Finding Love Is As Easy As Finding the Cleanest Toilet in the Mall

The trap with online dating isn't that there's no one out there.

It's that there's always one more swipe.

You're on a date. She's nice. It's fine. And a little voice is already going - maybe the next one's better. So you're never really there. Half here, half back in the app.

That mindset ruins it.

So the question is: how do you know when to stop swiping, when there's an infinite number of possible partners just one swipe away?

Turns out it's just maths. And finding the right person is as easy as finding the cleanest toilet in a mall.

Wait, what?

There's a theory called the secretary problem. I'm calling it toilet theory.

The maths say: reject the first 37%, no matter how good. You're not picking yet, you're calibrating. Then choose the next one who beats that group. Do it and you've got the best odds going. Stop too early and you don't know what good looks like. Stop too late and the good ones walk past while you "keep your options open."

In life, 37% is a bit hard to remember or calculate, so here's the rule of thumb: 1/3. Reject the first third, use it as your baseline.

Say you're in the mall and you need the toilet. Ten stalls. You want the cleanest one. So you don't check all ten, you glance in three, get a feel for the baseline, then commit to the next one that's clearly better than what you've seen.

There you go. The statistically cleanest stall for you.

And if we were all rational, emotionless, and life didn't have much randomness in it - love would be findable exactly that easy too.

Let's say you're 20. You want to be married by 30 - that's a 10-year window. Now, how long does it take you to really know you'd marry someone? For some it's six months, for others a year, two. Say you go with a year. That's ten serious relationships in your 10-year window. The maths says the first three are calibration, and the next one that beats the baseline is the love of your life. :D

Unfortunately, life is a little more complex than that.

But just because the secretary problem (aka toilet theory) doesn't work like that, doesn't mean it's useless in dating.

Forget picking the optimal partner. Use it for the one thing it's actually good for: knowing when to stop swiping around randomly, and learning how to be present on the date you're actually on.

Say you run your odds through my calculator and realise - ouch, that's a lot of dates. Whatever the number is, 50, 100, or 10, just remember the first chunk are calibration. A sense of the baseline.

You're learning what's out there, and what you even like. Which, after ten years with one person, I genuinely didn't know anymore.

That's it. The point was never to find the perfect person. It's to know when to stop looking for a better one, and actually be present with the one in front of you.

Bad dates stop stinging too. Not a failure. Just calibration.

Sure, your black swan could show up on the very first date. But that's rare - and a story for another post.

For the record, I've explained all this on actual dates. Some laughed. Some very much did not. Still calibrating.