The quality of your wife is 40% who you are, 20% who you choose, and 80% how you conduct yourself during courtship and marriage. Overlap due to some correlations and the fact that it's easier to screw things up than get things right.
To pre-optimize a future wife, focus on being a man of character. Sacrifice for noble goals, exercise self-discipline, show love to family, especially your mother. To optimize an existing wife, continue to do those things, and also spend a lot of time together, be romantic, communicate honestly and frequently (pursue intimacy; resolve to hold no secrets), and ensure a good sex life for her--which for you means generosity and an eye toward emotion.
> The quality of your wife is 40% who you are, 20% who you choose, and 80% how you conduct yourself during courtship and marriage.
This is incredibly idealistic - and doesn't really jive with the real world. It says if a man is a good man and conducts himself exceptionally during courtship and marriage, his wife is almost certain to be quality.
And this is false! I mean, there's so many real world examples - some people are undisciplined, unambitious, self-centered, reckless, not grounded, etc, etc. Unfortunately, I know a couple guys, good guys overall, who married such women. No matter how much he toils in the marriage, it can't and won't be a good marriage.
The character and quality of your spouse has a lot to do with their character - you can help them grow to some extent, but you need to start from a good place. The idea that "be a good person and conduct yourself well and things will work out" sounds nice, but is in fact dangerous and bad advice. For both men and women, the base character of your spouse matters a lot - and that's before even starting to look at compatibility and having complimentary views. Idealism - "be a good man and things will work out" - sounds nice, but it's the sort of thing you need to be careful with.
"It says if a man is a good man and conducts himself exceptionally during courtship and marriage, his wife is almost certain to be quality."
No; you've misinterpreted Dove's point[1]. Let me clarify:
The amount of effort it takes to ensure that one marries a "quality" person is very small compared to the amount of effort the other stuff takes. One does not need to pick the very most perfect woman in order to have a great marriage, only to pick a woman within the set of "quality women".
Put in the 20% effort to restrict your search to quality women. To optimize further, focus the rest of your efforts on being a quality person yourself and on treating your wife well, instead of focusing on finding "the best" of the quality women.
It is dangerous advice to ignore the character of your spouse. Pick someone of good character. But honestly, that's easy in comparison to living a life of integrity and treating your wife appropriately.
[1] as Dove's husband, I have additional insight into her intended meaning.
Fair. Of course, the whole thing is a simplistic rhetorical device; real life is complicated.
If you really could expect full marks in "be a man of character" and "treat her right" categories -- if you were some mythical combination of Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, and Jesus Christ, perhaps you could redeem a fairly self-centered wife. Those are, after all, men who made their names by succeeding at redeeming evil cultures with little more than compassion and force of character. But it'd sure be difficult and painful. I'm not claiming things would "work out" easily even in the best case, and that's the worst one. Most folks really can't expect straight A's there. Most folks, if they're honest with themselves, are shooting for more like a C+ and maybe don't even always get there. So in a way, how my model handles that corner case is academic.
My point by assigning such a low value to who you choose isn't that it doesn't matter at all -- of course it does. Of course you can easily doom the whole thing to failure (short of heroic measures) by marrying an utterly irredeemable jerk. My point is that it's not a relatively big contributer. And I'm strongly of the opinion that it isn't. Stick to quality women, or even just decent women, and the other factors dominate.
Over ten, fifteen, twenty years of marriage, the single largest factor in who your wife is, is who you are. And vice versa. Her criticisms become your defensive sore spots. Your generocity becomes her avid interest. Your callousness becomes her indifference. Her complacency becomes your disinterest. And on and on. After many years, every groove in your soul matches a cusp in hers, and vice versa. There's feedback. There's resonance. That's why the quality of your wife is 120% you.
You grow to be like who you hang out with. You rise to high expectations or sink to low ones.
Do you want your wife to be beautiful at 35? It doesn't matter whether she was a 6 or 10 or 8 at 24 when you married her. It matters whether you've been buying her jewelry, telling her her beauty is worth sacrifice and expense to you. It matters whether you've been telling her she's beautiful, encouraging her to experiment with new shoes, or making fun of her when you find her with green goop all over her face. It matters whether you criticize or support, because her outward appearance is a measure of her self-esteem, her confidence, and whether she thinks being pretty is a hobby worth keeping up with.
Do you want a sexually engaged wife? Make sex something she loves. Be generous. Be romantic. Be attentive. And wait five years.
Do you want a kind and generous wife? Be kind and generous. Do you want a wife who understands you? Talk to her. Do you want a wife who is not annoyed with you all the time? Listen to her criticism, don't defend yourself, change your behavior, explain in tenderest and most loving tones what has been misunderstood.
To optimize your wife, optimize yourself. Because marriage is really long, and after just a few years, she's mostly who you've made her.
(Goes the other way, too. But this place is mostly guys).
if you were some mythical combination of Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, and Jesus Christ, perhaps you could redeem a fairly self-centered wife.
The irony of this list is that (as I understand it) King was unfaithful to his wife and Gandhi refused to have sex with his wife while frequently sleeping in the arms of beautiful younger women to prove to himself he could resist temptation and Jesus never married at all.
Men who are deemed to be heroes/men of great character in the eyes of society don't necessarily make wonderful spouses.
(Not at all meant to disagree with your basic point.)
Sometimes it's difficult to know if the person is "quality", especially character. You could live with a person and know their worst habits and dark secrets after only a couple of years.
I find both of you to be lucky (well you pushed also your luck by being hard-working). It's refreshing though to read this; lots of food for thought, thanks.
"The quality of your wife is ... 20% who you choose"
doesn't make sense to me. Or does that imply that if you sacrifice for noble goals and be a man of character, you'll automatically meet a good quality wife?
You will necessarily meet a number of quality women in your life. Which of them you choose to pursue has some effect on the quality of your wife, but it has a much smaller effect than how you treat her.
I understand what you mean but I think presenting it as 20% is misleading imho.
One might conclude that it's doesn't matter if you choose a nice, good-looking, smart etc. person vs another poor choice. Because with your figures (40 and 80%), you could still "optimize" the person later, in theory.
"One might conclude that it's doesn't matter if you choose a nice, good-looking, smart etc. person vs another poor choice."
It's more like, as long as you're looking at quality women (that is, you've constrained yourself to all pretty good choices), it doesn't matter very much which specific one you pick.
Some people have a mental model of marriage (much like the one in the original article) in which 99.9% of the effort and return come from picking the exact right person, at which point everything just falls into place. This model is wrong and indeed harmful, as it implies the other person makes the marriage work automatically.
Instead, we say, put in a small amount of effort to make sure you're looking at a set of quality women (so don't pick up Trampy McSkanksalot at the club.) But as long as you're looking at quality women, don't worry too much about getting the exact right one; the more important optimization is how you behave yourself and how you treat her. Only a small percentage of your effort should go into the picking process; most of it should go into making sure you're a quality person and you treat whoever you mutually pick with love and respect and all those other things.
I have a fantastic marriage (to the poster you're responding to). My dad and my father-in-law, who are both very much like me, also have fantastic marriages. Our wives are all very different from each other, but they are all quality women, and we all treat them in the ways Dove originally described. If you swapped our wives' personalities, we'd all still have quality marriages for exactly those same reasons.
There should be some logic in HN to stop you two from down-voting each other for unrelated reasons. I would hate to see you lose 50 points for not taking the garbage out.
Simple method for optimizing a marriage, as it works from both ends:
Love does not merely happen, and merely continue. It takes work. Put effort into loving more and being more lovable (ie, self improvement), and your relationship will improve.
I see too many long-married couples who are mostly together out of convenience / habit / apathy, and it really shows in their relationship and their lives in general. The ones I've found who are really happy have wonderful married lives because they both worked at it, and continue to do so, and this sample set includes a couple dozen 10-year-somethings through 50-year-somethings and a couple older yet.
I've only been married for a few months, though we've been living together and effectively married for over two years, so go ahead and chock it up to n00b idealism. But why does that have to end? I've found plenty of cases where it never did, and every one of them has said it's because they worked to keep it going, and they're all vibrant, happy people.
I think both optimizing and wife-selection are best left to another four letter word that isn't 'math', but rather love. I don't think love can be computed nor would it make sense to even try.
"Thus, as k increases, the left side approaches 1, and we can take the exponential of both sides to give..."
k/k-1 -> 1 in the limit.
The problem is that most people don't have an infinite number of women to choose from, so k/k-1 is likely NOT sufficiently close to 1. The algorithm then takes the exponential of both sides, making the matter worse...
So, based on the average number of serious girlfriends the average person seems to have before getting married (~4), the average person probably shouldn't pass on the first N / e... they should probably pass on something more like the first N / (e^1.3) or so.
(I would have sent this in private, but found no contact info in the respective HN profiles.)
To Dove and lotharbot:
Thanks so much for your comments in this thread. They are extremely insightful, and resonate strongly with my own experiences of married life, which is nearing a decade in length. I always admire and am inspired when I see examples of good marriages.
I believe this problem is a lot closer to the Secretary Problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem
As he notes however, he does not try to choose "the very best candidate", for which the optimal solution is to pass on the first 1/e candidates. Instead, he tries to maximize the "goodness" of his wife selection.
In short : maximum likelihood soultion is to pass on (1/e)*N, minimum mean squared error solution is to pass on sqrt(N). This of course assumes you can estimate N well.
The difference in this case is that you can't switch back to a woman you've already "sampled." With Feynman's restaurant, we can sample ten dishes, and choose the fourth dish for the rest of eternity. With the wife selection algorithm (a modification of the "Sultan's Daughter" problem) we're only allowed to marry the current candidate, or take a pass on her. Exes are off-limits.
Could this be applicable to search ranking? Say I was doing a search based on an input string, and I had a "closeness of match" heuristic. That expected value for N=100 case seemed so good that I'm considering the possibility that you only partially search any data set and return a result that is pretty much good enough. (At least initially, and then you could asynchronously add better results to the list, in the background. Then you'd get very fast first results, at the very least).
The article also applies to picking business opportunities. Suppose you are going to see N opportunities. According to the article you should pick the best opportunity so far after N/e have passed.
Some questions this raises:
(a) How do you really know if an opportunity (or a wife) is any good? The evaluation function seems to be a key ingredient for success.
(b) What if N is infinite.
(c) More realistically, suppose N is very large. Suppose I am going to see an opportunity a day. If I live for another 40 years, that 14,610 days. So N = 14,610. Doing the math the article is saying that you do nothing for about 15 years. And then pick the best opportunity you have seen so far.
I don't see any gender differences in the OA that would be important. If a woman is willing to similarly watch for the best man and choose him when she meets him, she should use the same algorithm.
Indeed, it's not courting-specific at all, or even human-specific. The same math could be used to answer questions like: "If you are a hamburger bun selecting patties from a conveyor belt, how do you optimize your selection of a quality patty?"
Also, if you do apply this method, don't tell your perspective wife. She will drop you like a rock.