Love Actually

Professor Gary Becker of the University of Chicago pioneered the use of economics to analyze social interaction, his papers on the Theory of Marriage are classics and should be read not only by economics students but by other social sciences students as well. While in the middle of my long drive back, I was thinking about the economics of petty lover's quarrel by couples (i.e., toilet seat issues, driving styles, looking at other ladies, etc.). I heard a phrase before and it went like "familiarity breeds contempt" and this is supposed to explain how couples drift apart after being together for some time (Pitt-Aniston?).

You would observe and expect that newly "coupled" couples would rarely have these petty quarrels because they are either putting their best foot forward or the present value of the pleasure of their future together is high compared to the cost of letting small things pass at the early stage (i.e. women: "i can still change him").

Yet you also see old couples who've been together a while yet have not drifted apart and seem to have grown into each other (80 year olds that still hold hands). I would predict they don't have petty quarells anymore. If they do, it would usually result in irreconcilable differences and breakup of their union. Differences might have been too big for their common interests to cover and for the fight to start in the first place.

Now I come to a perverse prediction. I predict that couples with a high degree of caring and love for each other actually have more of these so-called petty quarrels yet they remain together. The reason is love (call it the unexplainable presence of a mathematical argument in a person's utility function that's linked to the welfare of another person). Love lowers the cost of making up, because you care about the person, you can afford to almost get at each other's throat yet meet again in the middle because the cost of renegotiation of diverging interests is low.