The Mathematics of being chosen

If you are someone who knows me well, you probably know how delusional I can get sometimes when it comes to love. My idea of love for the longest time has been something like this: Someday there will be a man who sees me smiling, laughing, or dancing, and in that one moment he will just know. He will fall in love with me, and the rest will be history. Yes, yes. I know what you are thinking. Honestly even I am thinking the same :P

PRACHIIIIII, YE SAB REAL LIFE ME NAHI HOTA.

And I do agree!!!!

I would, however, like to blame Bollywood for at least part of this delusion. Our heroes have spent decades falling helplessly in love because someone's dupatta got stuck in their watch, because she turned around in slow motion, or because the wind conveniently decided to cooperate at exactly the right moment. Real life, unfortunately, appears to have significantly worse production design (Oops!)

But if you strip away all the dramatic background music and flying dupattas, I think there is something underneath those stories that is not entirely unrealistic.

The desire to feel chosen.

There is something unusually beautiful about being chosen. And its not just being merely liked. Not admired from a distance. Not kept somewhere in the universe of possibilities as a “maybe.” Chosen.

And I really think we underestimate how rare that feeling actually is. Most of us will, at different points in our lives, be appreciated by people who never choose us. Someone may enjoy our company, find us attractive, admire the way we think, or even feel something deeply for us and still not choose us in any meaningful sense of the word. 

And perhaps that is because liking someone and choosing someone are fundamentally different decisions. (And since the Mathematics major in me refuses to stay quiet even while discussing love) If I were to make the distinction mathematically, I would say that being liked means making it into the choice set and being chosen means becoming the outcome.

(And why leave Econ out of this!?)In economics, a decision-maker begins with a feasible set of alternatives. There are several things they could choose, each carrying different benefits, costs, uncertainties and trade-offs. When we consider human relationships, well they are obviously far messier than an optimization problem. But the analogy is interesting because our lives increasingly resemble very large choice sets.

We meet people at university, at work, through friends, while travelling, and through apps that can show us another potential partner with a single movement of a thumb. Possibility has perhaps never been more abundant. And abundance changes the meaning of choice.

Someone recently shared a daffodil analogy with me, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. Imagine that you are walking through a field of daffodils. 

Not one daffodil but hundreds and thousands of them!

Some are taller. Some are brighter. Some have opened more perfectly towards the sun. Some are slightly crooked. Some are growing alone, while others appear in beautiful little clusters. You walk through the field knowing that you could choose any of them.

And then, somewhere along the way, you stop. You bend down. And you choose one. And the moment you do that suddenly that particular flower becomes different. Not because someone has objectively demonstrated that this particular flower dominates every other flower on all relevant variables.

It becomes special because a decision was made. This one.

Perhaps that is what being chosen feels like.

We sometimes approach relationships as though there must be some invisible ranking system determining who deserves to be chosen. We compare beauty, intelligence, income, humour, education, personalities, families and a hundred other dimensions until affection begins to resemble a badly specified regression model. And surely, we think that the person with the highest score should win.

But I believe that human beings are terrible optimization algorithms. Fortunately. There is rarely one globally optimal person. More so because preferences are incomplete. Information is imperfect. Timing changes everything. The weights we assign to different qualities evolve as we do. Things that once seemed indispensable become irrelevant, while qualities we barely noticed when we were younger gradually become the things we value most.

Economists would probably object to my romantic misuse of utility functions here, but imagine for a moment that each person somehow carries a utility value in another person's mind. The naive interpretation of love would be simple: Choose the person who maximizes utility (The argmax). But real relationships complicate this immediately.

Like, how exactly do you assign a coefficient to the person who remembers something insignificant you said three months ago? What weight do you place on feeling safe enough to be ridiculous around someone? How do you quantify the comfort of being understood before you have fully explained yourself? What is the utility value of someone who makes an ordinary Tuesday feel slightly better? And how do you compare any of these things against someone else's appearance, ambition or social status?

The model collapses remarkably quickly.

And perhaps that is the point. Being chosen cannot really be about proving that you are objectively the best option available. There may always be someone more conventionally attractive. Someone richer. Someone funnier. Someone with a more impressive CV. Someone who shares more hobbies. Someone geographically closer. Someone who arrives at an easier moment.

If relationships required us to establish global dominance over every relevant variable before we could be loved, none of us would ever feel secure. There would always be another observation somewhere in the dataset.

And yet people choose. Perhaps that is the most fascinating part of all.

At some point, someone stops evaluating an infinite universe of hypothetical alternatives and begins investing in one particular reality. And every genuine choice contains an opportunity cost. To choose one path is to relinquish others. Choosing one city means not living in countless others. Choosing one career inevitably closes certain professional doors. Choosing how to spend an evening means sacrificing every other possible use of those hours.

Relationships are perhaps are no different. When someone chooses you seriously, they are not claiming that no other interesting human being exists. They are saying that the existence of those alternatives does not prevent them from investing in you. And that distinction matters.

Because one of the strangest expectations we place upon love is the idea that someone must become blind to everyone else for their choice to be meaningful. But perhaps choice is meaningful precisely because alternatives remain visible. The daffodils do not disappear from the field after you choose one. They are still there. Still beautiful. Still possible.

And yet you walk home carrying only one particular flower.

There is another economic idea that feels relevant here: revealed preference. Economists have long distinguished between what people say they prefer and what their choices reveal that they prefer.

That distinction becomes particularly powerful in relationships. Someone can tell you that you matter. They can compliment you endlessly. They can describe the future beautifully. But eventually, preference has to reveal itself through behaviour.

Who makes time? Who remembers? Who returns? Who communicates when it would be easier to disappear? Who accommodates? Who repairs things after conflict? Who keeps choosing the relationship even after novelty has disappeared?

Perhaps love is partly a sequence of revealed preferences.

Not one enormous cinematic decision, but hundreds of tiny selections made repeatedly. I choose to call you. I choose to tell you this. I choose to make space for you in my day. I choose to understand rather than assume. I choose to stay through this uncomfortable conversation. I choose you again today.

The beautiful part is that neither person possesses perfect certainty. You cannot know exactly how someone will evolve ten years from now. You cannot completely insure yourself against heartbreak. You cannot observe every possible future state of the world before choosing a partner. There is no complete-information version of love.

Eventually, every meaningful relationship contains an act of faith. Maybe that is why being chosen touches something so deep inside us. It is someone making a decision despite uncertainty. Not after receiving guarantees. Not after comparing every person they could possibly meet over an entire lifetime. But with incomplete information, limited foresight and no certainty about the future. And still saying: "I would like to see what happens if I build this future with you"

There is something profoundly tender about that. Because somewhere underneath all our comparisons sits a remarkably human question:

Am I enough to be chosen?

Perhaps that question is one of the reasons we spend so much of our lives optimizing ourselves. We collect degrees. Build careers. Exercise. Learn how to dress better. Become more interesting. Try to become funnier, kinder, smarter, calmer, more successful.

A lot of that growth is wonderful for sure!

But sometimes, hidden underneath all that optimization, is a dangerous little equation: If I optimize myself enough, someone will eventually have no rational alternative but to choose me.

Unfortunately, human affection does not work like that. You cannot engineer yourself into being universally preferred. And perhaps you should not want to. Because the goal was never to become the objectively best daffodil in the entire field. There is no such flower. The goal is to encounter someone whose preferences, values, timing, temperament and strangely specific collection of experiences make them stop beside you. And then, crucially, for you to want to stop beside them too. Because being chosen only becomes beautiful when it is mutual.

Out of all the people one might meet. All the cities one might live in. All the decisions that had to precede the meeting. All the jobs accepted. All the invitations attended. All the messages answered. All the tiny accidents of timing that had to occur. Two people somehow arrive within each other's choice sets. And then choose each other.

Mathematics cannot tell us whether something was destined. Probability cannot prove that one particular person was always “meant” for us. But perhaps it can help explain why mutual choice occasionally feels miraculous. There were many possible outcomes. And somehow, this particular one happened.

Still, I think the most interesting part may come afterwards. Because perhaps true commitment is not the moment you win the optimization problem. It is the moment the optimization problem stops being relevant.

At first, we compare. Is this person right for me? Could someone else fit me better? What if there is something better outside my existing choice set?

Those questions are natural.

But at some point, lasting love seems to require something very different from perpetual maximization. You stop continuously recalculating. Not because the world has run out of alternatives. Not because your partner suddenly dominates every imaginable variable.

But because you have decided that continuously searching has become less valuable than building something with the person already beside you. And perhaps that is commitment:

the voluntary decision to stop treating love as an endless search problem.

You look at the field. You know there are other flowers. You know there may even be flowers you have never seen.

And still, you look at the daffodil in your hand and think:

I don't need to know every other possibility to know that I want this one.

As i said, there is something almost rebellious about that in a world obsessed with optimization. We optimize careers, productivity, investments, travel itineraries, sleep schedules, and even our dating profiles. Everything around us seems designed to remind us that something marginally better might exist one swipe, click, or decision away.

Which makes me wonder whether having more choices necessarily makes choosing easier. Perhaps sometimes the opposite happens.

The larger the choice set becomes, the easier it is to imagine that a superior alternative must exist somewhere just beyond what we can currently see. And in endlessly preserving our possibilities, perhaps we occasionally lose the ability to experience one of them fully.

Maybe love begins somewhere around there. Not when someone proves themselves superior to every conceivable alternative.

But when two people decide that comparison has served its purpose. The field can remain full of daffodils. You simply no longer feel compelled to inspect every one.

And perhaps that is why the idea of being chosen carries so much emotional weight.

Not because being chosen makes someone objectively superior to every alternative. Not because it guarantees permanence. And not because everybody experiences choice in exactly the same way.

Perhaps it is simply because there is something extraordinary about moving from possibility to preference, from preference to decision, and from decision to repeated choice. So perhaps being chosen is not about being the most beautiful flower in the field.

Perhaps it is something quieter.

Someone saw you.

Someone could have kept walking.

And they stopped.