So I have some friends who seem to go
from relationship to relationship in the span of a few weeks,
and others that have been single the entire time I've known them,
and it's made me wonder what are the chances of
actually finding the one for you?
So after thinking about it for a while, I came up with this formula
which can roughly model the probability of meeting the right
person after you figure out three things:
How often you act on opportunities that arise,
how many people you're interested in,
and how many encounters you have in a given timeframe.
Once you figure out what these values are,
you can then plug them into the formula to get the hope you have left.
So let's start with our opportunity value.
Um, some engineering friends told me that using an "o" as a variable is in bad
form because it looks like a "0,"
but when I told them it represents the courage you have to talk to girls,
they thought it was fine.
Bear in mind it is a pretty substantial multiplier so
really sit down and think, out of all the recent opportunities that you've had
to ask someone on a date, how many moments did you let slip away,
and how many moments were you at least 7/10 drunk?
Now next we have "p,"
which is the fraction of people you would be interested in, and figuring this out
takes a bit of work, so if you're thinking: "I can't be bothered,
I'm down with anyone,"
then the p can be removed from the equation, and you can use the new formula.
Okay, so assuming that's not you, we have be able to figure out
how many people in the world that you would be interested in.
Now, there are 7.4 billion people
in the world, so if you're a straight male,
biologically speaking, you have 3.7 billion potential
partners, but we'll say 4 billion because...
It's 2017.
Now, obviously you don't want to date
someone underage, so we'll say they're at least 18,
and you don't want to date someone too much older, because then you're less likely
to have much in common. Uh, given my age,
I'd say that caps out somewhere around 32, or
35.
So, obviously, I'd prefer if they were single, but,
it wouldn't be the first time I've broken up a marriage.
Shout-outs to mom and dad.
So, let's focus in on the English-speaking countries,
and, this is
personal preference, but I think a sense of humour is really
important for both parties so, I'd really like to date
someone who's at least as funny as me.
(How is that possible?)
Now, I'm pretty vain, so I want any accidental
kids to be as good looking as possible. Um, I'm not gonna
say I'm only going to date eights and higher because people tend
to end up with other people who they perceive to be in the same league,
so we'll say eights and higher with low self-esteem.
Okay, so I'm looking for an English-speaking
girl who's good looking, single, and laughs at my jokes,
that sounds pretty accurate, and after eliminating countries
that aren't really viable, that ends up at around 10 million,
or 1/100 people, which is our value p.
Okay, so moving on to the
third and final variable, we need to figure out "e":
how many encounters you have in a given timeframe.
Now the best way to do this is actually
recording how many new people you meet in a year, month, or week,
and then just extrapolating.
But if you're just looking for a ballpark, they say the
average person will interact with about 80000 people in their life,
which is about 2.7 people a day.
So if you're a math guy, just use Euler's number as a default.
I decided to actually count
how many new people I've said "Hello" this last month,
and that number ended up being about 2.5/day.
Unfortunately, the amount of people who said hello back was about
1.8.
That made me sad.
Now, for the final step, if we take all the values, that we have so far,
we can put them into the "Hope" formula,
do some simplifying, do a little bit of number-crunching,
and the chance of meeting someone who could be the one for you
is 1.35%/day
or 99%/year.
All in all that doesn't sound too bad, so with the good news behind us,
when the day comes, and you do finally meet someone
who could be the one for you,
all you have to worry about now is finding out if you're
the one for them. Conveniently, this formula
is exactly the same,
all we have to do is take the Hope formula, and then substitute
the "H" for an "N," before proceeding as normal.
So the hoodies are actually in now, and we also have some
mugs. So you can check those out at CasuallyExplained.com.