Romantic Calculus

I remember thinking in college, after the rare promising, mutually interested girl didn't pan out, that the odds were against me.

50% of people are male and consequently unavailable
50% of women are spoken for
40% of women are either out of my league or I'm out of their league
     (let's say 20 and 20)
50% of women are only interested in men that share their religion
     (closer to 20% in college, though)
98% of women aren't intelligent enough to interest me
     (closer to 95% of my school's undergrads, but still extremely high)
80% of people are incompatible with my rather strong personality

I calculated that I would meet one compatible woman for every 800 students. I'd have to not only meet 800 undergrads, but talk with them long enough to know whether they were a romantic possibility or not. Since I'd just met and dated somebody who fit all those qualifications, I figured I'd blown my wad for my whole college career.

By the time I graduated, I'd realized I needed to add that approximately
70% of women don't want enough sex to make me content
and
80% of women were either too old or too young for me

So out of college, the numbers were even more daunting. One in 83,000 people I met should be romantically compatible with me. I stand by these numbers.

Fortunately, sometime in college I had an important epiphany: prehistoric humans had to make due with what they had. They lived in bands of 50-150 people and at most had a dating pool of 500-2000 people (a dozen culturally similar bands might meet or interact with one another). Even worse, our ancestors 500 years ago had arranged marriages. Their partner was picked largely for economic reasons, yet divorce rates hovered around 2% and I have to assume that they grew to love each other and were more or less content with their lot. This is all to say that we can love practically anyone. Some may be easier to love than others, but humans are far more romantically flexible than modern society would suggest. This is largely because the modern concept of monogamy is more emotionally and personally intense than 500 or 10,000 years ago. We want our spouse to be our best friend, our partner, our roommate and our only lover. We are the victims of our own high expectations.

While recognizing that our society is plagued by terrifyingly high expectations didn't change those expectations, it did go a long way toward calming me down. Humans, ultimately, have a proven ability to happily settle with far less. I thought to myself, probably everybody goes through this calculus and comes up with similarly alarming numbers, yet somehow the human race continues to multiply. There was a disconnect between those numbers and reality. This was partly because I'd stated my "bare minimum" based on my concept of what I needed rather than on my experience and partly because the very environment we choose to place ourselves in drastically improves our odds.

Living in a major city? Not in a slum? The average IQ there is much higher than 100 and hardcore religiousness is much lower than 50%. Ever date friends of friends? They are far more likely to be culturally and intellectually compatible with you. Did you count other men as people you have to "search through"? How about women who are spoken for, too young, old, ugly or pretty? These things aren't hard to determine quickly. Have you ever thought about how easy it is to judge a book by its cover? On the bus do you ever find yourself categorizing people? Immigrant, punk kid, gay guy, neohippy, educated couple, not-quite-homeless bearded old guy (probably an old hippy), second gen immigrant kids in high school, well-dressed nerd who's probably a programmer, tourists, crazy cat lady, scene kid, etc, it's so easy it's practically unconscious. How they're dressed, their facial expression, how they sit... like it or not we also fit into these categories. Only rarely (and certainly more rarely than we think) do we qualify as "genuine iconoclast" and even when we do it's usually clear what sort of people we're most likely to get along with or date.

Of course, the biggest turning point in my approach to "romantic calculus" was precipitated by finding my first girlfriend. I was forced to reconcile that I had found a compatible person against the supposed odds. If life had doomed me to a life of loneliness, it certainly wasn't acting like it.

The thing is, --and I cannot stress this enough-- there is no mathematical way to predict your likelihood of finding somebody in a given year based on established preferences. Predicting your likelihood based on past experience might have some bearing on reality, but that assumes that you, your lifestyle and method of finding people remains constant. For somebody in their twenties, this is never the case. For somebody in their forties, this is only rarely the case.

None of this is to say that thinking about compatibility calculus is necessarily a bad thing. Thinking about how you are rendering candidates with perfectly-good hearts, minds or genitalia ineligible is a good way to address systematic ways you are placing yourself out in the cold. In practice, though, it is more common for such calculus to be misused. Wallowing in dooming numbers is self-defeating, childish and oh-so-common. Everybody likes a good pity party.

Then again, pity parties are unpleasant from the outside looking in, which is why I'm here to rain on all the pity parties that you, my readers, are undoubtedly indulging in at this very moment. There is hope for all of you. Actually, there was this one lady I saw on the bus the other day who was probably hopeless... but you're not her!