Saturday, November 15, 2008

Don't date her...yet...or ever.

Dear ironicmathsolver,

Okay, "hypothetical" situation here... you totally dig this girl, but she is kind of still with her ex. You meet her ex for the first time and he is a totally solid dude, the kind of dude you would definitely be friends with if not for the situation. How do you approach this? Give up? Go for the gold? Play Warcraft to forget about the pain? Thank you in advance!!!



This is a fantastic question.

Make. No. Effort.
Date. Other. People.

Whatever happens, happens.

Also, if you're that much like the ex, two things are probably true: 1) you're not different enough to get with next and 2) you and she as a couple could end up with the same shortcomings as the previous partnership.

People tend to choose next mates with extreme focus on making up for the deficiencies of the previous partner, so that they can feel like they've completed what's missing--this comes with a commensurate devaluing of the qualities that made the ex attractive in the first place. Having a ton in common and getting along really well with the ex would probably make your dossier read too much like his, so you're tanked anyway. To find you attractive, she'd have to date someone entirely unlike either of you in between before swinging the pendulum back toward...your pendulum.

This process is modeled most accurately by [1] a discretized f(x)=sin(ax)/bx curve, where a scales with her mean relationship attention span and b tracks how evolved her mental image of an ideal mate really is. At f(x)=0 she is achieving maximum partnership compatibility, but she oscillates around that impossible target through a series of relationship jumps with (hopefully) ever-decreasing amplitude. You and this ex are on the same side of her x-axis; she'll have to go to the dark side for a while before swinging back. See also Journal of College Bisexuality, pp. 450-456, where in [1] a=awesome. The limit of g(x) [marriage proposal/biological clock anxiety] as f(x) approaches epsilon (her minimum tolerance of imperfections in a mate), unfortunately, is infinity, which generally acts as a negative feedback signal toward the dc component of her projection onto your f(x). Oops. Math is hard.

Also, a situation where you like the girl enough to date but you also like the dude she's dating as if he were a friend or brother is one to not mess with, even if it has its own drama: these are the couples who you're going to actually enjoy hanging out with when you're a couple, or married, or worse. Think of your coupled friends where you like one of the members and the other one kinda sucks, but you hang out with them anyway--wouldn't it be great if they were both cool? Right. Carry on.