The economics of pickiness

Alright, all of us singletons have been accused of being too picky at some point or another. Don't worry; this is not where I go into a rant about why someone who's such a great catch should start lowering standards. To lapse into economics for a moment, the essential question is whether the marginal benefit of being in someone's company outweighs the marginal cost. In equation form:

where i = all the things you like about the person and j = all the things you don't

and α, β, δ, and γ are weights

So you're out on a date. You're getting to know someone. Every new piece of information is either an i (positive) or a j (negative). You keep dating the person until the next j added tips the equation in that direction.

Where we open ourselves up to attack is what that j is. The proverbial straw that breaks the camel's back, the last j is unfortunately what we give as the reason we don’t want to keep seeing the person. So if my last j (under the category of Interests) is he likes the American version of The Office EVEN THOUGH he's seen the original, I get called out for being too picky. Which, if you look at the math, is totally unfair.

First, there's the issue of weights. One part of being accused of being too picky is when people don't like our weights. If my α is 0.85 and my β is 0.05, someone is going to come along and tell me I care too much about personality, and I should focus more on whether or not he's a good person. Actually, a friend of mine who got married by an arranged marriage keeps telling me I need to weight γ zero. That's going to make for a fun marriage when the kids are out of the house and that was the only thing you had in common.

Generally, I think it breaks down like this for me*:

α = 0.27

β = 0.27

δ = 0.19

γ = 0.27

So, liking the US Office added 0.27 to the right-hand side of the equation. That's really not very much at all. What it really comes down to is that the left-hand side of the equation didn't have enough i's to balance it out. If he were better looking, less religious, less inclined to spend the date talking about his exes, then that little 0.27 wouldn't have been enough to tip the balance.

So the next time someone gets on your case for being too picky, hand them a copy of this equation. Then plug in some numbers to show them quite clearly how rational it is to dump a woman for having man hands.

*Feel free to put your own numbers in the comments section—if you can't type greek, that's alpha, beta, delta, and gamma.