@Erik – I thought of you when I saw the game theory bit Loved the more detailed thought-process on your blog. For others – it is here: http://erikstuart.com/post/33044873

@Ricky – great examples re: the house. I struggle with the “settle” conclusion. It seems to broad. I guess it is all a matter of degree… settling/compromising over smaller things (or a whole bunch of smaller things) seems fine to me, but settling on a “larger” issue just to get married seems… desperate. But then it comes down to what’s smaller/larger for each person.
Glad you enjoyed the articles!

So many different things to think about and comment on. This is a bit of stream of conscious comments.

1) Consider that in my twenties, I attended lots of friends weddings. Now, in my thirties, there is a wave of divorces. Clearly getting married was not really true exit from the pool. People didn’t get divorces just because of bad marriage. Usually there is a bad marriage AND a better choice.

2) Women doing the choosing makes perfect sense to me. I hope this is not too commercial of an example, but consider a house. Seller puts up a “for sale” sign, gets (hopefully) multiple bids, then selects the ideal buyer. The seller gets two choices. This is similar to marriage proposal situations.

3) Continuing with the real estate example, has the great single woman in the thirties initially “priced” themselves out of the market, by having too long/high of a checklist for an acceptable suitor. As the length of days on the market increases, the perceived desirability decreases to an potential suitor.

4) A Princess wants a Prince (don’t want to settle for less). A Prince might or might not want a Princess. So the pool for the Princess is actually quite small (Only the Prince that wants a Princess). Will the Princess have better luck kissing lots of frogs and hopefully one of them turn into a Prince or wait until someone else turns the frog into a Prince. Or wait until the frog turn itself into a Prince. Either way, Prince is not born overnight.

5) In the end, I agree with the “The Atlantic”. SETTLE! You take the chance that your choices is less than ideal now, but over the long run a big portion of your initial checklist is wrong or invalidate. I certain couldn’t have predicted what matters to me now 10 years ago. And the things that really matter before seems quite trivial. So take Atlantic’s advice. Take your mother’s advice. Settle is the way to go for happy marriage.

Again, great articles.. lots of things to think about.

I don’t think the Slate author really understood the auction paper cited, though: “strong” and “weak” bidders aren’t necessarily high-quality or low-quality _themselves_ – they’re just drawn from higher and lower probability distributions. It’s not clear what the corollary would be for for men or women…

The question is also begged: why isn’t the symmetrical statement true for men? (The implication – that better and worse men are roughly the same in terms of decisiveness, whereas good women are for some reason a lot less decisive than women who aren’t as good – seems odd.)