Optimal Stopping Strategy in Dating - Part 2

 

In April 2022, my post was about the optimal stopping strategy applied to dating and other life situations in which one must decide to choose a good option or to move on and continue looking. My son recently got married and while I didn’t expect him to be following my Math Blog, I was curious to know if his decision point was close to the optimal stopping point.

The original post of the Optimal Stopping strategy, suggests using the 37% rule. The approach used to maximize the probability of choosing the best option is to use a stopping rule. In the hiring problem, let n be the number of candidates and r as the stopping point. This means one automatically rejects the first r-1 candidates and then chooses the next candidate who is better than all the prior candidates. The term r can be either the number of choices or a time factor.

I don’t know how many women my son dated or plan to date, so I used time as the factor. As a rough guess, I estimated my son’s dating years to be between ages 18 and 60. One could make arguments for making either end of this range higher or lower, but this was just a starting point.

By the 37% rule, one dates, but does commit, 37% into this range. After that stopping point, one chooses the next candidate who is better than anyone dated prior to the stopping point.

For my son, the age of the stopping point would be 18 + .37 x (60 – 18), or 33.5 years. When my son announced to me that he was engaged, I asked if he was sure and he said, unequivocally, that this was his match. The reason I asked my son is because he started dating his spouse in August 2022 and was engaged to be married in December 2022.

My son was born in April 1989, so the age at which he met his spouse was 33.3 years and he was married at 33.7 years. As it turns out his decision matched the optimal stopping strategy nearly to the month. I wish him and his wife many, many happy years together.

Jacob and Carolina

Some readers may want to know if I followed this strategy. Fortunately, I didn't know about this when I got engaged at age 24, 9 years short of the optimal stopping point. However, my wife and I have been married for 39 years, so I'm glad I wasn't following the strategy - I relied on love and not math!