finding our soul mate is one of the hardest problems we face in our lives. It is really hard, we have to face so much heartbreak and go through so much stuff until we find the best “suit”. So is there any way that we could avoid all this fuss? Like is there any theory or a model that could make us take a chance which has the most probability of finding our soul mate? Well, of course, there is! Today we discuss it.
We meet hundreds of people in our lives may be thousands. But finding “the one ” is always the problem. Sometimes we feel it like he or she is the one and we trust our hearts and go with it and it ends up horribly. The thing is humans are complicated so finding the perfect one is nearly impossible. But we can try, take chances and follow some sort of algorithm to find the best suit as our soul mate.
Think of this problem like this, now you have a put an up to a job vacancy for the position “soulmate ” and there are a number of candidates waiting outside. You will be interviewing them one by one. When one is interviewed either you hire that person or let that person go, and he or she would never return. this is the “soul mate ” problem we face in our lives, simplified as a simple IQ problem.
So exploring further down the question the main matter is, you could miss the best one. This could happen in two ways. Either you would hire someone before you meet the perfect match, or you could have passed the perfect match looking for someone better and now you will have to hire someone else.
So what you should need to know is, when to stop. Let’s say you have 100 candidates in your “soulmate” interview, the first one being the perfect one is highly unlikely( it could happen, but we are talking probability here) and the last one being the perfect match is also the same. So the perfect match is sitting somewhere between 1 and 100. So we need to get someone at least closer to the perfect match, not getting a totally random person.
As we know we rate all the people relatively. There is no standard measurement to rate people. All we can do is say someone is better or worse compared to other people. So when we are finding the perfect match, he or she should be relatively perfect compared to other people we meet in our lives.
Keeping that in mind, what we simply going to do is first to make some sort of “standard” out of the people we meet, then to select the best one we could find according to that “standard”.
So how can we make this standard? Getting back at the job interview for “soulmate”, when you are interviewing the first candidate, you have no idea which types of candidates there would be next. But when you are interviewing the second one, you have an idea of the first one, so compared to the first one you can judge if the second one is better than the first one or not. When you interview the third one you have a better idea, a better “standard” than in the beginning as now you have passed two people now. The more people you interview, you automatically improve the standard. So if you are interviewing the last person in the interview, you will have a complete idea or a “standard ” about the candidates. But it would be too late since you have let everyone else leave so you will have to hire the last one even if that person is not good enough.
So again, it’s all about “stopping” at the correct place. so what we can do is we can take a percentage of our candidates to make a standard, then following the standard we can hire the next best one we meet in the rest of the candidates. Sounds like a plan eh?
So in mathematics, this is called as “optimal stopping” and where to make the standard and where to do the hiring is lied in the 37% percentage line. Explaining more, if there are 100 candidates you interview the first 37 people, but not hire anyone out of them, then when interviewing the next 63 people once you meet a one who is better than the first 37 people you will hire that one. He or she is the best chance you get.
But the thing is in our lives, we don’t know how many people we will meet in our lives. So how can we find the 37% marker?
Well this rule is also applicable to the search time.
So if we simplify this rule further, let’s say you had a first “real date” at the age of 16 and you are planning to get married by 30 the last.
That gives you a time period of 14 years. So now calculate a 37% time period of that 14 years which is roughly about 5 years.
So doing the math, 16 + 5 = 21, which means you should have a clear idea about which type of person you want to marry by 21. In other words, you have made your “standard ” by age 21. So what you should do is marry the next person who you think is best to that standard.
I know this sounds like lots of crazy and you have so many questions on this. This is just a blind theory which is derived from mathematics. So if you are not a math person you might find this really odd. As I said at the beginning of this article, the human mind is strange and complicated. We have so much trouble finding what we need and our minds change from time to time. Most of the time what we do is we just get adjusted to the situation at hand. Even in marriage, it happens. We may not marry the perfect match but eventually, we come to some sort of agreement between both of us and our partner which helps us to live better.
Making decisions in our lives cannot be done using simple algorithms since there are so many parameters to our lives. This article was to help you or to guide you how things work just in case you are lost right now. Hope this article helped you in some way. Leave your comments below and don’t forget to share this if you liked this article.
