Shapely gal, and where it loses shape
There are no elegant solutions to the stable matching problem, IRL
My newsletter is called Shapely gal as a play on the mathematicians Lloyd Shapley and David Gale, who proposed a solution to the “Stable matching problem”
Given n men and n women, where each person has ranked all members of the opposite sex in order of preference, marry the men and women together such that there are no two people of opposite sex who would both rather have each other than their current partners. When there are no such pairs of people, the set of marriages is deemed stable.
This is a very elegant solution, except that it makes several assumptions that are far from reality today:
Everyone in the market exists on one platform, and that there are no single people to be matched outside of this superset
There exists no transaction cost in iterations to arrive at a match
The number of single men and women in the market at any moment is equal
No, I am not here to disprove solutions by nobel prize winning economists. But I am here to ponder upon why these assumptions fail in real life…
For one, it’s complicated
There are several dating apps and matrimonial sites, each trying to satisfy the aspirations of a different set of customers. There is no single platform that serves everyone’s needs simultaneous today. But, even if you did have a single platform with everyone in the world, it’s complicated.
The first time I heard this phrase in the context of relationships is when Facebook introduced this as one of the options for relationship status. This is a state in a relationship where the couple either do not concur on its status or are unaware of the state it’s in.
Today, this is a widely accepted relationship status. Despite having everyone in the market on one platform, you could still not end up with a stable match due to uncertainty of intentions.
Stepping into the market to choose a partner is not like walking into the supermarket to buy vegetables. For one, most of the time, people don’t know what they want from the market - marriage, a semi-casual relationship or a chance to just meet someone interesting.
Secondly, even if they entered the market knowing fully well what they wanted, there is so much choice in the market, that it’s hard to find what you want. Someone who says they are looking to get married might just be looking for a quick fuck, and so, until they’ve exchanged an emoji or two, there is no way to know for sure.
High transaction cost
Because men and women aren’t commodities, you can’t possibly go through the transaction mindlessly in one click. You need to speak to the person, get to know them, and their interests, or the lack thereof, before you muster up the will to take things forward.
Before you’ve exchanged a few rounds of “What did you do last weekend”, you are either exhausted, or you’ve realised this was sunk cost, and moved on. Imagine if you had to do this with 20 other people, chances are that your ideal match in the market has given up before you, and settled with less than a perfect match.
Fine, maybe you won’t take 6 months to get to know someone, but the problem is…
there are fewer single women in the market
At best, only 30% of users of dating platforms are women. Privacy is of utmost importance to women and their families, hence, you’ll find most of these single women tucked away in physical binders of offline marriage bureaus.
If you, as a man, is hoping for one of these matrimonial websites or dating apps to help you meet an interesting woman, god bless you. You’ll need all the luck to fight at least three other men just to get one girl’s attention.
Wait, that’s not very different from a Swayamvara now, is it?
Umm, it actually is. In a Swayamvara, there’s no qualifying round, there’s just finals.
You met all the prospects in one shot, gave them a little test (like deadlifting a bow, or getting them to solve problems from Irodov) and let the best man win the woman. But you see, not all of us are kings and queens with massive courtrooms to pull off such scenes, so we had to then settle on a process that not only had a small transaction cost, but also fit in our living rooms.
The boy and girl met once with their families, through a mutual connection, and post meeting, a letter was sent by one party (usually the boy’s side) to the other, declaring the results of the interaction, and boom, that couple was out of the market!
Oh that’s a quick shag. But no, thank you.
We’ll deliberate and push the decision as far as possible, so it feels like it was worth the wait. We’ll secretly call it off a love marriage also. And maybe get one pre-wedding music video to validate that. May be.
Technology should be solving all our problems, but why not this?
Each dating app promises to objectify the attributes that are fundamental to choosing a partner, but fundamental to whom? Technology needs scale, scale comes from uniformity and predictability. There is nothing about love that makes it uniform or predictable, at least not today.
So, may be someday, we might have a way to use technology to capture these differences to design experiences that cater to our very irregular irrationalities.
And before that, we’ve got to:
Stop killing girls in the womb
Stop judging the shit out of women for putting themselves out there
Accept that love marriage is not the same as arranged marriage, and that one is not better than the other
Realise that a marriage is always a leap of faith, irrespective of how you meet your partner, and that there is no use exchanging pointless texts for 20 years getting to know every participant in the arranged marriage market
Once we’ve fixed these assumptions, we’ll check back with Prof. Shapley and Prof. Gale, ok? But until then, you’ve got me to solve at least some of your problems.