The Business of Love: Can Marketing and Business rules help us achieving success in dating?

A few days ago, I was talking to one of my housemates about love and dating when he explained to me his latest epiphany about love. According to him, this simple idea has revolutionized his dating life and I would like to share his wisdom with my readers. You can decide for yourself whether it is good or bad advice and perhaps, you could even try it for a while and see if it works for you or not. More than a story, this is a conversation that went as follows:

“I had it all wrong… I used to have a type and like certain guys but they never liked me back… I used to fall for men that were not interested and I have suffered a lot over the years” He said while taking the last slide of pizza from the kitchen table. 

This was true, I remember him chasing big gym rats at nightclubs that never looked at him twice or finding him sobbing in the living room over some guy that didn’t even know of his existence.

“… but one day I had an epiphany and everything started to change…” He continued looking throw the window to the endless sky as if he was about to reveal the biggest mystery of mankind. 

That was totally his style. He is a skinny tall drama queen with a mystic halo wrapped in low crotch yoga pants. But his confidence and the noises coming from his room over the past week (that confirmed that in fact, he had been receiving some night action) got me interested.

 “I realized that I needed to discover my market value and find my target audience,” He said in between pizza bites as if everything coming out of his mouth made perfect sense.

“Eh….??? What have you been smoking honey?” My very down-to-earth and slightly sceptical housemate replied.

“I’m telling you that if you want to be successful in dating, you need to find what you have that other people might value highly, what it is unique about you… That my friend is your market value!” He said placing his half-eaten pizza slide on the side and moving his hands around as if he was giving a business seminar in front of a large crowd.

“Then you need to find who it is interested in what you have to offer, who will value your uniqueness…  That is your target audience!” He continued very seriously without even blinking once.

His passion for communicating his ideas was contagious and I felt a strange impulse to clap when he paused. However, I repressed my clapping urge when I realized that, overall, I wasn’t sure that I understood what he meant. Then an unconformable silence invaded the kitchen and, for a minute or two, I kept on looking back and forth at both of my housemates with an eyebrow raised and in need of a further explanation.

Shop window in Bond Street,  Brighton. Picture taken January 2017.

“Just think about it for a minute… instead of looking for a partner that you like, find a pool of people that like you and then pick among them the closest match to what you like… Just reverse the problem” He added before taking a big sip of the cucumber water that he always carries around.

More silence followed his explanation. I guess that my housemate and I needed some time to process his latest words.

“I’m not sure that applying marketing and business rules to dating can work for finding true love” I finally said breaking my silence. 

I confess that in the back of my mind, I knew that his approach did make a lot of sense, but my inner hopeless romantic resisted the idea of applying an “optimizing outcomes” approach when it comes to emotions. However, his revelation has sowed doubt in my mind.

Could marketing and business rules help us to achieve success in love and dating? Is there such a thing as “emotional strategy”? Can we choose who we love or are love and emotions completely out of our control?

Maybe the key to finding love is to pay more attention to those who pay attention to us but we have not really considered them as “possible mating partners”. Perhaps we have been so blind trying to reach our own targets that we forgot to look around.

I look forward to hearing what my readers think, so please leave a comment below :)!