Rational partner choice
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 14 February 2019
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Should your head trump your heart when seeking lifelong love? That's the challenge Business Daily's Justin Rowlatt has taken on for this Valentine's Day.
The hyper-rationalist businessman Ed Conard thinks he knows the answer, and his strictly mathematical strategy for romance is called "sequential selection, no turning back". He used it to meet his wife of the last 20 years, Jill Davis.
But is Ed's approach right for everyone? Justin hears sceptical voices from two very different quarters - romantic novelist Nicola Cornick, and Nobel prize-winning economist Alvin Roth. And what about Jill? What's it like to be on the receiving end of such a calculated courtship?
Producer: Laurence Knight
(Picture: Jill Davis and Ed Conard; Credit: Patrick McMullan via Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It's Valentine's Day. I'm Justin Rowlat. Welcome to Business Daily. |
| 0:06.3 | L is for the way you look at me. Today we are talking about love. |
| 0:14.7 | He was standing across one side of the room and I was across the other. You know, I was interested in him. |
| 0:19.9 | I've been married many decades. We know all about each other's lives and we've shared in the |
| 0:24.8 | important point. Well, I think for him this is romantic, but it's a different version of romance. |
| 0:30.8 | I don't want to be a downer, but the stats suggest we're doing something seriously wrong when it comes to choosing a life partner. |
| 0:42.9 | 42% of British marriages end in divorce. In the US, it's 50%. |
| 0:47.7 | So are we letting our hearts trump our heads? Should we take a more rational approach to romance? |
| 0:55.7 | That is Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 1:02.2 | Let's say I describe somebody to you, and you say, oh, that's a person I would consider marrying. |
| 1:06.8 | What's the probability that you could actually be happily married to that person? |
| 1:10.3 | Let's say it's 20%. |
| 1:11.6 | Meet Ed Conard. |
| 1:13.0 | He is an Uber capitalist. |
| 1:15.4 | He made millions as a managing director of the venture capital company, Bain Capital. |
| 1:20.3 | He is now an economic commentator and the author of the magnificently bombastic bestseller. |
| 1:27.0 | Unintended consequences why everything you have been told about the economy is. of the magnificently bombastic bestseller, unintended consequences, |
| 1:28.5 | why everything you have been told about the economy is wrong. |
| 1:33.0 | He has also devised an unusually calculating way to find your ideal life partner. |
| 1:40.8 | It's called sequential selection, no turning back. |
| 1:46.6 | What you do is you take your set of people who you're going to evaluate. You take the first third and you use that for calibration. And then you take |
| 1:51.9 | the second two thirds. And when you find somebody better than the best person in the first third, |
... |
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