The things we do to find our perfect match
People do extraordinary things to find their perfect match. Some of us become serial daters or reject marriage proposals as we are looking for that perfect match who never shows up.
Remember George Clooney who is currently married to Amal Alamuddin? Here is a list of women he dated before Amal.
Dedee Pfeiffer, Kelly Preston, Talia Balsam, Kimberly Russell, Karen Duffy, Celine Balitran, Lucy Liu, Charlize Theron, Renée Zellweger, Krista Allen, Lisa Snowden, Sarah Larson, Elisabetta Canalis, Stacey Keibler. Phew, that’s a long list of women!
Phew, that’s a long list of women!
Few others believe they are so special and unique that they can find their perfect match only by looking for someone who has their same interests and passions. Believe it or not, there is a dating site just for people that believe in supernatural things and ghosts!
That’s not all. Some of us end up wearing all kinds of trinkets and amulets based on the recommendations of your parent’s favorite God-man and hope that the amazing powers radiating from magical stones will make you find your soulmate.
How to find your perfect match using numerology or astrology is pretty much the game that parents play when it comes to arranged marriages in India.
Talking of strange customs, raise your hand if you are a “Manglik” (If you actually raised your lands, sorry, we don’t have eyes everywhere and we can’t see you). Mangliks are thought to be cursed and are destined to cause a premature death of their future husband. So what’s the solution, just marry a tree first and then sign up for one of the specialized matrimony sites available just for any supernatural ailment you may have.
And let’s not forget the harassed young men and women of India who are well past the “ideal age for marriage” and cursed due to the wrath of Gods. It’s very easy to spot them in your neighborhood temples. They are the ones decked up in pious religious markings all over their bodies, probably wearing a garland (if they are in a Temple), running around performing “special” rituals that invariably involve a fat fee for the priest.
A mathematician’s equation for a perfect match!
Dr. Hannah Fry is no ordinary mathematician. She works with physicists, geographers, architects and computer scientists to find patterns in human behavior for applications in traffic management, crime, shopping, terrorism and of course, finding your perfect match. She wrote a book titled “The Mathematics Of Love” based on the speech she gave at TEDx.
Hannah also is a star of a couple of documentaries series that appears on British TV.
“Calculating Ada: The Countess Of Numbers” is a show hosted by Hannah about Ada Lovelace, a 19th-century mathematician who foretold the age of computers. In the second documentary, “Climate Change By Numbers“, Hannah cuts through the clutter to talk about important factors that impact climate change.
You can listen to her entire TEDx speech here or check out our spin below.
Finding aliens is not different from finding your perfect match
Hannah talks about a paper titled “Why Don’t I Have a Girlfriend – An application of the Drake Equation to love in the UK” by Peter Backus. In this paper, Backus applies the drake equation for finding alien life to calculate his odds for finding his girlfriend! Here is a short explanation by Hannah on how he came up with his odds for finding his perfect match.
Of all of the available women in the U.K., all Peter’s looking for is somebody who lives near him, somebody in the right age range, somebody with a university degree, somebody he’s likely to get on well with, somebody who’s likely to be attractive, somebody who’s likely to find him attractive. And comes up with an estimate of 26 women in the whole of the UK. Now, just to put that into perspective, that’s about 400 times fewer than the best estimates of how many intelligent extraterrestrial life forms there are. And it also gives Peter a 1 in 285,000 chance of bumping into any one of these special ladies on a given night out. I’d like to think that’s why mathematicians don’t really bother going on nights out anymore.
As you can see applying the Drake’s equation is quite discouraging to young men and women. In case you are actually interested in applying the Drake’s equation to calculate the odds of finding your perfect match, here is an explanation of how the equation works.
If you think you are not ready to give up your quest to find your perfect match just based on one mathematical equation, read on.
Maths can unearth patterns to help you find your perfect match
Hannah is an optimist. She is an expert in finding patterns and she thinks she can crack most problems on this earth by applying her mathematical skills.
Hannah uses maths to predict outcomes and study weather patterns, the growth of cities, stock market fluctuations and many other concepts that look confusing for ordinary folks. It appears there is always a method to the madness around us.
Like weather and stock market, love is also unpredictable as it is driven by human emotions and Hannah believes she can apply her mathematical wizardry and techniques to identify patterns. In fact, she has already done this and offers three mathematically proven tips to help maximize our chances of finding your perfect match.
#1: Find out who is your perfect match on dating sites
For the sake of Indians reading this blog (we think it’s mostly Indians), you can replace “online dating” with “online matrimony” if you are going through arranged marriage. Hannah explains a brilliant concept that a popular US-based dating site OKCupid unearthed based on user behavior on their site. Here is what we learn from OKCupid.
If you are a woman, you will get more messages if you end up creating extreme reactions among men. In other words, when looking at your online profile, if a group of men thinks you are beautiful and another group of men thinks you are unattractive, you have a greater chance of getting more responses. If you are a classic beauty and most men think you are either super attractive or cute, the chances of you getting a response comes down!
Here is an example of a couple of movie stars and how men may react to seeing their photographs. 
Sonakshi Sinha is considered beautiful by all of us here at Jodi Logik. But, there have been many instances when people have called her ugly.
Here is a recent Twitter exchange Sonakshi had with someone who called her ugly. Someone asked her why she is ugly and she had the perfect response 🙂
As you can see below Sonakshi Sinha can bring out extreme reactions.
Let’s take Deepika. You will be hard pressed to find anyone calling Deepika ugly. There is a unanimous agreement that she is an angel and a stunning beauty.
But, if you are a man and you came across Deepika’s profile in an online matrimony site (that’s more unlikely that Peter Backus finding a girlfriend in his lifetime), who would you choose? You are most likely to choose Sonakshi because you are probably intimidated by Deepika!
This seems very counter-intuitive. But here is how OKCupid explains this concept.
Just imagine that you are a man looking for your perfect match online. As you can see in the image below, if you think there are flaws in the woman that you are checking out online, you may end up assuming that your chances of meeting the woman are probably higher and based on this assumption you are more likely to express your interest. 
So what’s the lesson for women that are playing the dating game or looking for arranged marriage through online matrimony sites?
Play up your perceived differences or quirks instead of hiding them! A big forehead that you have been trying to mask all your life can actually help land more responses from men!
Check out this passionate love calculator to find out if you have strong feelings towards someone you may have met. Click here to take the test.
Tip #2: How to choose your perfect match?
Let’s say you embraced Hannah’s tip#1 and became very successful in attracting a swarm of men that expressed interest in your online profile. Now, you have another major headache to deal with. How the hell will you pick the perfect partner from the various people you end up meeting?
Hannah turns to math once again. This time, it is the Optimal Stopping Theory. Here is how she explains this concept when comes to choosing your perfect partner.
So let’s imagine then, that you start dating when you’re 15 and ideally, you’d like to be married by the time that you’re 35. And there’s a number of people that you could potentially date across your lifetime, and they’ll be at varying levels of goodness. Now the rules are that once you cash in and get married, you can’t look ahead to see what you could have had, and equally, you can’t go back and change your mind.
So the math says then that what you should do in the first 37 percent of your dating window, you should just reject everybody as serious marriage potential. And then, you should pick the next person that comes along that is better than everybody that you’ve seen before.
However, this approach also has its drawbacks. What happens when you keep rejecting people for the sake of rejecting them and you end up dismissing your perfect match during your first 37 percent?
Another issue is what happens if your perfect match never comes along after you are done rejecting and you are ready to marry someone?
But wait, human being are prewired to use this approach all along! When you look at how people date or even choose partners through arranged marriage, a vast majority of them don’t end up settling with the first person that shows interest. They try to look at several options and only when they believe they have seen it all, we will probably consider choosing someone for good. This only shows that mathematics is not science fiction. It is in fact based on patterns that we see all around us.
In summary, don’t say yes to the first person that comes along. You are likely to find your perfect match only after you have had a chance to review some options. Most likely after you are done checking out 37% of your potential matches 🙂
Wondering how to find your perfect match for marriage? We uncover the art and science behind finding your soulmate. Read this awesome blog post!
Tip #3: How do you stay married to your perfect match?
Once you have found your perfect match, the next logical question is what should you do keep your perfect match for life and not end up an innocent divorcee!
So how can a seemingly complicated issue i.e. the marital relationships be predicted or even have a pattern? This is the first question any married individual will ask. Actually, scientific research has an answer according to Hannah.
Psychologist, John Gottman, observed hundreds of couples having a conversation and recorded, well, everything you can think of. So he recorded what was said in the conversation, he recorded their skin conductivity, he recorded their facial expressions, their heart rates, their blood pressure, basically everything. ottman and his team found was that one of the most important predictors for whether or not a couple is going to get divorced was how positive or negative each partner was being in the conversation.
Gottman and his team predicted whether a couple was going to get divorced with a 90% accuracy. he found that couples that got into a spiral of negativity usually ended up separating eventually. Gottman then teamed up with a mathematical, James Murray, to create mathematical equations that predicted how the wife or husband is going to respond based on their observed behavior data.
These mathematical equations depend on the mood of the person under three circumstances
a. When they are on their own,
b. When they are with their partner
c. How much the husband and wife influence one another, also called as the “negative threshold“.
In simple terms, negative threshold refers to how annoying the husband or the wife can get before the spouse looses it! You can read more about Gottman’s “Love Lab” here.
Let’s take a quiz
Assuming you have read and understood what a negative threshold means in your marriage, based on common sense, what do you think should be the negative threshold for a successful marriage?
If you have answered, “that’s simple, the negative threshold should be high”, you are probably among the majority of readers who agreed with you. But, you are wrong.
Let’s go back to what Hannah has to say on this inverse logic that says, “you should not tolerate too much nonsense”.
Actually, the mathematics and subsequent findings by the team have shown the exact opposite is true. The best couples, or the most successful couples, are the ones with a really low negativity threshold. These are the couples that don’t let anything go unnoticed and allow each other some room to complain. These are the couples that are continually trying to repair their own relationship, that have a much more positive outlook on their marriage. Couples that don’t let things go and couples that don’t let trivial things end up being a really big deal.
Ladies and gentlemen, the best approach to ensuring a long-term marriage will be to provide room for expressing complaints freely and approach such complaints with a positive frame of mind. In addition, It is imperative not to blow up trivial things into major issues.
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Did you know?
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