Economists
are always being accused of trying to reduce everything to money and mathematics.
Critics will make assertions such as: "You can't put a price on love"
and "There are more ways to analyse life than mathematically" and so
on. But as one of the most well known quotes from any economic text book
reminds us, economics is even grander in its claims:
"Economists are often accused
of believing that everything — health, happiness, life itself — can be measured
in money. What we actually believe is even odder. We believe that everything
can be measured in anything."
David
Friedman
When
it comes to matters of the heart, perhaps the key thing that underpins it is
information. Romance is about discovering more and more of a person, rather
like how an explorer discovers more and more of a new country. Discovering more
and more of a person is about obtaining more and more information.
A
friend once asked me for some advice about a guy she was seeing: do I stick
with him or cut and run? I neglected to answer, as I didn’t feel it was my
place - plus I lacked most of the relevant information couples require to
decide whether to stay together.
Information,
of course, is the key thing about their relationship that couples have and
outsiders don’t. At the point of asking for advice my friend had a trade-off
between what she presently knew and what she might go on to know in the future.
Being in a relationship means learning new things about your beloved every day,
and this new information is bound to have an effect on whether any decision to
stay or go was the right one. Given that at present she was unsure about
whether her partner was the one she wanted to stay with, her dilemma was really
down to one question: will future information change things for the better or
the worse?
If
she thought the former she may well be inclined to stick it out for longer; if
the latter, now would be the time to say goodbye. The trouble is, of course,
future information is by definition unknown in the present, as the present
merely gives us probability indicators about future stages of a relationship.
Because
information is key, and because relationships are dynamical, your relationship
with your partner is, like most things in life, based on a series of probability
estimates. A Valentine's Day card to your partner is, from your point of view, a
way of signalling that at this moment in time the probability of staying
together is greater than not. And unless you're married, the probability that
you'll repeat the process next year is conditioned primarily by the information
you'll obtain between now and Feb 14th 2017. In the meantime, if you want a
test that's a bit edgier and intrepid, you could always try this
one on for size.
