Never let morality stop you from doing the right thing.
A. Asimov.
The world viewed from a male perspective—”long live casual sex”—is unacceptable for women. A woman who adopts this approach will likely be rejected by a still conservative society. However, it’s important to understand that the stereotypes of “it’s okay for men, but not for women” are a deeply sexist attitude.
It was beneficial for society to keep women in strictness—this was essential for motivating men to work for the benefit of their heirs. A social morality was established, which functioned well until the mid-20th century.
But then came emancipation, the sexual revolution, and with them contraception and paternity testing. Why, after all this, should women still hold themselves back? Where is the gender equality? Why should women pay any attention to men whose “thinking” is limited to their spinal cord and who continue to insist on “female fidelity” in the 21st century, while they themselves feel free to look elsewhere? What is the point of a man with such a level of culture who, despite objective reality, continues to impose demands on women and believes that his “rights” are violated because “his” woman dared to sleep with someone else before him? Or is it about quantity? Where is the line of “acceptability”? Five lovers is fine, but six is not? How is it even logically or mathematically possible to have a system where all women are faithful and all men are not? Who, then, are men sleeping with?
Apparently, men who have a higher level of thinking are, first of all, more selective in their relationships and do not welcome the idea of “casual sex” on their part. However, they do not claim the freedom of a woman’s personal choices, as they are capable of understanding that having multiple lovers makes her an experienced lover and, on the other hand, boosts his self-esteem.
After all, she consciously chose him, rather than just “buying” the first cat in a bag. For such men, sex, despite being a major motivator for their behavior, is not the ultimate goal. These are precisely the ones who need more than just that. And women are right to seek out such men. This is a good criterion that defines the level of culture and awareness.
In defense of jealous men, it can be said that their strategy of rejecting “lighthearted” women is quite optimal. Besides the fact that the ancient part of the male brain, unaware of contraceptives and DNA tests, fears wasting its resources on raising carriers of someone else’s genes, their unconscious calculator also suggests that such women have a wealth of suitors and the likelihood that they will be the ones left in the end is extremely low. Ultimately, only those who are not afraid of competition remain with “lighthearted” women, and there are very few of them.
Sleeping with everyone indiscriminately is not quite the right strategy for finding a life partner, whether for men or women. For men, it’s a resource-intensive endeavor—not just in terms of money, but also time. Of course, one could be a rock star and simply open the dressing room door for a fan after every concert, but such cases are rare. For women, it’s also a waste of time, as they, unlike men, “age” more quickly and need to fulfill their desires for family and children before they lose their competitive edge in the sexual market.
On the other hand, it’s also a flawed strategy to sleep with only one person unless that person is a spouse. It’s important to continue exploring and trying new connections. In other words, having a small number of lovers, who are cycled through one after another, doesn’t give the chooser a clear idea of what the optimal choice is. Conversely, a large number of lovers or promiscuity can completely diminish the role of sex as a bonding factor and lead to wasted time. If people choose the path of “home, family, children, grandchildren, and ‘I don’t feel like drinking,’” then casual sexual encounters are unlikely to be beneficial for them.
How many people does one need to go through before making a choice? Our internal computational system can intuitively solve this problem, but, of course, there is a correct mathematical solution. Let’s assume that a person has the task of choosing a life partner within a year. Also, let’s assume that it takes four months to get to know someone well enough. This means not only sleeping together a few times but also going through some shared experience, which, of course, needs to be organized. Lastly, let’s assume that a person cannot be in bed with more than three people at the same time. We conclude that one can have no more than 9 lovers in a year.
With proper organization of the search and selection process, one should build a “sales funnel.” This is a term used by salespeople to describe the simple fact that signing a contract only happens after a series of meetings with different clients. Contracts are signed with those clients with whom there have been more than one meeting, while many potential clients meet the salesperson only once. To arrange a meeting, even more phone calls need to be made, most of which will result in refusals. And to even make those calls, you need contacts or leads, which should be even more numerous than the phone calls themselves. The same applies to the dating market. If the goal is to sleep with nine people over the course of a year, you might need to sleep with around 15, since some people will turn out to be “one-time” encounters or simply terrible lovers. To sleep with 15 people, you need to go on second dates, which might end in kisses, with about 30 people. And to have 30 second dates, you need to go on 40 first dates. To go on 40 first dates, you need to have a circle of 80 people over the year with whom you actually want to meet and who you should talk to one-on-one to plant the idea of going on a date in their minds.
And here come into play factors that, despite any sales plans, will prevent those plans from being realized. A salesperson can technically make no more than 40 calls a day. Or a salesperson may not be able to hold more than two meetings a day. In other words, knowing the conversion rate from the number of meetings to the number of deals, and the average deal size, one can, with some caveats regarding market capacity and competitive activity, estimate how many active salespeople are needed to achieve a specific sales plan. The situation in the dating market looks similarly daunting: kissing 30 people over the course of a year is a challenge, not to mention that such an important stage as cohabitation can only be organized more than four times a year by very few. This means we either need to extend the search period, reduce the number of candidates worth considering, or optimize the funnel—using different conversion rates. In practice, this is exactly what happens. People surrounded by many others give themselves a long time to search, or they quickly choose from the five guys/girls available in their small town, knowing there won’t be more, or they try to take every first date to the next level.
So, we have a certain number of potential marriage partners. Let’s say there are 100 over a certain period, by the end of which one must make a choice. Each person can calculate their own “sales funnel” and understand how many partners they might have to choose from, based on the available time, social connections, and their own attractiveness. If the seeker rejects a partner, they do not return to them. Either the partner is proud, or they become occupied in another marriage. In life, returning to “exes” is extremely rare, so we will exclude that from possible scenarios for now. After all, the seeker rejected this partner for some reason. For the sake of illustration, let’s say it’s a princess who is considering the suitors vying for her hand. If she rejects 99 out of 100 princes, she is forced to marry the 100th, regardless of whether he is good or bad— the others have left and will not return. Similarly, if the princess marries the very first prince, there is a 99% chance that she did not marry the best one. This means there is a certain number of princes that should be reviewed and rejected in order to later choose someone from the remaining options. This mathematical problem was solved in the 1960s and became the first in a whole field of mathematics now known as the theory of optimal stopping of random processes.
The mathematical solution to this problem suggests that one should review and reject n/e suitors, where n is the number of available princes and e is the base of the natural logarithm, approximately equal to 2.718281… After that, the choice should be made on the first prince who is better than all the previous ones. For example, if we expect that a bride aged 18 to 28 will encounter 25 men, she should unconditionally reject the first:
25/2.7182 = 9 suitors
This strategy gives the princess the highest probability of choosing the best among all the princes who could have been her husbands. This formula works for a large number of suitors, for example, 100 or more. For a small number of suitors, there are complications with whole and fractional parts. For instance, with five suitors, 5/e = 1.839… So how many should she reject? In fact, two, and it might be inappropriate to provide a detailed proof here. You just need to know that starting from the third candidate, the princess should choose the first one who is better than the previous two. If there are going to be 10 suitors, she should reject the first three or four. Of course, if there are fewer than five suitors, she should accept the very first prince she meets. Sleeping Beauty or Snow White, who did nothing to find a husband and just lay there waiting for a prince on a white horse to come to her, should have accepted the proposal of the very first wandering man who found her in such a state. For her, he would have been the best man, which means, by definition, a prince. No alternatives, literally.
Thus, to optimize the choice of the best spouse, a person should a) maximize the number of candidates and b) not hesitate to reject the first 37% (100% / 2.72…) of potential candidates. If the number of potential suitors is less than five, one should accept the first proposal that comes along or propose to the first person who is willing to accept. People have a choice: to sit and wait for the first person they meet and marry them regardless of their “market” characteristics, or to become the architects of their own happiness, planning the necessary and optimal flow of potential partners and making a conscious choice with effort. There’s no need to constantly calculate in your head how many to reject and whom to accept. The unconscious computational complex has been solving this problem for a couple of hundred million years without any Beresovskys. This biocomputer just needs to be shown and provided with the scope of choices so that it can determine, “yes, this is the one.”
Women often misinterpret the folk wisdom that advises them to “cast their nets” rather than confront a potential partner directly. In trying to apply this strategy to attract the attention of that guy they have a crush on, they end up in a dead end. They are not casting nets; they are hunting for a specific fish with a spear. Naturally, that fish is likely to slip away. Unlike the spear fisherman, the net fisherman doesn’t know which fish will end up in the net and chooses the suitable one from the catch he has made. The very idea of “casting nets” excludes the situation where it concerns just one person.
People, without consciously trying to provide their bio-computer with new data about the number of potential brides or grooms, simply rely on their intuition to guide them on when to make a choice. However, the “Sleeping Beauty” strategy of marrying the first person they meet or the “Nice Guy” strategy of marrying the first person they sleep with is appropriate in small communities where the number of suitors is limited. These are traditional communities where most people still live today: villages, hamlets, camps, tribes. The tactic of choosing the “first passerby” is still employed by the bio-computer, especially among those who live in villages or who were born in them and later moved to the city. The bio-computer has yet to realize that the number of potential suitors has increased, and in these new conditions, its strategy for making a choice is no longer optimal.
How to maximize the number of candidates? At the very least, take an active approach and examine the characteristics of your “funnel” and ways to improve it. For example, don’t just sit around and wait. Don’t shy away from simultaneously handling incoming requests. It’s wise to have several romantic interests at different stages of development and to start a new one after finishing the previous one. If, for some high moral reasons, “sexual honesty” in relationships is extremely important, then out of these several romances, let only one be physical, a couple in the “candy-bouquet” stage, another five in active flirting, and about twenty in your contact list for casual conversation. This approach will make it easy to end romantic relationships that have reached an intimate stage but need to be terminated for the sake of optimizing your search. Simply “revealing” the presence of another suitor can lead to a high likelihood that your current lover will break up with you on their own.
This strategy is not new. Our “feelings,” which guide us, suggest the right patterns of behavior. It turns out that among teenagers, there are quite a few who operate “in parallel.” However, among adults and singles, there are very few. Of course, people may have matured and all that. But it’s worth remembering that those who actively sought have already found the best of what was available. By middle age, the market is left with only the “highly moral” and “second-rate” individuals, or simply those who are lazy. But as Albert Einstein once said, “The greatest stupidity is doing the same thing and hoping for a different result.”
In essence:
- Modern morality does not insist on the virginity of marriage participants. This can and should be used to understand what we truly want and what we choose.
- Our instinctive strategy dictates that we should unconditionally reject the first 37% of candidates from those we are willing to consider.
- If our brain unconsciously perceives the number of candidates as small, it will “switch on” infatuation for the first person we meet, which affects the quality of our choice.
- At the same time, those who marry the person with whom they lost their virginity may, despite not having the best choice objectively, be happier than those who have gone through multiple partners. Their built-in system motivates them to hold on to such a rare and therefore valuable person.
- The optimal search strategy has nothing to do with “easy behavior”? Should one not hesitate to assess and, if possible, increase the potential number of partners who will pass through your bed and, more importantly, who will take a “test drive” with you during the search for a wife/husband? Of course — yes. Should you sleep with all of them? No. 37% is enough.
- You should always have a “go-to” friend or partner who isn’t looking to marry you. This will make your mind more discerning and prevent you from falling for the wrong person.
Reliable contraceptives and proven paternity were discussed by B. Russell in his 1929 book “Marriage and Morality” as “inventions of the future” that would fundamentally impact social structure. Bertrand Russell’s reflections on where these inventions would lead turned out to be prophetic. He predicted the disappearance of the institution of marriage as it existed before the early 20th century. He also noted that free education for children would become widespread, which indeed happened. B. Russell was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1950 for his book “Marriage and Morality.”
They say that there is absolutely no prostitution on the island of Crete. It’s absent because local men believe that women owe them if they are satisfied. And they are right. After all, who puts in more effort and tries harder?
By the way, B.A. Berezovsky, whom we know as the disgraced Russian oligarch, defended his doctoral dissertation in mathematics, which was related to a generalized version of the problem of the selective bride.
That’s exactly why boys often marry the first girl they sleep with: their internal calculator miscounts the number of potential brides. As a result, they fall into a crazy infatuation, making vows of loyalty and so on. This miscalculation happens because, in their youth, “no one gives it up” to them. And this girl “finally did.”