As someone with experience will know—we probably test and rule out bad partners in a single conversation, where we don’t even get so far as a date. Or don’t last more than a week. (I. E the experience set is growing through various means).
I consider this number to be much more useful than number of long-terms partners due to sample size. You should be able to evaluate most partners in a lot less than 6 months. I think if it takes more than 3 months to evaluate a relationship’s potential for marriage, you’re doing something wrong. For my part, I’ve never been in a relationship with someone I thought I might marry. I’ve only twice known someone I thought I might marry, and neither of those resulted in a relationship.
You have raised some interesting alternative problems to applying this solution to real life. I suspect that most people don’t think very hard about it; and they like to enjoy relationships/life/existence for the purpose of existing.
Trouble is that it’s a lot harder to count; but yes—the candidate space grows when you start thinking that the shorter ones are fair attempts...
now that I think about it a bit harder; as long as you have a determining factor for how frequently you can process trials (i.e. how long a relationship is, or more specifically how many you can have in each year of your trial-time-period), you can still work out the 1/e time-point, and possibly use that for a heuristic of exploration/exploitation time-point...
You have raised some interesting alternative problems to applying this solution to real life. I suspect that most people don’t think very hard about it; and they like to enjoy relationships/life/existence for the purpose of existing.
Apart from enjoyment a relationship also provides for personal growth.
I don’t think the plan to have children is simply about finding a suitable mate. It’s also about developing the skill set of being a good parent and having an enduring relationship that doesn’t break apart after a few years.
I consider this number to be much more useful than number of long-terms partners due to sample size. You should be able to evaluate most partners in a lot less than 6 months. I think if it takes more than 3 months to evaluate a relationship’s potential for marriage, you’re doing something wrong. For my part, I’ve never been in a relationship with someone I thought I might marry. I’ve only twice known someone I thought I might marry, and neither of those resulted in a relationship.
You have raised some interesting alternative problems to applying this solution to real life. I suspect that most people don’t think very hard about it; and they like to enjoy relationships/life/existence for the purpose of existing.
Trouble is that it’s a lot harder to count; but yes—the candidate space grows when you start thinking that the shorter ones are fair attempts...
now that I think about it a bit harder; as long as you have a determining factor for how frequently you can process trials (i.e. how long a relationship is, or more specifically how many you can have in each year of your trial-time-period), you can still work out the 1/e time-point, and possibly use that for a heuristic of exploration/exploitation time-point...
Apart from enjoyment a relationship also provides for personal growth.
Yea; I had to skip all the other reasons to have relationships in order to specifically attack the reduced problem of the assumption of:
There are certainly companionship values for having relationships that are worthwhile doing; but that’s not what this post was about.
I don’t think the plan to have children is simply about finding a suitable mate. It’s also about developing the skill set of being a good parent and having an enduring relationship that doesn’t break apart after a few years.
I don’t disagree with these points.
Can you clarify what you are suggesting by bringing them up?
I don’t see a large extend of skill building in the post but it mainly being about effective ways of evaluating suitable mates.