If you follow just one rule in dating, make it the 37% Rule.According to journalist Brian Christian and cognitive scientist Tom Griffiths, co-authors of "Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions,"that rule could help you save time looking for a spouse.The 37% Rule basically saysthat when you need to screen a range of options in a limited amount of time be they candidates for a job, new apartments, or potential romantic partnersthe best time to make a decision is whenyou've looked at 37% of those options.At that point in a selection process, you'll have gathered enough information to make an informed decision, but you won't have wasted too much time looking at more options than necessary. At the 37% mark, you've maximized your chance of selecting the best of the bunch.A common thought experiment to demonstrate this theorydeveloped by un-PC math guys in the 1960s iscalled "The Secretary Problem."In the hypothetical, you can only screen secretaries once. If you reject a candidate, you can't go back and hirethem later(since they might have accepted another job). The question is, how deep into the pool of applicants do you go to maximize your chance of finding the best one'If you interview just three applicants, the authors explain, your best bet is making a decision based on the strength of the second candidate. If she's better than the first, you hire her. If she's not, you wait. If you have five applicants, you wait until the third to start judging.So ifyou're looking for love between theages of 18 and 40, the optimal age to start seriously considering your future husband or wife is just past your 26th birthday (37% into the 22-year span). Before then, you'll probably miss out on higher-quality partners, but after that, good options could start to become unavailable, decreasingyour chances of finding "the one."In mathematicslingo, searching for a potential mate is known as an "optimal stopping problem." Over 1,000 possibilities, Christian and Griffiths explain, you should pull the trigger on someone 36.81% of the way through. The bigger the pool of options, the closer to exactly 37% you can get.Research about successful marriages seems to support the age sweet spot of 26.Last July, the University of Utah sociologist Nicholas H. Wolfinger discovered the best ages to get marriedin order toavoid divorce rangebetween 28 and 32. The range doesn't align exactly28 years old is closer to a 45% Rulebut partners usuallydecide oneach other a while before their actual wedding. Wolfinger'sanalysis also revealed that a couple's chances of breaking up increased by 5% each year after age 32.If you commit to settling down around26, in other words, you're on the right track.The 37% Rule isn't perfect. Since it borrows from the cold logic of math, it assumes that people have a reasonable understanding of what they want in a partner by 26, but doesn't account for the fact thatwhat we look for in our partnersmay change dramatically between 18 and 40.What the 37% Rule does tell us is that 26 is the age when our dating decisions are most trustworthy it's the point at which we canstop looking and start taking those big leaps of faith.SEE ALSO:14 things that are harder to get into than StanfordJoin the conversation about this storyNOW WATCH: How men and women react differently after marrying a psychopath
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