To mark the release of Sex and The City in Jakarta, its time for another post on relationship economics (The issue of fuel raise has reach fatigue point anyway, at least for me).
The main plot connector in SATC is whether Carrie will end up with Mr Big. She (and the audience) is taken to emotional roller coaster along the path to find the answer.
But why she did not settle for a-less-emotionally-draining-but-sufficiently-good-and-rich-man ?
Groucho Marx once quipped that,”I don't want to belong to any club that will accept people like me as a member.”
The logic of the statement is when a club willing accept him, without needing him to go through lengthy verification of good credentials/network, then it is not exclusive enough and good enough for him to join.
Change club to relationship and we got the Carrey dilemma. Should she wait until the flashy-and -almost-perfect -but-unfathomable Mr Big to proposed or to “lower” her standard and go for another man that clearly want her.
The problem is unobserved and asymmetric information. People can’t really know the inner quality of other people and his/her as partner in romantic/marriage relationship until they are in it.
But selectability is a good cue and signal. If one person has many possible suitors then maybe the quality for Mr/Miss Right is there. They can’t be all wrong.
But if one is too eager or too wanting then the targeted person is justified to wonder whether that is the best s/he can get. Couldn’t I do better (note: the notion is subjective as it is multi dimension)?
So what to do in this conundrum? If one don’t want person that want them then nobody get together with anyone.
One gateway is quality certification. So the two know that they are both in the same range of desirability level and could not do much better. It requires an independent arbitrage trusted by both parties to do the assessment.
In a classic proverb, that’s what friends are for.
