Love is in the air..

True Love: Let's calculate the odds (ST, 6 Oct 2006)

True love is like a kick in the head. No, really. It's not just that it comes out of nowhere, knocks you sideways and changes your lifeforever. It is statistically like a kick in the head.

Most statistics are about things that usually happen or that most people share: prices, salaries, IQs, political opinions. These qualities are called 'normal distributed'. If you chart them, the graph they produce is that old favourite, the bell curve.

But love is different. True love is rare; we can only hope to find it once in a lifetime, and maybe not even then.
The curve that charts love is very narrow - more like a steeple than a bell. It is called a Poisson curve, and its classic exemplar was the chance of being kicked to death by a horse while serving in the Prussian cavalry.
The normal distribution was discovered during the 18th century when confident Age of Enlightenment tyoes assumed that all people, places and times were pretty much alike. Statistics that produce a bell curve(like, say, the heights os everyone on your street) show a clear average, with plenty of readings within a predictable range around that averagem called a 'standard deviation'. Common qualities, such as height, are easy to forecast.
Simeon-Denis Poisson lived in the more unpredictable 19th century. He was more interested in rare events. He wanted to discover how well you can predict the chances of one such event occuring during a given time(improbable); two events(very improbable); three(like totally improbable); or four(so improbable you can forget about it).

While the bell curve describes things we can expect, Poisson's formula predicts things we fear or hope for - things that, though rare, could happen at any time. In World War II, the British used it to predict the likelihood of any particular neighbourhood in London being hit by a V-2 rocket. Telephone companies use it to predict the likelihood that any particular numbre is going to ring at a particular moment(it's low, although it somehow higher when you're in the bath)

The chance that the store will run out of your cat's favourite food, that you'll have a fender bender on the way home, the chance that a war will break out somewhere today: If there's an average occurence of any event over time, Poisson's formula can predict a likelihood for the here and now.

True love is such an event. It could be today; it could be never.

All we know is that it happens to some people, sometimes. This makes me believe that the hope of meeting the love of your life is also governed by the Poisson curve. If so, it suggests some interesting conclusions. Film director Woody Allen pointed out that being bisexual doubles your chance of a date on Saturday night - but sadly, Poisson shows little change in response even to this drastic rise in probability.

His curve, applied to finding true love, charts two things: the chance this rare event will happen once, twice, thrice in a lifetime, but also how likely it is to happen at all in progressively more unlikely circumstances. When you move away from the back of the horse, the chance of being to death falls precipitously. Similarly, edging away from the kind of people who are the current focus of your affections(in the hope that say, a Florentine millionaire-poet-ski champion will come knocking at your door) makes the chance of success drop away much more quickly that it would for normally distributed phenomena.

This implies that your best chances come from seeking out and sustaining friendships with the people you already like most, rather than devoting too much time to the exotic alternatives. Rare things become near-impossible once you compound their rarity - say, by buying a lottery ticket only on your birthday.

In probability, we have only two ways to control fate: through standards and through opportunities. If you want to avoid a bad Poisson event(like the fender bender), you maintain high standards by driving as defensively as you can. You steer clear of certain routes at certain times to avoid giving the other idiots too many chances to hit you. Finding love, too, demands high standards(this is, afterall, the person who'll share your existence) but you need lots of opportunities.

Go speed dating, by all means - remembering that it only selects for a good date, not necessarily a good mate. Skew your social life towards those events where you can find out more about potential partners than whether they are just great dancers. Use every experience, good and bad, to refine your vision of that unknown ideal so that when one chance comes, you won't let it slip away. Every step will take you closer to the centre of that Poisson curve.

So..wat're ur odds?