A growing number of people are organising their love and sex lives via spreadsheets. Is this really how to excel in relationships From 1843mag
“Love is a capricious spark, a miraculous whirlwind,” one of his blog posts began, sarcastically. “It is found by following ancient prophecies, embarking on dangerous quests...Something like that, who knows. Anyway, it sounds like finding a girlfriend was crazy hard before computers!”
Jacob wanted to work out which of the women he’d met online would make the best life partner. He started by listing ideal qualities for a girlfriend, then weighted them as objectively as possible. Great sex, for instance, was worth roughly a third of great conversation, since people typically spend less time doing it. Other categories were peculiar to him. Jacob outlined 15 attributes in total, hoping that by isolating his requirements he could compare them in a systematic way.
Jacob is just one of a growing number of people seeking inspiration from business schools rather than poetry in the quest to find the right partner. This hard-headed attitude is evident in the practical turn that romance’s ardent lexicon has taken in recent years. We look for partners, not soulmates. We avoid deal-breakers.
All these people are trying to optimise the process of acquiring a partner and maintaining a relationship. Optimisation grew out of attempts to solve real-world problems with mathematical techniques. People are most likely to have experienced the effects of optimisation in their workplace. Management consultants, for example, used statistics to help companies perform better.
At that point Jacob had been dating a woman for two years who lived thousands of miles away. He met Natasha – this is not her real name and she declined to comment for this article – in Israel, where Jacob’s parents live, when she was visiting from Russia. Jacob says he knew he was in love when they stayed up one night solving probability problems in their underwear. Natasha was on track to becoming a hedge-fund quant. Jacob was applying to business school.
More than a century later, a subsequent generation of free-love advocates – hippies, radical feminists and gay liberationists – drew inspiration from Oneida. These groups believed that monogamy produced individualistic family units, in which unequal gender roles reflected inequality in society at large. Love without limits, it was argued, would dismantle patriarchy along with capitalism.
New forms of relationship necessarily make inventive use of the materials that society provides them with, so perhaps it’s inevitable that they have certain corporate overtones. Because non-monogamous relationships also lack legal protections – group marriage is illegal in many countries, and in America you can face legal employment discrimination on the basis of relationship style – participants have to get creative.
Perhaps the most novel technique they employ is a weekly relationship check-in they conceived and dubbed the Six Questions. Every week, Madeline and Evin, and Evin and Katie, enter into Google Docs the answers to six questions about how their relationships have felt in the past week and their goals for the week ahead. Then they discuss their answers, usually over text but sometimes in person.
There was one group of thinkers who had the tools Jacob needed: proponents of a new philosophy known to its adherents as rationality. These nerdy internet-users were preoccupied with recognising cognitive bias, applying the lessons of biology and statistics to everything fromresearch to fan fiction, and modifying their emotions and desires to achieve their goals.
That approach could be used to hack other emotions too, he realised. Whenever Jacob felt himself getting angry with Natasha, he’d search for another angle from which to view the situation.
Jacob began to wonder if he had been deceiving himself in his belief that he could transform his own feelings. Maybe he and Natasha weren’t made for each other? At first these thoughts made him despondent. But soon Jacob recognised that he could turn this realisation to practical advantage. Natasha no longer speaks to Jacob. This makes him sad and confused. Jacob takes a sip of tea as he recalls the most recent email from her: a request that he take down or untag photos on Facebook of them together in some of their happiest moments, on a trip to Israel and at a flash mob in New York. She’s monogamous now, he thinks, and wants to leave him and that period of her life behind.