The search for love

What are your chances of finding true love in life? Maybe being a hopeless romantic is not a lost cause after all when the search for true love is approached with a certain strategy...

Depending on your personal persuasion, and if you're really serious about finding true love, you may decide to learn from religious advice; or to consult an astrologist that will ask you a number of questions for a fee; or possibly consider counseling of some sort, which undoubtedly take you to the realization that the problem lies in yourself and not on others, and this, at a considerable expense. Then there's also that important aspect of beauty. Wouldn't it be nice to find love in someone who's considered above 8 in the beauty scale? I'm sure you all have examples of celebrities that would fit this quality, so I won't even bother in mentioning names here.

And we all know how things are these days with internet dating. I don't know about you my male friends, but I think it's fantastic. I sit at home, in front of my computer, usually late at night in my pj's and really, not looking hot at all, and I usually find someone I like in just a few clicks. Ok, I grant it, my odds as a female are a lot higher just by the sheer disproportion between men and women in some of the sites I visit.

This brings me to another point. You try to maximize your chances by looking in the right places... I heard of a matching site exclusive to fit and beautiful people, and maybe some of you might want to give it a try, but not me... not that I fit the bill in the first place, apparently the site has only just over a thousand members, but there's something eerie about being picked only by your looks. It just doesn't feel right... Would you date someone who's considerably more attractive than you are? You begin to reckon so many things... For instance: Will this person leave me for someone more attractive? Does this person have deep emotional problems that I should know about? Is this person hiding something? Oh yes, those feelings of insecurity and aversion to risk start boiling in your head.

Maybe some of you had the chance to see the movie "A Beautiful Mind", a story about John Forbes Nash, a mathematician and economist, who had something to say about how we build strategies to find love by applying game theory concepts. Just take a look at the explanation given in the movie.

So, the scene basically makes the point for a stag hunt with all the guys at the pub, so they can all get laid by not choosing the stunning blonde in the group of girls that just stepped in. Wow, it seems that for the girl in the movie, being the prettiest meant being the loneliest.

Now, that was a strategy designed for the sole purpose of getting laid, but finding true love in life is definitely a higher endeavour... but before we should take some time in defining what true love is. I'm sure this might mean different things for different people, but one thing is for sure... unless we're impossibly narcissistic, we would need somebody else for true love to happen. So realistically, maybe we should consider that we can only find true love with someone who's willing to date us. If you have a better idea, please let me know.

Of course, when you do this there's always the ubiquitous time factor. You simply cannot look forever for your perfect love, but you can't pick the first one that comes along because really, you figure that you'll miss a better chance if you do that. You might get lucky if you decide your first date is your true love, but that's a big risk. On the other hand if you wait too long, the pool of possibilities can only get smaller because potential mates settle with somebody else and they are not available anymore.

I suppose the practical question is how many dates or relationships should you end before you settle with the one. And with this, let me just clear out that at no point you should be accepting a choice that is relatively worse than those you dated before. I guess, the question becomes one of whether you'll make a decision to settle at some point. Well, I figure you can see where this is going, and even though it's only science, it might be worth considering it when you pick a potential partner.