Diminishing Rate of Return: When You’re Dating Too Often

So in my last post I talked about the economy of scale (the more you do the more cost-effective it gets). Now I’m going to talk about the opposite: The Diminishing Rate of Return.

Singles should date often-but not too often. Once I went on three dates in a single day: lunch, drinks, and dinner. Never again! By the end of the night I totally lost track of what’s-their-faces. Which one likes French cuisine again? Which one has a dog again? Which one went to U of T again? I ended up putting all their names and details on little sheets of paper and tried to match them up like fridge magnets!

In economics, this is called The Diminishing Rate of Return. That means there comes a point when the more you do, the less benefit you’re getting out of that last extra bit of effort. Think vacuuming up after your pet. The first time you run the vacuum over the carpet, it picks up tons of fur. Then it picks up less and less on subsequent rounds, until it’s virtually impossible to get that last little bit of fur out.

Dating is the same. It’s great to meet people, but it’s no fun if you can’t even remember which one you want to go out with again. Dating too much makes you tired and jaded (after a while all the boys kinda blend together). That’s when you might miss the good ones. You need to know when the scale tips for you, and learn to pace yourself.  Note that the tipping point is different for everyone, e.g. a player would hardly care about the details about a girl, he just wants to know enough to get into her pants.

As for me, I gave up figuring out the fridge magnets. Just for fun I lined up all the details I liked, formed the perfect man, and sighed. I’m quite sure (I think) they didn’t all belong to the same boy though.