Heidi Ahihi

What dating, relationships, and heartbreak can teach us about choice, scarcity, information, and human behavior.

Love does not sound like an economics problem.

Nobody falls in love while calculating marginal utility.

Nobody should be sitting across from someone at dinner thinking:

Given my current constraints, is this person maximizing my welfare?

😂

That would probably be a good way to make sure there is no second date.

But actually…

Economics has quite a lot to say about love.

Not necessarily about that strange feeling when one particular person walks into the room and suddenly becomes more interesting than everybody else.

Economics may struggle with that part.

But whom we meet, whom we choose, why some relationships work while others don’t, why we stay, why we leave, and why two people who genuinely care about each other still might not be able to build a life together?

Now economics has some things to say.

And economists have actually tried.

Wait. Economists Study Marriage?

Yes.

In 1973, economist Gary Becker published A Theory of Marriage: Part I in the Journal of Political Economy.

And he literally used the term “marriage market.”

Romantic, right?

😂

Becker began with two basic assumptions: people try to do as well as possible, and the marriage market is in equilibrium. From there, he examined how things such as income, human capital, wage differences, and individual characteristics could affect matching and the gains from marriage compared with remaining single.

Now, before we turn Becker into the least romantic person at a wedding, we need to understand what economics is doing here.

Becker was not trying to explain the feeling of falling in love.

He was building a model to understand marriage behavior.

And that distinction matters.

Economics doesn’t necessarily have to explain why your heart does something ridiculous when somebody texts you.

It can instead ask:

Under what conditions do people form partnerships?

And suddenly, love starts looking a little more economic.

Love Has a Scarcity Problem

We usually hear the word scarcity and think about money.

But economics uses scarcity much more broadly.

Our resources are limited.

And one of our scarcest resources is time.

We cannot meet everybody.

We cannot date everybody.

We cannot deeply know everybody.

We certainly cannot build a life with everybody.

Even if there were 100 people somewhere in the world who could theoretically be wonderful partners for you, you probably aren’t going to meet all 100 of them.

You have a job.

You need to sleep.

You have family.

You have responsibilities.

You live somewhere.

They live somewhere.

And unfortunately, teleportation has not yet solved the dating market.

So every relationship exists inside constraints.

Time.

Geography.

Money.

Culture.

Career.

Family.

Age.

Health.

Life goals.

And choosing one path usually means giving up another.

Hello, opportunity cost.

Economics defines opportunity cost as the value of the next-best alternative we give up when we make a choice.

That sounds terribly clinical when we’re talking about relationships.

But think about it.

Choosing to build a life with someone in Hawaiʻi may mean giving up an opportunity somewhere else.

Moving to New York for someone may mean giving up something you value in Hawaiʻi.

Having children may change career possibilities.

Prioritizing a demanding career may change the time available for relationships.

None of that tells us whether one choice is right.

Economics isn’t a fortune teller.

It simply forces us to acknowledge something we sometimes don’t want to acknowledge:

Every meaningful choice closes other doors.

And love doesn’t magically eliminate trade-offs.

Sometimes love creates more of them.

But Finding Someone Isn’t Like Buying Bread

This is where treating dating as ordinary supply and demand becomes too simplistic.

If I want bread and the store has bread, I can buy bread.

The bread does not get to look at me and say:

“Hmmmm… you’re nice, but I’m not really feeling a connection.”

😂

Relationships are different because both sides choose.

You can think someone is wonderful.

You can want them.

You can be ready.

And none of that produces a relationship unless they choose you too.

Then even mutual attraction isn’t necessarily enough.

Imagine two people who genuinely like each other.

They laugh together.

They are attracted to each other.

They respect each other.

They want similar things.

Great.

Except one wants to spend the next ten years in New York.

The other wants to build a life in Hawaiʻi.

Now what?

Their feelings haven’t disappeared.

But the feasible set of choices has changed.

Or imagine:

One desperately wants children.

The other absolutely doesn’t.

Neither person is wrong.

Neither person needs to be the villain.

They may simply be a terrible long-term match.

This is one reason I find the economic way of thinking useful.

Sometimes we ask:

“Do they love each other?”

when another important question is:

“Can these two people actually construct a life that satisfies their most important constraints?”

Those are not the same question.

And real love does not automatically produce a viable match.

That’s painful.

But it’s also very human.

Dating Has Another Problem: Nobody Has Complete Information

Now things get fun.

Because early dating is basically an information problem.

😂

You meet someone.

They’re charming.

They’re funny.

They say they want a relationship.

Wonderful.

But what do you actually know?

Not much.

You know what you’ve observed.

You know what they’ve told you.

Meanwhile, they possess enormous amounts of private information about themselves.

What do they actually want?

How do they behave during conflict?

How do they treat people when nobody is watching?

Are they financially responsible?

Do they want children?

What does commitment mean to them?

What happens when life becomes inconvenient?

Are their words consistent with their behavior?

And – perhaps most importantly –

Who are they after six months, rather than three dates?

Economics has a name for situations in which different parties possess different information:

information asymmetry.

This is not a theory originally created to explain dating.

But it gives us a surprisingly useful way to think about it.

Because early relationships involve decisions under enormous uncertainty.

And when we don’t have complete information, we look for signals.

“I Really Like You” Is a Signal. But Is It a Good One?

Economist Michael Spence’s famous 1973 work on job-market signaling examined a completely different environment: employers trying to make decisions about workers when they cannot directly observe everything they want to know about them.

Again, Spence was not writing dating advice.

Please do not cite him on Tinder.

😂

But signaling theory gives us an interesting framework for thinking about romantic relationships.

When important information is hidden, people use observable things to infer what they cannot directly see.

So imagine someone tells you:

“I really like you.”

Okay.

That’s information.

But saying those words is relatively easy.

Now imagine someone consistently makes time for you for six months.

That’s different.

Or they remember what matters to you.

They show up when they said they would.

They incorporate you into important parts of their life.

Their behavior remains consistent even when being with you becomes inconvenient.

Those actions require something.

Time.

Effort.

Consistency.

Sometimes sacrifice.

In economics, signals can become more informative when they are difficult or costly to imitate.

But we have to be careful here.

This does not mean:

Expensive action = love.

Someone buying you a $5,000 handbag does not provide an econometric estimate of their affection.

😂

And people can perform costly actions for all kinds of reasons.

The more useful lesson is simpler:

When intentions are invisible, we often learn about them through behavior.

Words give us information.

Actions give us information.

Patterns give us even more information.

And over time, uncertainty decreases.

Or sometimes…

it increases.

Welcome to dating.

And Then There Is the Sunk-Cost Problem

This one hurts.

Imagine someone saying:

“I can’t leave. We’ve been together for eight years.”

Eight years is enormous.

Eight years of birthdays.

Trips.

Arguments.

Inside jokes.

Families meeting.

Plans.

Memories.

Maybe a home.

Maybe children.

Maybe versions of yourself that existed only inside that relationship.

Of course walking away feels different from ending something after three dates.

But economics asks an uncomfortable question:

What does the eight years already spent tell us about the best decision from today forward?

Those eight years cannot be recovered.

Economists call costs that have already occurred and cannot be recovered sunk costs.

Hal Arkes and Catherine Blumer’s classic 1985 research found that people can become more likely to continue an endeavor after investing money, effort, or time into it.

Importantly, their research was not a study of romantic relationships.

So we shouldn’t say:

Science proves people stay in bad relationships because of sunk costs.

It doesn’t.

But the broader finding gives us a powerful question to ask about relationships:

How often do we evaluate our future partly according to what we have already invested in our past?

“I already gave him five years.”

“I sacrificed so much for her.”

“We’ve been through too much to quit now.”

Maybe continuing is the right choice.

Maybe it isn’t.

Economics cannot answer that for us.

But sunk-cost reasoning reminds us that the question should not simply be:

How much have I already invested?

It should also be:

Knowing everything I know today, what kind of future am I choosing from this point forward?

Ouch.

Economics suddenly got personal.

Except Humans Are Terrible at Being Perfectly Rational

Traditional economic models often become easier to build when we assume people make consistent, rational choices.

And then…

there are actual humans.

😂

We become attached.

We fear losing things.

We procrastinate.

We overestimate ourselves.

We underestimate risk.

We stay because leaving hurts.

We leave because staying hurts.

We want something and then become terrified when we actually get it.

We know something isn’t good for us and miss it anyway.

This is where behavioral economics becomes especially interesting.

Behavioral economics incorporates insights from psychology to examine how people actually make decisions rather than assuming we always behave like perfectly rational calculators.

One famous idea is loss aversion: losses can affect us differently, and often more strongly, than equivalent gains.

Think about what that might mean emotionally.

Being single and not obtaining a relationship may feel very different from already having a relationship and then losing it.

Objectively, both situations may end with the same status:

single.

Psychologically?

Ohhhhh, absolutely not the same.

😂

The second one contains loss.

History.

Expectation.

Identity.

Memories.

A future you had already begun imagining.

And suddenly our tidy economic model has run straight into psychology.

Which is exactly where things get interesting.

So… Can Economics Tell Me Whom I Should Love?

No.

And please do not build an Excel spreadsheet.

😂

Imagine we somehow collected data on two people.

Similar education.

Compatible lifestyles.

Similar financial expectations.

Same city.

Both want children.

Compatible long-term goals.

Similar values.

Strong predicted match.

The model looks beautiful.

And then they meet.

Nothing.

No spark.

No desire to see each other again.

No mysterious little pull.

Just:

“Nice meeting you!”

And that’s it.

Then someone else walks into your life.

They create logistical problems.

Their schedule is inconvenient.

Maybe they live somewhere else.

Maybe they don’t satisfy half the preferences you thought were important.

And somehow…

you love them.

What happened to our model?

Nothing.

The model didn’t fail simply because it couldn’t explain everything.

Models are not reality.

They are simplified representations of reality designed to help us understand particular relationships within it.

And that may be the most important economics lesson hiding inside this entire conversation.

Economics Can Explain Choices Around Love. It Cannot Measure Love.

Economics can help us understand scarcity.

Trade-offs.

Opportunity costs.

Matching.

Constraints.

Information.

Signals.

Incentives.

Past investments.

Decision biases.

It can help explain why two people who love each other may still struggle to construct a workable life.

It can help us ask whether we’re staying because we genuinely want the future ahead – or because we’re afraid to abandon the past behind us.

It can even help explain why our choices sometimes look completely irrational.

But there is something economics cannot put neatly into an equation.

Why this person?

Why does someone’s laugh suddenly matter?

Why can one person walk through a crowded room and somehow your attention finds them?

Why do humans sometimes willingly accept enormous costs for people they love?

Why does caring for a child make financial “return” sound like an absurd way to measure value?

Why can something be inefficient and still be meaningful?

At some point, economics reaches the edge of its model.

And perhaps psychology walks in.

Psychology can ask about attachment, emotion, cognition, memory, and desire.

Then philosophy arrives with an even more annoying question:

What makes a relationship worth choosing in the first place?

And love?

Love stubbornly refuses to fit completely inside any of them.

Maybe that’s okay.

Economics doesn’t need to explain everything about love to teach us something about it.

Because perhaps the most useful thing economics gives us isn’t an equation for finding the perfect partner.

It’s a way of asking better questions.

What am I choosing?

What am I giving up?

What constraints are real?

What information do I actually have?

Am I listening to words or observing patterns?

Am I choosing my future – or protecting an investment I already made in my past?

And perhaps, after asking all of those perfectly reasonable economic questions, we are still allowed to arrive at the most unreasonable answer of all:

I know.

But I love them.

😂

Research behind this article

Gary S. Becker, A Theory of Marriage: Part I, Journal of Political Economy, 1973. Becker develops an economic model of marriage based on individual welfare and equilibrium in a “marriage market.”

Michael Spence, Job Market Signaling, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1973. Spence’s work develops signaling in a labor-market context; its use here for dating is an analogy and application of the broader information problem, not a claim made by Spence about romantic relationships.

Hal R. Arkes & Catherine Blumer, The Psychology of Sunk Cost, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 1985. Their research examines people’s tendency to continue an endeavor after investments of money, effort, or time have already been made.