Criteria

I again stumbled upon some Finnish blogs (yes, I know, I should refrain from reading these as they just result in me digging blood from my own nose...) and lo and behold the topic of the day was about the criteria that people, in this case women, have for selecting their partners. The topic is naturally as old as humanity and one of the more common discussions online. That said, I got around to thinking about it again and came up with the following angle.

My approach is that people typically have various dimensions to their lives. In the western hemisphere and especially in the regions plagued by the protestant work ethic one of the core dimensions is work. Another could be social life, friends, and the related stuff. A third could be continuous learning, sparring with ideas, and the pursuit of intellectual satisfaction. Then we could have physical well being and so on. I haven't spent very long with the taxonomy and I bet that someone could devise a more elaborate one and ensure that the categories are as orthogonal as possible to minimize overlapping. But for the sake of conversation, let's say that we have these categories to our lives. Finally, one of these categories is naturally that which contains your romantic life, your partner, etc.

The amount of time people spend thinking about this category seems to be disproportionately large compared to the fact that there are more things to life than selecting a partner. And people can be satisfied despite being single. For the sake of discussion again, let's say that for each category there's a certain threshold level that the person needs to achieve in order to be content with that aspect of their life. You can, to an extent, manually adjust the threshold level, but in some cases there are certain boundaries within which you must work. For instance, I couldn't say that currently I'd be satisfied in my professional life if I'd be cleaning streets; I'm currently way more competitive and want to move upwards and achieve things. So because of my character and nature, I can't really set the threshold level lower than a certain boundary.

But regardless, we now have categories and threshold levels. The name of the game is now to live a fulfilling life and pursue happiness. My hypothesis is that in order to achieve that, you should initially ensure that every category achieves the threshold level. I might be very successful at work, but if my social life is significantly below the threshold level, I would still be unhappy. Maximizing a single category is thus a very sub-optimal strategy and it's bound to fail in the long run.

Thus the amount of effort that people seem to allocate for their love life is very disproportionate. And defining hard criteria to define who you can and cannot date is not only a somewhat bad idea, but also eventually bound to backfire as you're going to undoubtedly set the threshold levels too high and cause yourself to be very unhappy. The dynamic here is that it's a multifold game: first you have to find the set of people who fill your criteria. Then you have to have individual games with each of the people to see if they're interested in you. And this is followed by the typical dating games and so on. If you have set your threshold levels high, then naturally this will cause the set of potentially interesting people to decrease drastically. This then also has the added fun factor involved in the fact that if you are very selective, then typically the other person can also be very selective. Are you special enough to pass their criteria lists? If not, then it's game over for you unless you split and re-evaluate your own criteria.

Then there's the aspect of the criteria lists in general. Apparently very often a certain group of women wants their potential partners to be good looking, well educated and smart, wealthy, successful, and so on. What's the point in that? Now that we're striving for gender equality, my understanding is that women should be able to finance their own lives and thus they wouldn't have to be dependent on men. These types of lists still sound to me as if certain women still see the world as a place where the name of the game is that they trade certain traits that they possess for an affluent and powerful spouse who will then support their lives. Hmm... Well educated? What does this matter? If your partner is incredibly well educated in a certain area, let's say in some specific area of string theory, chances of you actually understanding anything about it are very slim. So you most likely won't have interesting discussions about that aspect of their life with them. Unless of course you're also into that specific thing and rank in the top 10 researchers on the subject. This of course was a provocative example, but I guess the underlying point is that specialization of your spouse in a certain academic field is very much irrelevant in regards to your love life. Then there's of course the whole discussion regarding whether or not the level of education can be used as a proxy for intelligence.

So, my take on the criteria lists is that there is essentially one criteria for me regarding whether or not I want to spend my life with someone. And that criteria is essentially whether or not I love them. If I don't, then that's that. And if I do, that's simple enough again. The whole process of dating is merely to check out the compatibility, and there's no need to analyze it deeper with lists of criteria. If it clicks, it clicks. Having shallow lists of criteria merely makes your job harder as you might in fact potentially also miss interesting people who could've been the perfect match for you despite the fact that they might miss some mundane bit of criteria by being e.g. 169 centimeters tall instead of being over 170 centimeters.

And once you do find someone who you love and can share your life with, then I guess the natural thing to do is spend the leftover time to work on the other areas of your life which still need working. Because if you don't, then eventually you're anyway going to end up with an unhappy life. Or that's my take on the subject, anyway.