Speeches 4th year Marina Mayor

 

SPEECH: THE LOGIC OF LOVE: Delfina-Sofia

4th C

D.H.L

 

 

The logic of love

Introduction:  personal and audience reference 

Most of us have fallen in love and felt a storm of feelings and butterflies in our stomach, so we may deduce that human emotions aren´t ordered in a rational, easy or predictable way. But the thing is that math has something to offer us because, love, as many things in life, is full of patterns and mathematics is all about the study of patterns. Let’s say patterns to predict the weather, patterns to explain the movement of the planets or patterns to predict the growth of cities, and being honest, none of those things are exactly ordered or easily predictable, either. The truth is that mathematics is so powerful that it has the potential to offer us a new way of looking at almost anything, even at something as mysterious as love. Nevertheless, if you find it hard to believe how totally, amazing and excellent mathematic is, you may consider the following top three mathematical tips for love.

Body of the speech: topical order 

Tip number one: “how to win at online dating”. Most of online dating websites have been created by mathematicians. These people have been collecting data on everybody who uses their site for almost a decade and they've been trying to search for patterns in the way that we talk about ourselves and the way that we interact with each other. As a result they've come up with some seriously interesting findings. For example it turns out that on an online dating website, how attractive you are does not dictate how popular you are, and actually, having people think that you're ugly can work to your advantage. To understand this better, on dating websites you are allowed to rate how attractive you think people are. Despite most people would think that the more attractive you are, the more messages you get, it is not true. Based on data, people that were rated low marks were even more popular than people who were rated higher. The interest thing here is that most people when choosing pictures to use on an online dating website, often try to minimize those features some people will find unattractive. But actually this is the other way about. Instead you should play up to whatever it is that makes you different, no matter what the other think of it.

Tip number 2: “how to pick the perfect partner”. Generally it is not advisable to just marry the first person who comes along in our life. But at the same time don't really want to leave it too long if we want to enjoy a long-term happiness with your husband to be. So the question is, how do we know when the right time to settle down is, taking on account all the people we have been dating in your lifetime? Fortunately there's a rather bit of mathematics that can be used to help us, called “optimal stopping theory”. Let´s imagine then that you start dating when you're 15 and you'd like to be married by the time you're 35. There’s a number of people you could date across your lifetime, and they'll be at varying levels of goodness. Now it is supposed that once you cash in and get married, you can't look ahead to see what you could have had and change your mind. So to avoid this the math says that you should reject the first 37% of your dating as serious marriage potential. And then, you should pick the next person that comes along. If you do this, it is mathematically proven that you will maximize your chances of finding your partner in life.  

Last but not least tip, tip number 3: “how to avoid divorce”. It is a fact that that approx. one in two marriages ends up in divorce. To see why this happens a psychologist called John Gottman observed couples having a conversation and recorded almost everything: what it was said in the conversation, their facial expressions, their heart rates, their blood pressure, among other important indicators. What Gottman and his team found as one of the most important predictors to know if a couple will get divorced or not, was how positive or negative each partner showed himself in the conversation. Couples that had very low-risk of splitting, scored more positive than negative points on Gottman's scale. Whereas bad relationships on the point of divorce, found themselves getting into a spiral of negativity. By using these ideas, they were able to predict whether a couple was going to get divorced or not with a 90 percent of accuracy. 

But when Gottman teamed up with a mathematician called James Murray, both started to understand what causes these negativity spirals and how they occur. They create an equation where they project how the wife or husband is going to respond in their next turn of the conversation and how positive or negative they're going to be. These equations depend on the mood of the person when they're on their own, or when they’re with their partner, but most important, they depend on how much the husband and wife influence on one another. The really important point in this equation is the influence in this equation that people have on one another.  

Although you might think the opposite way, the mathematics and the subsequent findings by the team, have shown that the most successful couples are the ones who don't let anything go unnoticed and allow each other some room to complain. These are the couples that are continually trying to repair their own relationship, having a much more positive outlook on their marriage. 

Conclusion:

    Now you know that equations and numbers are not only used in exams, but  everyday in our life and that’s why it's important to know the power of mathematics and appreciate that this “boring subject” can create a doorway to new experiences and it can give you the chance to meet tons of new people. What you have to remember is not to always judge things by its cover because you can always find intesting things behind them.