Rational approach to finding life partners

c_edwards

Speaking from personal experience, finding the right relationship can be HARD. I recently came across a rational take on finding relationship partners, much of which really resonated with my experiences:

http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/02/pick-life-partner.html

http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/02/pick-life-partner-part-2.html

(I'm still working my way through the Sequences, and lw has more than eight thousand articles with "relationship" in them. I'm not promising the linked articles include unique information)

http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/02/pick-life-partner.html

http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/02/pick-life-partner-part-2.html

(I'm still working my way through the Sequences, and lw has more than eight thousand articles with "relationship" in them. I'm not promising the linked articles include unique information)

Remind me, why are you calling the inability of some to find sex a "market failure"? It might well be that the "market" does not think the package they are offering in exchange is good enough.

The fact that I can't acquire a superyacht is not a market failure.

Instead, the basic complaint looks much more like the classic entitlement narrative of "I have a right, I couldn't exercise this right, so I'm a victim, somebody make sure I can exercise my rights!"

Remind me, why are you calling the inability of some to find sex a "market failure"? It might well be that the "market" does not think the package they are offering in exchange is good enough.

Let, me translate that into the unemployment analogy for you:

Remind me, why are [we] calling the inability of some to find a job a "market failure"? It might well be that the "market" does not think the package they are offering in exchange is good enough.

Consider what the reaction would be to someone who made the above ... (read more)

0OrphanWilde11y

I think the implication is that the sexual marketplace is inefficient (with an implied dig at the idea that employment is a right in the sense that you describe). Given roughly equal numbers of men and women who want sex and/or relationships, and treating men and women as fungible, there is an inefficiency if everybody isn't satisfied, as partners can be rearranged to produce a greater number of satisfied people. On the down side for this view, people aren't in fact fungible. On the up side for this view, there are some obvious inefficiencies in the sexual marketplace, such as the distribution of genders across cities. On the "whatever" side for this view, I'm inclined to say that the root of the problem is that value on the sexual marketplace has greater variance for men than women, so the tails on both ends are dominated by men whose preferences cannot be satisfied, and the middle of the distribution has more women than there are men available to satisfy their preferences.