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The stable marriage problem and modern dating

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Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#41

Post by colmvp »

EGreg wrote: post #3

Why would having a larger pool make dating harder? I think the author is confusing the probability of a “stable marriage” with the probability of a relationship . What this says is you’d expect cheating to go up. As Chris Rock says, “you’re only as faithful as your options.”

> Why would having a larger pool make dating harder?

FWIW, I have found online dating way harder than dating someone I met through friends/work/school. YMMV but my theory is having access to that many more people leads one (including myself) to sometimes think there's someone more attractive/interesting out there instead of giving what's available to them a strong chance.

I have two good friends who have been serial daters for years and they have Seinfeldian reasons as to why they didn't fit with someone. It made me think my God, "if everyone had your standards, literally no one would have a long term relationship." Interestingly, when I saw them date mutual friends back in Uni, the relationships were the longest they've had their entire lives.

I'm convinced that a lot of stable marriages from people I know around me wouldn't have happened if they had tried first meeting online instead of happenstance in IRL situations, because person A wasn't the typical ethnicity that marries person B, or person A is much older than person B and wouldn't have fit in the filter, or person A isn't particularly photogenic, etc.

I'm not trying to paint online dating as a bad thing as there are quite a number of success stories.

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#43

Post by albntomat0 »

polote wrote: post #29

Could we solve the advantage towards men by removing the condition that there could be some unstable pairing ? (but not a lot), it is not like changing partner is a liquid market. What would be the percentage of people not being in a unstable pairing in order for men to not have any advantage over women ?

My understanding is the "advantage" men have over women in this article is due to the average man finding the average women more attractive than the average woman finds the average man, at least in the data used.

Without removing that, and assuming everyone pairs up, the "advantage" remains.

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#44

Post by e12e »

occamrazor wrote: post #35
anikan_vader wrote: post #11

>> The first graph demonstrates the O(n²) complexity of the algorithm. We can see that as the community grows larger, even by a small amount, the amount of iterations it takes to solve the matching problem grows exponentially. This statement is contradictory. Probably the author is using "exponentially" to mean quick growth. I suppose this is alright in common parlance, but I find it disturbing when people describe a…

And the chart actually looks very close to linear

Everything is linear on a log enough scale ;)

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#45

Post by toby »

poorman wrote: post #40

Having worked on a dating app startup with a 2m seed (it's since pivoted to a brewery run by active gang members), I can say the problem of dating is looked at horribly wrong. People assume dating is about finding the person "most compatible" with you. Compatibility is an illusion. Most people tend to date until they have an idea of "what they don't want". Once they know and they find someone who checks the boxes, th…

>> (it's since pivoted to a brewery run by active gang members)

Would this be an appropriate place to share that story? Because I'm intrigued

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#46

Post by whymauri »

e12e wrote: post #44
occamrazor wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the chart actually looks very close to linear

Everything is linear on a log enough scale ;)

It's not a log scale, though? It's just slightly unfortunate that the small curvature of the plot is hard to see.

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#47

Post by [deleted] »

poorman wrote: post #40

Having worked on a dating app startup with a 2m seed (it's since pivoted to a brewery run by active gang members), I can say the problem of dating is looked at horribly wrong. People assume dating is about finding the person "most compatible" with you. Compatibility is an illusion. Most people tend to date until they have an idea of "what they don't want". Once they know and they find someone who checks the boxes, th…

[deleted]

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#48

Post by YetAnotherMatt »

poorman wrote: post #40

Having worked on a dating app startup with a 2m seed (it's since pivoted to a brewery run by active gang members), I can say the problem of dating is looked at horribly wrong. People assume dating is about finding the person "most compatible" with you. Compatibility is an illusion. Most people tend to date until they have an idea of "what they don't want". Once they know and they find someone who checks the boxes, th…

Do you have any data to back that up that you can share? I don't mean to call you out, it could very well be the case, people date in rather not-understandable ways to me.

What you're saying does not match my experience though. Quite a few friends of mine have dated only very few people before getting married.

Anecdotally, the marriages that seem to do the best are the marriages in which both partners did not have a dating history with a lot of partners "to find out what they don't want". That said, I'm aware of the negative selection bias there.

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