I’m going to explain both marriage outcomes and the entire volume of Internet posting on sexual relationships in a single post. Seriously. I’m that good.
Being married is like a game of Prisoner’s Dilemma. This is one of the original Game Theory social puzzles and required reading for all budding social scientist types. If you haven’t read this before, I really recommend you click the link and read up on it. I’ll be right here when you get back. Ah screw it, I know I know… you’re all short attention span types. Here’s a picutre of the orginal Prisoners Dilemma….
So…
Marriage framed as a game of Prisoner’s Dilemma, and I’d argue that it’s really a fairly continuous game of Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma with say each month or whatever counting as a round of the game. The game breaks down like this… (you can click on it to make it bigger and harder…)
So assuming each month is a round of the game, obviously the top left quadrant is the better option for both Husband and Wife to aim for. But cheating on the commitment can become tempting, specially if you can get away with doing it and simply dupe the other spouse. So tossing in a cheating episode here and there can be a huge “win”. At least until you get caught.
What tends to happen is once caught the trust is forever broken in some way. And the other partner starts being more willing to break their commitment to you. “WTF you cheated on me, I’ll show you” is the basic thought here. Cheating can be either sex with another person, sexual denial to the spouse, refusal to work either in the home or out of it, or whatever. Basically it’s refusing to be a good spouse in the marriage.
So after a couple rounds of “Frak me, NO FRAK YOU” the relationship can break down as both parties firmly entrench in the refusal to be nice to each other ever again. This is how divorce almost always gets nasty.
Now if you want to apply the same sort of approach to say an opening few dates with a new partner, it looks like this…
I think my readers are smart enough to figure out the above table.
Now in terms of everything that is written in the Manosphere about Game, Sex and Relationships et al, it looks like this…
So what according to Game Theory should you do in order to maximize outcomes for yourself? The summary below are the key points from the Wikipedia Link…
Nice: The most important condition is that the strategy must be “nice”, that is, it will not defect before its opponent does (this is sometimes referred to as an “optimistic” algorithm). Almost all of the top-scoring strategies were nice; therefore a purely selfish strategy will not “cheat” on its opponent, for purely utilitarian reasons first.
Retaliating: However, Axelrod contended, the successful strategy must not be a blind optimist. It must sometimes retaliate. An example of a non-retaliating strategy is Always Cooperate. This is a very bad choice, as “nasty” strategies will ruthlessly exploit such players.
Forgiving: Successful strategies must also be forgiving. Though players will retaliate, they will once again fall back to cooperating if the opponent does not continue to defect. This stops long runs of revenge and counter-revenge, maximizing points.
Non-envious: The last quality is being non-envious, that is not striving to score more than the opponent (impossible for a ‘nice’ strategy, i.e., a ‘nice’ strategy can never score more than the opponent).
So there we go. Life the Manosphere and Everything in one handy dandy post. A little superficial I know. But what you gonna do about it….
…. well be nice of course. For purely utilitarian reasons.
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