爱

It’s probably no surprise to you that I see offering world-class investment advice as a valuable service for the long-term well-being of our clients. And while I think of investing as critically important, I acknowledge that there are a few issues that may be equally, 甚至更多, central to our long-term well-being. 爱情就是这样一个领域. 所以, in the interest of supporting your happiness and prosperity, backed our usual analytical rigor, we offer the following guide to three important activities related to love:
•如何选择伴侣
•何时结婚
•送什么礼物

如何选择伴侣
这么多选择! How do we know that this person is the “right one”? 好吧, 科学美国人 identified this as the “marriage problem” in a 1960 publication. The theory applies to whom to hire, and other decisions when faced with multiple options.
比如说前景, 或者申请人或候选人, if we want to think of our future spouse in those terms, 出现的顺序, and your decision to accept or reject each one is final; there’s no going back once you’ve made your decision. Should you choose the first attractive one, thus forgoing a potentially more attractive spouse? But what if you pass on an attractive candidate that turns out to be the most attractive? You can’t go back to the one you 拒绝了.
The answer to this conundrum is found in mathematics. In a simple example of three prospects, 一个是最好的, 另一个是可以接受的, 第三种是最糟糕的. The three can be ordered in six different combinations. The best strategy is to always reject the first, then choose the next one that is better than the first. In this case, the odds of choosing the best is 50%.
当然, when you add more than three candi日期 to the selection universe, the odds of choosing the best fall, 但这一比例降至37%左右, 不能再低了. 所以, the optimal strategy is to reject the first 37% of potential mates, and then choose the next one that is more attractive than the everyone in the first, 拒绝了, 集团. The probability of choosing the best one is 37%, but that is as high as you’re going to get.
如何不选择伴侣
Don’t let your parents make your match. In a detailed research paper by the World Bank in 2015, a survey of Chinese couples found that “parental 相亲 is associated with less marital harmony between the couple, 更顺从的妻子, and a stronger belief in old-age support.” Parents choose a spouse for their sons that will be best for the parents (quite a surprise). On the other hand, it does lead to a more harmonious inter-generational relationship. This is graphically shown below.

什么时候结婚
It seems that many people choose their wedding days with special numerical significance. Four approaches are most common: on Valentine’s Day, on sequential 日期 (1-2-03), on same-number 日期 (9-9-09), and on mirror 日期 (9-8-07). The graphs below show the spike in weddings on these four 日期, with special prominence for popularity on same-number and mirror 日期 (the bottom 2 graphs).

Research by two professors at the University of Melbourne, using 1.1 million marriage and divorce registries in the Netherlands between 1999 and 2013, found that the incidence of weddings was 137-500% higher on these special 日期 than on other 日期. 不幸的是, they also found that the odds of divorce for couples marrying on these special 日期 were 18-36% higher too (graphically shown below). This was even more likely for first-time marriages.

So, avoid being cute by choosing a special day to marry. I promise that that ordinary date will become special to you.

送什么礼物
花? 巧克力? 珠宝? 就我个人经验而言, confirmed by my own rigorous research (asking some friends), 花是必不可少的, 巧克力很好, 但珠宝是最好的. Diamonds, in particular, never fail.
But better than all of these, at least over the past 40 years, would have been a US Treasury bond, which has outperformed diamonds nine-fold! (见下文). Your spouse may not appreciate the gift of a bond when she was hoping for a diamond, so you may need to show her this graph. I’m sure she’ll love you all the more.

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