Valentine's Special: Is Your Partner Much Of A Catch?

 

Sometimes with beloveds I wonder, through an economist’s lens, what kind of a find he/she is in terms of numbers? 😃 That is to say, what kind of 1 in an n have I got? - where one always hopes n is a large number.  Is he/she a one in a hundred thousand, one in a million, one in a hundred (lol)? Naturally, you could say about any unique individual that they are 1 in n, where n is the number of (wo)men in the world today (or, as a subset, number of viable prospective partners). But we are not really asking that question; we are asking what kind of a catch our beloved is, in terms of the dating equivalent of price systems, matching markets and implicit valuation of preferences.

If you want to play along in your head, start by considering what you think your partner is in terms of catchiness – where someone highly desirable by many scores high in catchiness, and someone less desirable scores low in catchiness. Perhaps, like my wife is, you are with one of those one in a million male beloveds – one of those astounding finds that you almost can’t believe he came along at all 😃. Or maybe you’re with someone who was on the shelf for years, and you had to pull them off to save them from more decades of singleness and tracksuit-bottomed repeats on UK Gold 😃

I guess, suffice to say, the approximate 1 in an n value you assigned in your head definitely comes from an intuitive and rational calculation, because it’s the same kind of mental calculation we make when deciding how much we value fruit, cheese and trousers. That’s what the price system is for.

Similarly, a prospective partner can be viewed as a scarce resource in a two-sided matching market. Each individual possesses a set of attributes - physical, intellectual, emotional - that confer utility to potential matches. The rarity of certain combinations of attributes increases their “market value,” analogous to goods with limited supply but high demand.

What we know intuitively and rationally in terms of our specific partner is that they are part of the equation whereby the probability of encountering a partner with a specific combination of desirable attributes is a function of the distribution of those attributes in the population, alongside the selectivity of other agents in the market. Thus, in contemplating a partner’s “catchiness,” you are implicitly assessing their expected utility relative to the available alternatives and the opportunity cost of forgoing other potential matches.

Do with all that what you wish 😃