Economist Article: "Between the spreadsheets"

Between the spreadsheets
The management consultant’s guide to love and ***, by Alice Hines

I don't know if you can read this without a subscription.

https://www.economist.com/1843/2020/...e-spreadsheets

Excerpts:

Jacob knew he wanted to get serious with someone, but he found it hard to weigh the merits of each of these potential partners against each other. So he did what he knew best: he made a spreadsheet. He called it “How to Choose a Goddess”. When he described this to me, some of the calculations lay beyond my comprehension. But my more quantitatively minded friends seemed impressed when I rattled them off.

Jacob wanted to work out which of the women he’d met online would make the best life partner. He started by listing ideal qualities for a girlfriend, then weighted them as objectively as possible. Great ***, for instance, was worth roughly a third of great conversation, since people typically spend less time doing it. Other categories were peculiar to him. Jacob outlined 15 attributes in total, hoping that by isolating his requirements he could compare them in a systematic way. “Status – friends admire her”, “Will be smart, dedicated mom”, and “Emotional crush” were worth 5, 9 and 6 points respectively. But Jacob still didn’t know if his back-of-the-envelope estimates were right.


At one point he considered using pairwise ranking to assess his hierarchy of priorities and advanced statistics to determine the relative importance of Goddess Qualities. He’d learned these tricks in a business-school class about pricing goods. Ultimately Jacob chose a simpler approach. “A guesstimated number is better than not using numbers at all”, was his motto.

He then scored each woman attribute by attribute, multiplied those numbers by their weights and added the results to get a final score. But there was a problem: Jacob didn’t know what counted as a high enough score to indicate that he should stop dating and settle down. So he devised his own spin on the “Secretary Problem” – an equation typically used to decide what percentage of potential candidates a person should interview for a job. (The classic solution: the greater the size of the pool, the closer the answer tends towards roughly 37%.)

...

People who use spreadsheets, charts and planners to manage their love lives are different from the majority only in their conscious embrace of a fundamental truth – that relationships are transactions, and the work involved in creating and maintaining them is a form of labour.

...

Meet Evin, Bunny, Katie and Madeline. Katie (bisexual, she/her) dates Evin (pansexual, he/him) and Bunny (straight, they/them). Evin also dates Madeline (queer, she/her). Neither Evin and Bunny nor Madeline and Katie date, but it’s possible that some of the other people they’ve dated have dated each other. Confused? That’s ok. They sometimes are too, which is why they plan everything.

“At one point, I was literally asking every partner on the same day every week to tell me what days they were available, and which they preferred,” Evin told me. We met last winter at a Christmas bar crawl organised by his local Burning Man group. As a blizzard howled outside, people in Santa outfits passed out home-made toys with playfully demented appendages – a Barbie with a phallic third arm, and stuffed farm animals with several Smurfs emerging out of their sides and rectums.

“I then gave everyone a row in a spreadsheet,” continued Evin, “and each day of the week a column, and coloured the cells in green, yellow and red based on their availability to try to create an optimal schedule wherein I would see each partner the desired number of times.” Evin works as a project manager and took inspiration from work. “It can certainly be seen as a businesslike way to look at things, but the objective is quite the opposite. Scheduling is a significant part of how I try to make sure partners feel respected.”

...

On a recent evening in Brooklyn I met Stephanie, a biologist in the final year of her PhD. She is the woman that Jacob’s Goddess Spreadsheet advised him to marry.

According to Jacob’s spreadsheet, Stephanie attained high marks in “Can talk at my level about science, rationality, big issues” and “Openness” (Stephanie had discovered non-monogamy during a prior long-distance relationship). She was also darkly funny. When Jacob and Stephanie were matched on okCupid, she explained the day-to-day of her research on fruit flies: “rip their butts off, squeeze the fat off like a tube of toothpaste, and turn them inside out like a sock.”

Still, the final spreadsheet results surprised Jacob. He’d expected a woman with whom he had more immediate chemistry to get the top score. Jacob was also an unexpected choice for Stephanie. Typically, the men she falls hard for are more sensitive. “If I was entirely following my heart, I probably wouldn’t be with him,” she told me.

A sign that they had made the right choice came when Jacob told Stephanie about the spreadsheet. She smiled and asked a question about his algorithm design. Stephanie and Jacob got married in 2017. Their relationship has always been open, save for a few months at the very beginning and, more recently, a stretch during which they worked on their bond.

Stephanie isn’t a rationalist, and she understands the backlash against Jacob’s methodology: “‘Oh, like this guy is such a catch, chooses a girl with a spreadsheet’,” she quips. “But I felt like everyone sort of does something like that…what are the pros and cons to being with this person?”

Great article!!