Celebrity Marriage Math

In this blog we have talked about the surprising math of cooking, relieving math of parenting, curious math of travel and helpful math of dating. Yes, this is correct - dating. What to do to increase the chances of accidentally bumping into the subject of your affection, how to count his exes and when to settle down confident in your choice. Now - when we talk dating and marriage there is nothing more magnetizing than celebrity coupling. Who went to Oscars with whom, what were they wearing, how long they are dating, their age differences and whether they will be together the next year?

A new formula published this week in the NYTimes claims to predict the stability of celebrity marriages. This formula has been created by Garth Sundem and John Tierney six years ago and recently refined by Sundem based on the plenitude of the new scandalous data.

Before revealing the actual formula, let's think what public variables one could use to come up with a good couple compatibility predictor. Probably ages and age differences, number of past marriages and their length, number of years couple dated before marriage. There should a time factor - as probability slowly descends with years, although not necessarily linearly.  For celebrity marriages specifically there may be relative fame: when each person in a married celebrity couple spends most of the time away alone shooting a movie or performing they are more likely to start fancying someone else. There is also a type of fame: do you read about them in the NYTimes or mostly in National Enquirer.

Well, we were quite close with most of the variables, but the actual formula is far from simple:

Red variables describe the wife, blue - the husband and gray Md and orange T describe their relationships. Couples combined age (Ah + Aw) is used as age makes us wiser and data shows that younger couples divorce sooner.

Garth discovered that "tabloid fame dooms" celebrity marriages (or, to my opinion, perhaps just reflects their natural disintegration) and it is wife's fame specifically that matters most: ratio of the times she was mentioned in the NYT to ENQ.

What about this strange Sc (aka Sex Symbol) variable? Authors are citating  psychological research  that shows that women who wear sexually provocative clothing tend to be more narcissistic, and narcissism is a good predictor of sexual infidelity.

When you plug into this formula Kate Middleton and Prince William their chances of celebrating 15th marriage anniversary are pretty high - 71%, but for Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes is it only 10%.  Enjoy the full NYTimes article and more couple comparisons here.