Forget Romance, This Video Shows You How to Use Math to Find Your Spouse

Not sure if he or she is the one? Watch this video to apply math to the age-old question.
Donna Fuscaldo

When to make the leap and tie the knot is an age-old question for countless couples around the world. After all, choosing the person to spend the rest of your life with can be daunting. Go with the wrong one and you may be in for a life of misery or an expensive divorce. 

Thankfully you don't have to leave it completely up to fate. You can apply science and mathematics to the question to determine how many people you should date before tieing the knot and settling down. This video takes the romance out of the equation, showing us how to calculate our perfect match or at least our spouse using mathematical formulas. 

Relying on the so-called Optimal Stopping Theory, this video offers up a calculation that tells you when you should stop dating. The rules of the theory go like this: you can only choose and reject somebody once and you don't know all the people you can date. Let's say you're going to date ten people in your life. The calculation will tell you how many of them you should bother with until you decide that's the one to marry. 

To come up with the number of people to date, the time-based theory is applied. It looks at the period of your dating life which could be from 16 to 36 to determine how many people you are likely to date. It then calculates the time period you should reject people from before settling down. Let's say the percentage comes back at 37%. That means you should reject people from the first 37% of your dating years and choose the next best partner after that. 

Most Popular

Sounds farfetched? There are fish that already use this method, according to the video. They reject the first 37% of the fish during mating season and then pick the next better fish that comes along.

The video tested the Optimal Stopping Theory against a more random calculation and determined the Optimal Stopping Theory did well. But if you lived by it only, you could miss a potentially great mate. It's better to meld science and intuition to determine when you should make the leap.  

message circleSHOW COMMENT (1)chevron