Because having a happy, functioning relationship is the ultimate Holy Grail, giving women far greater boasting rights than, say, curing cancer or winning the Booker Prize (it’s true – the universe is far more obsessed with Victoria Beckham’s successful marriage than it is with Naomi Wolf’s literary prowess), someone has felt the need to work out the ultimate formula for a successful relationship.
MSNhave commissioned a piece of research investigating what makes the perfect relationship, surveying 2000 men and women. The results revealed that 25% of men and women believe their partner should have four sexual relationships before them (making five the magic number), that men place importance on looks over intelligence (snore), and are twice as likely as women to believe that good sex is important for a happy, enduring relationship (is this really true?). Oh, and that what we're all really after is a GSOH. Phew!
The researchers also came up with a (handy) formula to help us work out if our current has any longevity – because nothing says super-hot shag fest like algebra:
L = 8 + .5Y - .2P + .9Hm + .3Mf + J - .3G - .5(Sm - Sf)2 + I + 1.5C
Getting a maths-lesson-induced panic? Don't worry here’s a handy key, which you can always laminate and keep in your purse, if necessary...
L: The predicted length in years of the relationship
Y: The number of years the two people knew each other before the relationship became serious
P: The number of previous partners of both people added together
Hm: The importance the male partner attaches to honesty in the relationship
Mf : The importance the female attaches to money in the relationship
J: The importance both attach to humour (added together)
G: The importance both attach to good looks (added together)
Sm and Sf = The importance male and female attach to sex
I = The importance attached to having good in-laws (added together)
C= The importance attached to children in the relationship (added together)
All 'importance' measures can be scaled from 1 to 5 where 1 is not important at all and 5 is very important.
So, I used this to work out how long my relationship with my ex should have lasted, and apparently we should have stayed together for 49.1 years, which we fell short of by… 46.1 years. He’s now married to someone else, and I don’t care, which isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement for the veracity of the mathematical bollocks above.
Anyway, this formula is based on what people think they want from a relationship when they’re asked in a survey, and as we all know, there’s a gaping void between what we say in surveys and what we actually do. We might like to think that the sign of a good relationship is both having the same attitude to money and mother-in-laws, because that’s sensible, logical and quantifiable. But the things needed to make a relationship really last are far less easy to explain or create formulas for.
You need to like someone enough to look at their face every single day for the rest of your life without wanting to punch it, but how do you make an algebraic equation for that? You should fancy the pants off them, even after you’ve spent five days of gastric flu together, and you should find each other hilariously funny, even when you're moving house and it's raining, and one of you has dropped a cast-iron frying pan – that you've only got to look posh, anyway – on the other's foot.
Or, as one friend always says to me, you need to find a partner who ‘makes you come like a train and laugh like a drain’. Or, to put it in a language you mathematicians will understand:
L= (O10 x C7)/.5G
Key:
L = length of relationship.
O = number of times he's given you a mind-blowing orgasm somewhere really un-sexy, like your nan's spare room, or Skegness.
C = number of time he's made you accidentally snort wine out of your nose in a really posh restaurant.
G = number of times you've been sick on his lap on the tube.
Follow Rebecca on Twitter @rebecca_hol
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.