"He's gotta be strong, And he's gotta be fast, And he's gotta be fresh from the fight. " Bonnie Tyler - Holding out for a Hero.

There's a belief going around that people are finding it harder to enter relationships because they're looking for more out of their partner. This belief has two prongs:
a) looking for more out of a partner makes it harder to find one.
b) it was easier to marry in the past because people were less fussy.

Certainly, my parents divorce causes me to impose extra criteria on possible soul-mates. With rising divorce rates and unconventional parenting I believe many Gen-Xers and Gen-Yers think the same way.

Imagine the entire human population as a big pool. From that pool we will choose people who meet our requirements. 100% of the pool is '1'. We call the number of requirements 'x'. We call the percentage of suitable people in our pool 'y'. 'a' is how much each requirement reduces the pool.

So how much harder is it when you have high standards? Knee-jerk reasoning says the difficulty is proportional to the number of requirements you have. Inverting the conventional wisdom, we get: 'each standard reduces the pool by a set percentage' expressed as:

y = 1 - ax

The graph shows a straight line starting at 100% making its way straight down toward zero. 'a' controls how steep it goes. But 'a' remains unknown. This is not a particularly reassuring thought because we don't know how many requirements we're allowed to have before we hit zero and get nothing. It's one thing for relatives to tell us that if we're picky we'll end up alone. It's another thing to have it illustrated mathematically. It's yet another thing to have 'too picky' remained undefined.

Don't panic! In reality, filtering by requirements does not work this way.

First major assumption: each requirement halves the suitable population. Obviously this is not going to be true. While filtering by gender will effectively halve the population, filtering by income or appearance may return greater or less than half. Still, for simplicity's sake let's assume halves. For example, you want a member of the opposite sex. This halves the population. You want them to have a steady job. This halves the remaining population. From a starting population of 100 this means that a half is fifty. A half of a half is twenty-five.

You can see this is quite drastic as each requirement halves the resultant pool! If you've ever cut a cake into halves, quarters, then eighths, you will realise how quickly you're left with nothing but crumbs! We express this mathematically thus:

y = 1 * (1/2) ^ x or y = 1/2^x

Inspecting the curve, we see that while each requirement lessens the pool, each successive requirement lessens the pool far less than the effect of the previous requirement. And no matter how many requirements we have, we will never hit 0%. This is indeed good news for fussy people; you can never be too picky.

The Wonder Years
One thing that really struck me about my parents' and grandparents' generations was how easily they all got married. Maybe it's because their marriage is a fait accompli but many think it was because they were less choosy when it came to partners.

The obvious counter-argument is that they had a far smaller population to choose from as well as wars and disease to contend with. Does having extra requirements really make that much of a difference?

Let's imagine hypothetical 1970s requirements:

1. Member of the opposite sex
2. Appropriate age
3. Unmarried
4. Physically attractive
5. Member of a compatible race
6. Holding a steady job
7. Member of the appropriate social class

These seven requirements filters out all but 0.8% of the population. Which, for a 1970 global population of 3.9 billion still gives us a respectable 31 million candidates.

Now onto hypothetical 2007 requirements. These are, if conventional wisdom is to be believed, more numerous (albeit different) to requirements in previous decades:

1. Member of the opposite sex
2. Appropriate age
3. Unmarried
4. Physically attractive
5. Sexually compatible
6. Similar interests and values
7. Has a profession, or direction in life
8. Not be too possessive or blase
9. Compatible timing

Nine requirements, 0.2% of the population. For a population of roughly 6.7 billion, this gives us 13 million candidates. It's too hypothetical to conclude anything but that it would be easy for society pressures to change requirements such that the filtering effects overtake population growth.

No one likes the possibility that we will be forced to choose from a shrinking pool. Even scarier is the alternative, solitude. It's as if the requirement for companionship is itself made up largely of historical pressure which has not yet changed with the times.

But perhaps we need not cry over spilled milk. Especially not when there's a full bottle of Stoli in the fridge. The 21st century offers us incredible opportunities to explore our own bodies minds and spirits. If fate finds us without a person to partner we could do worse than to try finding better partners in ourselves.