Decoding Love - Andrew Trees [64]
Running all the numbers, it turns out that the best strategy is the 10 percent rule, which results in the highest average mate value, a high chance of landing someone in the top 10 percent and a very high chance of landing someone in the top 25 percent. To give you some sense of how much more effective the 10 percent rule is than the 37 percent rule, compare the average mate values. The 10 percent rule gives you an average mate value of 92 out of 100 versus an average mate value of 81 out of 100 if you use the 37 percent rule (and you have to date a lot fewer people!). The 10 percent rule isn’t particularly onerous. You only need to date ten people from a field of one hundred. That is lower than the twelve I originally promised. Of course, you are likely going to have to date more than just those ten. Remember the way the game works. The 10 percent rule means that you have to pass on the first ten people and then choose the next person who comes along and is better than the first ten. On average, you will end up working your way through roughly thirty-four potential candidates.
Of course, there are probably some indefatigable daters out there who think that one hundred people is a rather paltry total: the dating decathletes among us who are perfectly happy to date one thousand people if it improves their chances of finding true love. If you are choosing among one thousand women (or men), the 37 percent rule means that you will no longer be doing anything but dating for the foreseeable future. If you are willing to accept someone in the top 10 percent, though, you only need to apply the 3 percent rule for a 97 percent chance of success. And the numbers are even better if you are willing to accept someone in the top 25 percent. After running the game for numbers ranging from one hundred to several thousand, it all boiled down to one simple rule: try a dozen (Cresswell dubbed this the twelve-bonk rule, bonk being a British word for . . . well, I’m sure we all know what bonk means). Todd and Miller found that this number provided excellent results no matter how large the sample size. As they aptly put it, “A little search goes a long way.” We may still choose the wrong person, but the “try a dozen” rule shows that our mistakes are probably not from lack of trying.
Although I have yet to meet anyone who has explicitly used the twelve-bonk rule to choose a partner, the anecdotal evidence suggests that some of us subconsciously follow a method roughly analogous to it. For example, a number of people said that they viewed finding the right person as a simple numbers game. They just had to ensure that they met enough people in order to find the right fit. I realize this contradicts to some extent what I said earlier about too much choice, but it is very different to date several dozen people over the course of several years than it is to scan hundreds or even thousands of online profiles in the course of a few hours. The surprising thing was how often the numbers roughly correlated with what the twelve-bonk rule predicts. One woman decided to get serious about meeting someone and went on thirty-eight dates over a two-year period before finding Mr. Right, which is very close to the average predicted by the “try a dozen” rule. Another woman inadvertently ran her own modified version of the dowry game, albeit without the fatal consequences. She went on a hundred first dates, ruthlessly culled from that list ten men for a second date, ruthlessly culled again and went on a third date with three men. She ended up having a long-term relationship with two of the men, and she married one of them. I also found a variety of other people who had used methods roughly analogous to game theory.