Un lungo articolo di Alice Hines uscito nel 2020 su The Economist e disponibile dietro soft paywall (link alternativo) propone un approfondimento su alcuni statunitensi che utilizzano metodi di “ottimizzazione” per le loro scelte sentimentali. L’articolo si concentra prevalentemente sulla storia di Jacob e a partire da questa allarga il discorso ad altri casi ed esempi, cercando le motivazioni profonde delle loro scelte sentimentali.

For most of his life Jacob dated only when he’d received clear signs of encouragement from one of the many women he found beautiful or fascinating. In 2013 he moved to New York from North Carolina. Thanks to the volume of people using dating apps, it was suddenly possible to spend each night of the week with a different woman who was already intrigued by his online persona. There was the cheesemaker. The fashion designer. Three different med-school students. Jacob liked them all. On each date, he holidayed in another person’s world and learned something new.

But cumulatively, the experience was overwhelming. Jacob knew he wanted to get serious with someone, but he found it hard to weigh the merits of each of these potential partners against each other. So he did what he knew best: he made a spreadsheet. He called it “How to Choose a Goddess”. When he described this to me, some of the calculations lay beyond my comprehension. But my more quantitatively minded friends seemed impressed when I rattled them off.

[…]

At one point he considered using pairwise ranking to assess his hierarchy of priorities and advanced statistics to determine the relative importance of Goddess Qualities. He’d learned these tricks in a business-school class about pricing goods. Ultimately Jacob chose a simpler approach. “A guesstimated number is better than not using numbers at all”, was his motto.

Jacob is just one of a growing number of people seeking inspiration from business schools rather than poetry in the quest to find the right partner. This hard-headed attitude is evident in the practical turn that romance’s ardent lexicon has taken in recent years. We look for partners, not soulmates. We avoid deal-breakers. “Are you in the right headspace to
receive information that might hurt you?” reads a recent meme, advising people to ask loved ones for consent before making demands on their emotional labour.

[…]

One New Zealand couple deployed Agile, a project-management system that companies such as Microsoft and Lockheed Martin use to streamline processes across teams, in their marriage. The goal was continuous improvement. They held monthly retrospective meetings, where they reviewed personal successes and failures and set “action points” for the next month-long sprint