314: Dating Pools

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
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Dating Pools
The full analysis is of course much more complicated, but I can't stay to talk about it because I have a date.
Title text: The full analysis is of course much more complicated, but I can't stay to talk about it because I have a date.

Explanation

Half Plus Seven Rule

Megan is upset because she is apparently older than 26, and among people who marry, half do so below 26. The intuitive conclusion is that the number of potential partners is decreasing as time goes on.

The Half Plus Seven Rule is an unwritten rule which asserts that it is creepy to date anyone who is younger than half your age plus 7 years. For example, a 50 year old dating someone who is 31 or younger would be classed as creepy. As the graph on the right shows, there is a lower limit and an upper limit.

  • The lower limit defines the minimum age of your partner in order that you are not considered creepy.
  • The upper limit defines the maximum age of your partner in order that they are not considered creepy.

As age increases, they age range of potential non-creepy partners widens. At 26 the range of non creepy partners is 18 years (20 to 38 year olds). At 50 it is a range of 54 years (32 to 86 years old).

At age 14, you can only date people your own age. If under 14, the other person is older than you. The same also works with infinity, but even Methuselah died once.

While the application of this rule actually reduces the number of potential matches further, Cueball presents it in a positive way. By showing that there are whole swathes of people who she couldn't marry in the first place without being in a creepy relationship, and that as her age increases the range of non-creepy partners increases, combined with Census Bureau data, Cueball shows that her eligible dating pool is in fact still increasing.

Megan notes that graph-making nerds like Cueball may have a hard time finding dates, but this is belied by the title text.

Transcript

[Megan is sitting on the ground with her elbows on her knees and her hands on her chin.]
Megan: This sucks. The median first marriage age is 26. The pools of singles is shrinking. I'm running out of time.
Cueball: Actually, not quite.
Cueball: Yes, older singles are rarer. But as you get older, the dateable age range gets wider. An 18-year-old's range is 16-22, whereas a 30-year-old's might be more like 22-46.
Text on chart: Standard creepiness rule: Don't date under (Age/2 + 7)
Cueball: I did some analysis of this with the Census Bureau numbers just last weekend. Your dating pool actually grows until middle age. So don't fret so much!
[The first chart is labelled Singles, and is a decreasing graph. The second graph is labelled Dating Pool, and is a bell curve.]
Megan: Did your analysis say anything about the dating prospects of people who spend weekends at home making graphs?
Cueball: Come on. Somewhere at the edge of the bell curve is the girl for me.


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Discussion

The following text is exactly 160 characters long, which is the maximum length of an SMS:

(2013-08-17)-(199X-XX-XX)=6XXX days
(2013-08-17)-(199X-XX-XX)=5XXX days
7 =2556.75 days
6XXX/2+2557=5XXX
Standard Creepiness Rule: Don't date under age/2+7

Don't ask me how I found it :P (some digits are replaced with X for privacy reasons) --DiEvAl (talk) 10:08, 17 August 2013 (UTC)

Don't ask you how you found it? I'm a little concerned about that credo...121.222.232.156 06:18, 14 September 2013 (UTC)

By this standard, 14 is the minimum dating age. As a father, I approve Cflare (talk) 14:49, 21 July 2014 (UTC)

The chart appears to be using the following function for the maximum age: max_age_other <= (your_age - 7) * 2 The max age is determined by the oldest the other person can be before you are too young for them according to the age/2 + 7 rule.108.162.216.100 17:20, 24 September 2014 (UTC)

Am I the only one who thought of this? http://www.roundstable.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Screen-Shot-2013-11-19-at-8.32.48-AM-690x377.png (as far as making charts on stuff like love and shtuff. 108.162.217.89 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

... And this is how he spends the pi comic. Oh well :/ SilverMagpie (talk) 06:14, 22 June 2018 (UTC)

The second graph, while a unimodal distribution, is not a bell curve like it says in the transcript. 172.69.22.200 21:19, 7 December 2019 (UTC)