults who entered into such a commitment. It is my view that it is very clear she defected when they had made an agreement to always cooperate. That is all I meant. She wins and he loses because she chose to defect and he never stopped cooperating.
I’m very sensitive to the possibility of “falling out of love” with somebody. I worry about it. I must say, however, the older I get, the more I think that love is choice more than a particular feeling. It is a conscious choice, even sometimes despite your feelings, to place someone else’s needs above your own. In turn, you make yourself reliant on them to do the same, though you do nothing to enforce that they follow through. You simply hope and trust. It leaves you incredibly vulnerable (See Gunnar’s story).
I’ve had people love me this way and I took advantage of it. And I’ve loved people this way and they took advantage of it.
I perhaps should have said it that way, instead of saying she was wrong. She took advantage of him. And that is okay. But that was not the commitment they shared, and her breaking that agreement lead to serious consequences for several parties.
I completely agree with this. Assuming that “place someone else’s needs above your own” means that the other person’s higher-priority needs are placed above my lower-priority needs (not that any their need is automatically placed above any my need). Sometimes we even do it explicitly with my girlfriend; when we want different things, we ask each other to express how strongly we care about this issue on a scale from 1 to 10; and then we usually follow the choice with the higher number. Of course this system also requires trust.
I suppose I do mean that, though I’ve never thought of that distinction. Hm. Thanks—I think you’ve improved the model in my mind.
And you need some mechanism to avoid skewing only because someone has only slightly stronger priorities.
I wonder a bit about this “falling our of love”.
Obviously it is not that the ‘chemistry’ no longer matches. Do you mean infatuation wearing off? Which it obviously does for most people withing months. Or is it a bonding (which seems to have a strong neurophysiological basis) that is breaking?
To clarify: For us chemistry didn’t match very well. I fell heavily in love with her so I assume that was infatuated. And also obviously I bonded very strongly.
But I could rekindle the feeling of infatuation at will at any time. I could willingly flood myself with happiness. But I used it sparingly. I feared that it’d wear off if used too much or would bind to the wrong triggers. To keep it during crisis I reattached it to the children and I can still call it. So I say yes. Obviously at least that part is subject to will,
My bonding on the other hand didn’t seem to wear off with time and only broke under extreme pressure..
So “falling out of love” doesn’t really make sense to me.
I think of it now as the result of the failure to maintain a shared sufficient intentional conscious effort to the relationship by each partner.
The infatuation wears off. Felt affection isn’t always consistent—there are mornings when you wake up and don’t even like the person lying next to you, let alone feel in love with them.
Yet, you keep putting effort into love. Into being creative and helpful and courteous, etc. When that stops, there is the possibility for the relationship to wither.
In that sense, I don’t really think about “falling out of love” in the same way anymore. I still have a sense of worry about what that might feel like. But as I get older, I’m more aware of how fickle feelings can be. I’m aware love has a lot to do with choice.
The other thing is this: There is some huge chunk of the “successful” relationships out there that are functioning nowhere near what you would see as successful. Just because two people share a mortgage and have kids doesn’t mean they are fulfilled or happy.
Along time ago we consciously noticed that and tried to work around it. And we saw some improvements. But not enough to counter her dissatisfaction. And surely not enough to counter infatuation esp. as it was mutual.
Now that I know much more about these processes I wonder how I can hack them such as to maximize the chance of finding someone to mututally fall in love with. And I mean genuinely.
I tried to estimate the likelihood two ‘random’ people match in chemistry and ‘infatuability’. I came up with numbers in the range of 1:20 to 1:150 for each and wonder about the correlation. As I carefully kept the ability to trigger feelings of infatuation (at least a psychophysical fragment of it) I hope that I can improve chances. Maybe I will write a post on that some time.
I find it interesting that on The Bachelor/ette, it’s quite rare for any of the women (or, on The Bachelorette. the men) to say “Meh, I’m not into you”. Maybe they just don’t show it, but it seems like all of the women want to stay. And the bachelor usually finds it difficult to send the women home. It’s a highly artificial situation, and the women may be confusing their competitive drive to “win” for an interest specific to the man, but it does seem like a large percentage of pairings, in the right situation, can become infatuated.
The brain must have some way to make high level valuations influence the altimate emotion-circuit ‘click’ into infatuation. Otherwise you would just become infatuated just by randomly sitting next to someone matching ‘physically’ (that obviously also happens but is less frequent and probably caused by a correspondingly stronger physical component).
So whatever the pathway is leading from high level to low level it needs learned patterns like “is smart”, “can provide”, “controls the show”, “makes nice compliments”, And the decomposition of these patterns. And therefore you can surely influence these parts by hacking e.g. a compartment were someone matches such patterns.
And then there is the trick to enhance the physical component. As most low level signals show linear correlation of magniture (classical: shouting louder gets more attention) you can also enhance signals by exposing each other to stronger physical signals (being closer, more physical work).
I’ve never watched the show, but if it works anything like the mental model of it that I’ve built through cultural osmosis, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were filtering for compatibility in some way before they finalize the selections. Closer competition makes for good TV; the network’s essentially throwing away free money if a non-trivial number of the contestants give it up as a bad job before they can cause drama.
That assumes that people fall in love based on their intrinsic attributes. I believe that it has much more to do with how they interact with each other.
Sure. Absolutely.
The idea was not to estimate the posterior probability of falling in love.
The idea was the prior probabilities I do not have (much) control over.
Checking for a match in chemistry is relatively easy. There even used to be social protocols to that end (involving e.g. handkerchiefs). Nowadays I goes the simplest approach would be to go out jogging together.
Checking for a match in infatuation also seems to be doable. Infatuated people can be spotted easily and I think I can notice early when I am falling. Maybe even speed up that.
Note I know that I’m sounding totally unromantic here. To make this clear: I do not intend to run a checklist on a date. That wouldn’t be a winning strategy either. It is more an analything getting a feel for the complexities involved. As I lack practical experience with dates I can use some spare time to resolve some statistical and ‘decision theoretic’ aspects that passibly couldn’t even be learned by simply doing dates. Sure I will not get around those.
Consider this: How many dates would you guess are needed before you find an acceptable match? Obviously this depends on ‘acceptable’. But I do have quite a lot control over the conscious ‘acceptable’ criteria. But much less so over the physical. What is the lower bound on the number of dates before you could e.g. expect a match in chemistry?
Knowing this could significantly alter my motivation to continue looking. If the number is higher than say 100 traditional dating would be out for example (at least for me as I’m not after sex for which a high match obviously isn’t required).
I do have a large dataset of person experience in dancing where I probably danced with >1000 different women in the last years. While I haven’t written down numbers I think the amount of data is large enough that the observations that come out of it aren’t due to chance but “real” patterns.
I think the amount of physical intimacy that a woman finds enjoyable would be a good proxy for what”s commonly understood as chemistry. In my experience that has a lot to do with my state at a particular day.
If you are dating a stranger that hasn’t already formed an opinion about yourself then I suspect the state that you have at the particular day has a lot to do with date success.
Jogging is probably relatively good as a date. It pushes the pulse of the woman up, and to the extend that I can trust the physiology textbooks that I read, a high pulse means that the woman is more likely to feel “chemistry”. It also matches my dancing experiences that high energy high pulse dancing leads to higher intimacy.
But you are dating a human that’s more complex than their amygdala which can be fooled into thinking there’s chemistry by giving it other reasons for making the heart beat higher.
In the end you don’t get a good connection to another person by treating them as a system to optimize. As far as my dancing is concerned I also don’t try to consciously push the pulse but instead try to choose the level based on music, my mood and how my dance partner reacts to what I’m dancing. That’s even when I know that dancing at high pulse would also be good for my heart.
Instead of looking at the numbers, I would focus on making the activity of looking fun. If you have fun while you are looking, you are more likely to have success. Even if you don’t have success while you look, you at least have fun.
Invite woman to jog with you because jogging together is more fun than jogging alone and because making the commitment helps you to actually go out jogging. Be open that something more happens but don’t count on it and be fine with having good company while jogging.
Interesting story of a math guy hacking okcupid to find love after 61 dates (which is about the number I’d expect):
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2014/01/how-to-hack-okcupid/all/
You got me wrong on both points. I know very well that humans are lots more complex than any simple scheme can optimize. And correspondingly I surely don’t just want to raise her heartbeat to fool her. Fooling anybody is no working long-term strategy. And we are talking loooong term strategy here. Remember: I’m a Beta optimizer. What I do want to optimize is the likelihood that we ‴notice‴ that we are ‴autentically‴ compatible. And I’m interested in how much resources I have to rationally allocate to physical (more dancing/jogging), psychological (more alpha/beta) and social aspects (more talking) aspects.
Emotional reactions do have meaningful long-term effects. If a girl feels good when she thinks about you that matters.
People do tell themselves stories to justify their emotions and those stories in turn strengthen the emotions for the long term.
If every times the woman thinks of you that thought makes her feel better the brain learns that there a connection between the stimulus of the thought and feeling better. That means the positive emotion get’s stronger when it reliably follows after the women starts thinking of you.
Getting a person to associate the emotion of love with a person might be more complicated than installing a phobia through a single traumatic event. On the other hand both are just emotions and there are processes that when a human goes through them, they end up with the emotional reaction to a stimulus.
The more I learn about how the human mind works the more I think that falling in love on first sight isn’t that much different than developing a phobia in a single experience. Once the emotional bond is there it has long-term effects.
It’s well above my ability to engineer the experience but I can see how people can fall in love on first sight in a way that allows a lasting relationship based on a few random variables being just right at a specific moment.
I don’t think noticing that you are authentically compatible is the prime factor for a relationship for most woman. “Noticing” sounds like a very intellectual process.
I don’t see how those are different area’s. If you sign up for a dance course you have physical activity. You have psychological covered as you learn to lead woman. If you go dancing in clubs you also cover rejection therapy. Lastly dancing is interaction with woman so it’s also social and there nothing preventing you from talking with the woman.
Inviting a woman to go jogging with you is also at least physical and social but probably also psychological when you aren’t used to inviting woman besides your wife to go to activities with you.
And if you want to add social and psychological aspects to solo jogging just greet every person that you pass while jogging.
I don’t think it makes sense to see physical, psychological and social as separate things that you could allocate time.
Indeed you seem to understand how my ideas go.
I considered dancing but from my previous experiences I’d tentatively guess that even though your arguments are sound the likelihood to find a woman of the right kind there might be lower than elsewhere.
Not allocate in the sense of doing 20% this (dacing) and 30% (talking) that. More like dancing has 20% this and 30% that.
Look for example nowadays dating sites are en vogue. I could come to the conclusion that matching expectations plays a large role and use e.g. okcupid as primary filter for matches. And then try to get a date with those.
Or I could conclude that physical attration is the critical path, then I might consider dancing because it has a high number of contacts. Or clubbing—even more contacts but even shorter time to evaluate. And probably even less really prospective candidates there.
One current idea it to take up part-time study on the local university.
OK. I have to get off this dry mode. This will be read and a turn off.
What do you consider to be “the right kind”? I think there are quite a few well educated people who do dance. It might be that you have stereotypes about who dances that aren’t accurate. But of course if you don’t want to dance I don’t want to talk you into it.
I especially don’t want to encourage you to put your chips on any one card.
I don’t think there anything wrong with going on okcupid and trying your luck. Writing a profile and writing a few messages isn’t going to cost too much time.
Optimizing a Okcupid profile and writing optimal messages to get a date is however not my idea of authentic human interaction. I consider online dating to be quite artificial.
If you enjoy being at university I don’t think there anything wrong at it. However I consider dancing to be more physical, provide better psychological benefits and be more social than being at university.
If you want to reply to something privately, feel free to PM. It’s certainly a topic where there are things that are better left unsaid in public.