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in 1973 titled, “A Theory of Marriage: Part I” in the Journal of Political Economy (Part II was published the following year). He assumed that rational-minded daters would search for the most desirable mates, which led him to predict “positive associative matching” or, in plain English, the idea that men and women with roughly similar levels of desirability would pair off. This simple conclusion involved numerous equations and lots of math. Becker is, after all, a Nobel Prize winner, not just some loudmouth down at your local bar, and he won his Nobel for finding ways to apply economic analysis to all sorts of human behaviors not usually associated with economics, such as marriage. Unwittingly, Becker provided the first tentative hints of how to apply theory and mathematical rigor to the distinctly fuzzy world of male-female relationships, and that initial inquiry has spawned thousands of followers.

Before I dive into this world, though, I want to emphasize that while the mathematical analysis is valid, it can get pretty weird pretty fast. Economists are busy these days slapping values on all sorts of things that you probably thought were impossible to quantify. For example, if you increase the amount of sex you have from once a month to once a week, economists estimate that it has the same effect on your happiness as a $50,000 rise in your yearly income. Has “earning” an extra $50,000 a year ever sounded easier? Marriage is worth an extra $115,000. For a woman, semen is worth $1,500 because there are a variety of chemicals in it that boost a woman’s mood when absorbed vaginally, and touch brings us an additional $26,000 in well-being by reducing stress levels and boosting our serotonin and dopamine levels. Economists have even put dollar figures on things like orgasms ($7,000) and sweat ($15,500). Interesting? Yes. But all of this is likely a classic example of the old saying about knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing. A mathematician named Sergio Rinaldi has even developed equations to quantify love. Sounds great, doesn’t it? The mystery of love solved with the precision of a mathematical formula. The mathematically inclined among you are probably already perking up and thinking that all of your problems are over. Well, let me keep you in suspense no longer. Here are the equations he developed:

Helpful? I didn’t think so. The equations come from Clio Cresswell’s Mathematics and Sex. Her book is filled with equations like that and is quite an enjoyable read. The main thing it taught me, though, was not that math can explain the mysteries of love but that math itself is fairly mysterious for a layman like myself. When it comes to remembering numbers, most of us are not much more sophisticated than our ancestors on the savanna. George Miller, a cognitive psychologist, wrote a famous essay in 1956 called “The Magical Number Seven.” He found that most of us can’t hold more than about seven things in our short-term memory at any one time. So, I offer this chapter to you with one caveat. Take everything in it with a grain of salt. Will it contain some interesting information? Yes. Should you take it all literally? No. While game theory and economics can provide incredibly powerful analytical tools for understanding dating, real life can never be reduced to simple formulas.

LET’S MAKE A DEAL

With that said, let’s see if we can’t ferret out some useful ideas from the dismal science and its equally gloomy cousin, game theory. First of all, let’s start with the idea of the “marriage market.” We all like to believe that we fall in love with someone for individual and idiosyncratic reasons. It makes us feel much better about ourselves because we can imagine that we are not the sort of people who make cold-blooded decisions about relationships. It also makes us feel better about love by providing a far more uplifting conception of our relationships than the cold, hard logic of the marketplace. But there is good evidence that the dating world really does function as a market and an efficient one at