This past Tuesday marked another Valentine’s Day, an exciting but also fairly stressful holiday due to the expectations it seems to set on love and relationships. Relationships of any sort can be hard, and as a result, people often look for advice or guidance on how to be the best partner they can be.
While I never thought this column would turn into one of relationship advice, I wanted to write something for Valentine’s Day and was reminded of mathematician Hannah Fry’s book The Mathematics of Love. I haven’t read the book, but I watched a TED talk Fry gave about it some years ago, and thought I would discuss some of its major bits of advice for love and dating.
A common question for people once they’ve been in a relationship for a little while is: “Is the person I’m dating the one?” Mathematicians have calculated an optimal strategy for finding a life partner without having to think too hard about an answer to this question. The downside is, this method is rather harsh: the math says you should reject the first 37% of the people you date, and then accept the first person after that 37% who stands out among the field of your past partners.
Fry notes the risks involved with this strategy. For one, if there’s a person who is truly great in that first 37%, you’d have to reject them going by the math. Furthermore, there’s no way of knowing whether you’ll find someone good (or someone at all) after this 37%. My gripe with it is that the strategy also doesn’t seem to account for relationships that happen by circumstance. Oftentimes, people will date in high school or college, but break things off after they move somewhere else — which seems totally fine. It’s unclear to me whether this would go into the 37% calculation or not.
The takeaway of this strategy Fry seems to emphasize is that it is fair to test the waters a bit and have some relationships that end up being relatively short-lived early on in your dating life. Breaking up is hard to do, but there are things you learn from these early relationships, and that can help you be a better partner by the time you have a longer-term relationship with someone you form a deeper bond with.
The most fascinating part about the talk is at the end when Fry brings up something called the “negativity threshold.” This refers to a person’s limit for approaching hard, frustrating, or annoying occurrences in a relationship — once the negativity threshold is passed, that person will react to the occurrence with negativity, either through anger, sadness, or distancing.
In the context of a relationship, one would think that having a high negativity threshold is good. There may be things about your partner that frustrate you, but if you’re able to still react positively most of the time, then that should mean you’ll be able to keep the relationship going. But, perhaps surprisingly, if partners both have low negativity thresholds, data shows that they are much more likely to stay in a relationship and not break up or get divorced.
The reason this happens is that when partners are quick to let each other know if something bothers them, behaviors can be changed long before any resentment or frustration starts to build up. A comment in the beginning about something your partner does that upsets you is fairer and more productive than lashing out with pent-up concerns later on.
Fry asserts interesting advice, which I found a bit shocking when I first watched the TED talk. I’ll reiterate that relationships, even the best ones, can be hard sometimes, which is why many don’t work out. So I hope this article, in a true mathematical fashion, presents a more pragmatic approach that helps even the most process-oriented among us find happiness in our relationships.
