I know a lot of people here want to master seduction for the purpose of eventually finding a life long partner. That's not everybody and that's fine. You have your own reasons and they are just as valid as anybody else's.

For those who are wife hunting, there is an issue of how to know if the woman you are seeing right now is the right one for you to settle down with or if you should keep seeing other people to find a better match. Most of us have been through a stage of putting women on pedestals and wanting to settle down with the first girl who gives us the time of day. It doesn't take long to realize that this approach isn't optimal. You need to have dated a few people to know if the person you are with is a good match. So you should probably get a bit of experience with a range of women before committing yourself to one woman for life. Given that most women won't be super enthusiastic about you wanting to date around a bit more before deciding if you'll marry her, we have to assume that you will either marry the one you are with or move on hoping there will be a better match for you later. If you stay too early you'll wonder if you could have done better. If you leave you might find out that you burned the best relationship you were going to get because you were looking for something better. There is an opportunity cost either way, so how do you know when you've dated enough different women to know if the person you're dating right now is the one you should spend the rest of your life with?

This is called an optimal stopping problem and there is an answer.

Let's create a simplified scenario where you want to know if the one you are with is the one you should stay with. Your first relationship was, at its time both the best and worst relationship you'd ever had. Assuming a random distribution of matches and a zero cost of each additional relationship, if you had to marry the woman you are with or marry the very next woman you date, your current information is only enough to make a guess with 50% accuracy. The math begins to get interesting when you add a third.

While you are with the first of the three relationships you will have in your life where it is your decision whether to marry or not (i.e. she's already indicated her interest in marriage) the information available only allows you to make a guess at 33% accuracy. It is on the second relationship where things get interesting. Based on whether your current relationship is better or worse that your previous one, you can make a better than random assessment of if it is better than the relationship you haven't had yet. If the second is better than the first then there is a 66% chance it is also better than the third and you should stay with number two. If the second is worse than the first then there is a 66% chance they are also worse than the third. You should marry number three. This approach gives you an equal chance of guessing the best of three as you had of guessing the best of two. As we scale this into higher numbers, the optimal stopping point becomes the first best match after testing 37% of the data.

So if were were to assume you were going to start dating a set number of women each year from age 18 and you wanted to be married by age 40 then you optimal approach to choose the best of your options is to treat the first 8.14 ((40-18)x0.37) years of dating as exclusively information gathering. Have fun. Work on yourself and your interpersonal skills. Enjoy women's company. Have relationships and learn how they work, but ultimately treat none of them as permanent because you don't yet know enough about your options to make an informed decision. One month after your 26th birthday you change your strategy. You continue doing everything else you'd been doing but the first relationship you have after that time which is the best of all the relationships you've had so far is the woman you should marry.

This is a simplified model. If you wanted to add depreciation factors you might determine that each percent point closer to the finish line lowers that relationship's value by 1% to account for time spent single. If you're pretty confident that half the women who would have agreed to marriage during the relationship would say yes if you came back with the same offer several years later then you could change the 37% to 60% and wait until you are 31 to ask the best partners you've had so far to marry you in descending order (taking the secret of who you asked first to your grave) and proposing to the next match that is the best you've had only if all the previous matches say no. Maybe you don't want to put a set maximum time of your search. You could instead attribute a cumulative percentage score penalty per breakup endured to preference earlier relationships when determining your optimal stopping point. You can make this your own.

Regardless of how you structure it though, EVERY optimal solution to answering the question of if the person you are with right now is THE ONE requires you to have a few relationships where you are with them to gather information to help you gain the experience required to accurately assess the qualities you are looking for in a long term relationship.

That girl who you've been pining over since tenth grade is statistically unlikely to be your best match. The woman you are approaching right now probably isn't going to be the love of your life either. What she is though is a necessary connection you need to make in order to calibrate your model of relationships on your journey to finding the woman you want to spend the rest of your life with. So go and have some fun. That statistically optimal relationship is out there somewhere and the trick is to start a whole lot of interactions that'll lead to a bunch of connections, a handful or relationships and eventually enough experience to know what a great relationship looks like.