Thirty Seven Percent of the Time, It Works Every Time
Dating Optimally
The bell dinged, and Sarah watched another man shuffle away from her table, his shoulders already squaring toward the redhead two seats down. Forty-three candidates tonight, according to the app glowing on her phone. Five minutes each. The math wasn’t complicated, but it was relentless.
“Having fun yet?” The woman at the next table leaned over, her name tag reading JESSICA in aggressive purple marker.
“Ask me in three hours.”
Sarah had come tonight on a dare from her roommate, who’d called it “market research for your love life.” What she hadn’t anticipated was how much it would feel like an exam she’d forgotten to study for. The gathering hall hummed with nervous laughter and the clink of wine glasses against metal tables. Somewhere near the bar, a DJ played music just loud enough to force intimacy.
The next man sat down. Kevin. Accountant. Liked hiking and “being spontaneous,” which Sarah had learned was usually code for never making plans.
“So what do you do?” Kevin asked.
“Applied mathematics. Decision theory, mostly.”
Kevin’s smile flickered like a dying bulb. “Cool, cool. I’m more of a people person myself.”
Ding.
By candidate twelve, Sarah had developed a classification system. There were the Performers, who arrived with rehearsed anecdotes. The Interrogators, who treated each five minutes like a job interview. The Settlers, who seemed ready to propose to anyone who laughed at their jokes. And the Ghosts, who were physically present but had clearly checked out three tables ago.
Candidate fourteen told her she had “kind eyes.” Candidate seventeen asked if she wanted to see his car. Candidate twenty-two talked exclusively about his mother.
Then the first lockout happened.
A man three tables down pressed the red button embedded in his table’s surface, and a small light began blinking. The woman across from him pressed hers in response. They rose together, their wrists tagged by a volunteer with matching green bands. Just like that, they were done, extracted from the pool and walking toward the “Couples Lounge” in the back corner.
Sarah felt a strange tightness in her chest. The field was shrinking.
Ding.
“You seem nervous,” said candidate twenty-four, a software developer named Marcus who had, mercifully, not yet mentioned CrossFit.
“I’m doing calculations,” Sarah admitted.
“On what?”
“On whether I’m making a mistake by not locking anyone in yet.”
Marcus laughed, but not unkindly. “That’s either the most honest thing anyone’s said to me tonight or a very polite rejection.”
“Both, maybe.”
Ding.
Two more couples formed. Then a third. Sarah watched the green bands multiply, each one narrowing her options. The math was clear: wait too long and the best candidates would be gone. Move too early and you’d never know what you missed. This was the problem she’d spent three weeks studying in Dr. Chen’s game theory seminar. The Secretary Problem. The Marriage Problem. Different names for the same dilemma, running all the way back to some mathematician in the 1960s who’d decided that love was just another optimization function.
But what was the solution? She’d gotten an A on the problem set. She’d walked into the exam confident. And now, surrounded by forty strangers and the rising panic of dwindling time, she couldn’t remember the formula that mattered.
Reject the first thirty-seven percent. The answer surfaced like a bubble breaking the water’s surface. Don’t lock in anyone during that phase. Just gather information. Learn your standards. Then, after that threshold, commit to the first candidate who exceeds everyone you’ve seen.
Thirty-seven percent of forty-three was approximately sixteen.
She was on candidate thirty.
The realization hit her with physical force. She’d been past the exploration phase for fourteen people. The algorithm said she should have started committing twelve candidates ago, selecting anyone who beat her previous best. And she hadn’t. She’d kept waiting, kept comparing, kept finding small reasons to let them walk away.
Ding.
The chair across from her scraped against the floor as someone new sat down.
“Hi,” he said. “I’m Henry.”
Sarah looked up. Brown eyes. An easy smile. A small scar above his left eyebrow that suggested a story worth hearing.
“You look like you’re solving a puzzle,” Henry said.
“I was. I think I just finished.”
“Good answer or bad?”
Sarah considered the question. She thought about the thirty-seven percent rule and its cold assurance. She thought about candidate nine, who’d made her laugh once, genuinely. She thought about all the candidates still waiting behind Henry, unknown variables in an equation she was suddenly tired of solving.
“Good,” she said. “I think good.”
Henry tilted his head. “Cryptic. I like it.”
“Tell me about that scar.”
Henry touched his eyebrow, surprised. “You want to spend our five minutes on a dumb childhood story?”
Sarah’s hand moved to the red button on her table. She pressed it. The light began to blink.
“I want to spend more than five minutes,” she said.
Henry stared at the blinking light, then at her. Something shifted in his expression, surprise giving way to something warmer.
He pressed his button.