The Theory of Relationship Relativity-redux

After years of devoted research, I’ve made a shocking discovery about relationships.  Love is a mathematical formula.

Sure, this flies in the face of thousands of romantics from the past.  Shakespeare would reject the theory outright.  Burns would chase me through the streets with a red rose (and a stick).  And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Dr. Ruth put out a contract on me.  But it’s true.

I finally came to this conclusion after closely looking at the relationships of movie stars.  After all, aren’t they the modern paradigm of love?  Gossip magazines spend thousands of dollars to snap wedding pictures of Posh Spice and her soccer man.  Everyone at work gathers around the coffee pot to discuss Madonna’s latest flame.  So they are perfect laboratory love rats, no offense to any rats out there.

The formula is this:

LOVE= amount of time with a person  x  the qualities you like about the person

        ÷ those pet peeves that drive you crazy

Let me give you an example.  Mr. Smith has loved his high school sweetheart for 10 years.  Ms. Brown served on the student council and lead the cheers at football games and looks incredible in a tight Angora sweater.  However, she snaps her chewing gum, hates to cook, cleans her house once every decade and wears perfume from K-Mart.

For the most part, the qualities and pet peeves are fairly even.  However, because of the length of time they have been dating, they will enter relationship heaven.

Example B.  Gail has dated Roger for close to a year now.  He works for the Shark, Curmudgeon and Bitter law firm as a junior partner, often gets confused for Brad Pitt and owns stock in IBM, Exxon and Ben & Jerry’s.  However, she’s recently learned that his favorite pastime is nude, Jell-O wrestling, munches on a whole onion (uncooked) at lunch and still thinks that “Porky’s” is the best movie ever produced.  This relationship will be joining the Titanic in no time at all.  Because the time factor is so short, and the nasty quirks are slightly stronger than the qualities, they don’t stand a chance.

How did this formula come about with the help of movie stars?  Well, look at the examples.  Bogart and Bacall spent a lot of time together on the sets of several movies.  A lot of close time together.  They both were beautiful, charming and provocative people.  Negative qualities were slight and undiscovered.  Their relationship was so mathematically predictable, even a French Lit major could solve the equation.

This formula gets repeated over and over with modern stars with incredible frequency.  Almost every week you can read in one of the paragons of journalistic reportage, like The Enquirer, about two hot stars falling into a relationship after spending many arduous months together on a film.  The time factor is so strong they can’t resist each other.

Of course, these relationships also never work out.  And it’s mathematical.  After a year of marriage/shacking up, the negative qualities start to appear and grow.  Soon they quickly outweigh time and positive qualities.  A break-up follows to the delight of readers everywhere.  This wouldn’t happen with Mr. Smith and Ms. Brown because the time factor has become so large the pet peeves could never overcome it.  There could almost be an argument made that to save the relationship, for the first few years you should try to avoid learning anything bad about your mate.  Build up that quality time so that the math works out.

As with all math formulas there will be countless tests to validate it.  So go ahead and test it to your heart’s (and relationship’s) content.  Plug in your parents.  Try out your sister and that stupid Marine she met at Mardi Gras.  And dare you?  Sure, be brave.  Plug your own relationship into the formula.  

The numbers don’t lie. 

 

Ahh, James Thurber

 

The Effort

There are a number of hiking trails that you can travel when you go to one of our beautiful National Parks such as Olympic (pictured above). The trails range from easy to difficult; from short to long. How far you hike depends on how much time you want to spend and the effort you’re willing to expend.

That's the same way it goes for hitting the trails, uh, bars and nightclubs, and seeking out women. Let me remind you, As I've pointed out numerous times, it's up to the male to make first contact.  So the male must carefully weigh if making the effort is worth the time, money and emotional risk.

It can be perilous, but often the journey is as enjoyable as the destination.

I bring this up because as I age I have made some changes in my evaluation as to effort level. In the past factors might include a female's looks, athletic ability (hey, I got a degree in Phys Ed as well as Journalism), voice, well, a lot of superficial things because on first contact you don't really have much else to go by.

Nowadays, I've begun to add age. 

Yes, I blogged about older men going for younger females, but this is more about making the effort. We older guys like to chase younger females because of their looks obviously, but also it makes us feel younger too (and boosts self esteem). Of course, when weighing the effort level, it also figures in that younger age increases the effort value. If we're still going by superficial values (we still don't know if they have a great personality until we make the effort) then why not go younger?

All of this doesn't mean that we older guys are not attracted to older women, or won't try to go out with them. It just means we are less likely to make the bigger effort. We want to hike the shorter trails with older females.

The problem is that females still want to play those old, wily games they could get away with when younger even as they age out of the long trail hike range.

Even though older, and perhaps wiser, they still refuse to try first contact, still are coy about talking/interacting to an approaching male, well, you know their guile. If you exchange numbers, they still refuse to call first. They still won't make an early commitment. Still don't think they need to make much effort to keep things rolling.

A number of years ago I remember reading an article that noted that older women were less likely to get remarried than men.  Although the gap is closing (from more recent studies) there is still a difference and my guess is because of the effort quotient. Guys just prefer younger females and are more likely to make the effort for them than for older ones. Again, it’s not that they wouldn’t try, it’s just the older the less likely to make the effort.

So just as I postulated in one of my earliest blogs, that love was a math equation, likewise, it again boils down to math when it comes to chasing a mate. As the female’s age goes up, the male’s effort level goes down. It just adds up.