The Peril of Love : Part III

The Butterfly Effect

“In the quiet suburban of East London, there is a boy queuing for an afternoon cut. The clock strikes four as the boy sat on the lumpy couch, having waited thirty minutes for his turn. Staring vacantly at the magazine in front, he ponders upon his decision to get a Mohawk cut; his new haircut would make him look distinct compared to the conservative neighbourhood kids of Leytonstone. Not to mention the fact that he could finally fit in with the cool gang at school and perhaps he would garner the attention of that uber cool rocker chick Lydia, who can play wicked riffs on her electric guitar.

Weighing the positive outcomes of his prospective haircut, the boy relaxes and breaks into a smile. Dreaming upon the chance of speaking with the illustrious Lydia, the boy is now adamant that this is the way to go, his way into her heart. In his mind’s eye he can see her now- the messy cut, badass attitude with a pinch of Goth thrown in, the electric guitar strapped around her shoulder, playing to heavy metal, nu metal, and metals that none have heard before! How is a boy who lives in the east part of London, who combs his hair from left to right everyday in the morning, who plays only classical pieces on the piano and listens strictly to N’SYNC and Backstreet Boys, ever going to be cool enough to be her boyfriend?

It is hardly the boy’s fault that he turned out this way; his parents are conservative Christians and a tad bit on the extreme side. Rock and Roll music are branded as satanic music, with Led Zeppelin leading the charge as the ambassador of Lucifer. He felt even worse when he realised how much his childhood mirrors that of the character Flanders from the Simpsons TV series. No, he thought to himself, “I would not be confined to the expectations and conform like a mindless robot, I would not be the spitting image of those loony cartoons from across the Atlantic...”

“Next!” says the barber, like the way people in clinics do.

“...ocean.”

Disrupted from his trail of thoughts, he walked across the room toward the chair in a trance, nervous about the event that is about to happen. As he stared into the mirror in front of him, the boy started to imagine how he would look like, twenty minutes from now. Nervous at the uncertainty of the impact of his haircut, his palms began to sweat, his heart picks up speed.

“So, what would it be Johnny?”

“M-m-Mohawk, sir,” he sheepishly muttered.

He heard a loud click, signifying the wake of the shaver. As the buzzing of the shaver inches closer toward the back of Johnny’s head, his body tensed. A drop of sweat fell to his cheek as he holds his breathe, embracing the moment. He closed his eye, trying to focus on the happy thoughts that he had earlier as his nerves sets in, only to remember where he left off, his parents.

The barber shaves off a small portion of hair from the back, but from Johnny’s point of view, everything slowed down to nanoseconds. His mind races from the anger that he would rouse in his house, to how his parents would write him off as a disappointment. In the end, parental opinion mattered too much to him as he weighed between the merits and his parent’s wrath, and subsequently decided on a heartbeat, that this haircut wouldn’t be worth it.

The barber moves the shaver upwards.

The boy panicked; he jerked forward and yelled “WAIT!” as everyone in the saloon stood wondering what had set off the boy to such a manner. The barber, bewildered looked over to his boss at the cashier and exchanged a shrug. The boy stood in his chair, shocked by his initial outburst, looks up and clears his throat.
“M-maybe a faux hawk would be m-m-more...appropriate.”

The inconspicuous Saturday afternoon turned out to be more dramatic than it needed to be; after all, it was only a damn haircut. Judgement day came when Johnny walked past the gates of Chingford Foundation School. To his dismay, his haircut yielded no attention from the said cool kids, and too much like a wimpy version of the true Mohawk, he got dissed for trying. His parents however, thought it to be a little too badass for the family’s liking, and that it has to be a sign of a rebellion, and thus cancelled the plans for his sixteenth birthday party as a punishment. Only his friend, David at the football academy thought his haircut was cool.


At the World Cup of 2002, David Beckham became the tipping point of the faux hawk cut.

“A butterfly flutters its wing in New Delhi and half way around the world, a tornado hits Taiwan. “

The butterfly effect describes how a single, tiny and inconspicuous variation may have a large impact on a complex system. Because every action or inaction inevitably results in a reaction, identifying the butterfly in a particular event remains to be confusing, difficult and subjective. Where the mere observation of the particles would result in an indirect influence of the behaviour of quantum atomics in quantum physics, life is not all that different.

Let us explore.

1. The Butterfly of Relationships

“Imagine a path descending into a lush forest. Now pick the tallest tree down this path without for once looking back or retrace the path travelled. Voila, the journey to find the fabled soul mates. “

It is no surprise that the quest for the mother or father of our children begins as such; we walk through life trying to find the illustrious perfect one to be with, we do not (usually) relapsed to the previous doomed relationship and everyone certainly had only been in a serious relationship for a number of times before settling down. For the majority, this journey begins at high school.

A fair amount of parents would be wary of the development of puppy love at the age of adolescent. This wariness stems from fear of poor performance if their children were to be too attached to their crush. It is a valid fear, and since the notion is that children do not know better than parents, thus in dealing with this situation that would threaten the bright future of their child, parents elect to discourage and even stop this kind of socialisation.

The method deployed to stop the development of puppy love varies. Some parents quarantine their children under their roof until the interest subsides while others prefer the subtle approach: they tell their children that there are better and bigger fishes out there, like how there are taller trees as the venture into the forest gets further.

Is it a valid theory?

2. The Ocean Paradox

Assume a population of 200 split evenly between males and females. In this small population, the respective attractive male and female of the species will inevitably be drawing more attention compared to others who are less attractive, leading to a higher amount of relationships for these individuals.

Let us assume that these attractive sample groups who had a head start are only separated into two categories: problematic attractive (PA) and non-problematic attractive (NPA) individuals; add in another assumption that only one party belongs to the NPA category, the girls, which leave the guys with two possibilities, PA and NPA.

In the small population of 200, the number of attractive males that would garner the attention of an attractive female would be limited; hence when a female makes a choice, she either gets lucky by picking a NPA which would signal the end of the perils of a love relationship journey and live happily ever after, or she might ended up with an PA. However, at this stage where the population is low, substitutes could be hard to find; a female may decide to stick with the current boyfriend for variety of reasons, but the logic reasoning would be “better a rich jerk than a poor one” if the said female does not subscribe to “better lonely than to be with jerks”.

Then, we increase the population of 200 to 600, with both gender split equally. The influx of new individuals to the population will result in several changes: firstly, females with PA would leave in search of NPA individuals. Secondly, these PA that got dumped by the said females would have no problem in finding new love as females from the rising numbers of female introduced into the groups. Given that certain group are mutually exclusive, bad reputation may not travel as fast until it is too late.

The journey of the female moves on as their attempt in finding a NPA male continues. Coupled with their experience from PA male, their chances of searching a better male partner increases. Assuming all the females who came out from these relationships got smarter and managed to discern the problematic from the norm, then the remaining 200 woman will have 100 lesser NPA to pick from in the population.

Again, the population increases to a total of 1000 and the number of males and females are split to 500 evenly. Since in the previous population, a hundred males and females are already in a relationship, the effective size is actually at 800.

The pattern repeats as the female with a PA male would again be able to have access to better substitutes and would leave these PA male in search of a better relationship, and these PA who got left that didn’t manage to capitalize on their experience of two failed relationship, will again be chosen to be someone’s baby because of sheer attractiveness. Assuming that the remaining 200 woman from the previous group has now left all the PA males and promptly gotten themselves into a relationship with NPA males, the effective size of NPA male is thus reduced by another 200.

It would seem that as the population size grow bigger, the actual number of non-problematic attractive male would decrease, thus refuting the notion that the bigger the ocean, the better the catch.

So what does it mean?

3. The Application

Economical models are all plagued with borderline extreme assumption which does not represent reality. As with the model above, the assumptions developed are all to lock in a number of variables that make the economic point of view possible.

In the above, we assumed that all women are non-problematic attractive individuals who are all interested in getting into a relationship and eventually got into one. We also assumed that men are the sole cause of their relationship demise and would never fail to find new love because of sheer attractiveness. Thirdly, we also assumed that all women who came out from a poor relationship would profit from the experience and subsequently select a better suitor.

None of all the assumptions are close to reality.

In the application to reality, we often find that our networking range is somewhat proportionate to how outgoing we are, which means a high school social butterfly might have 500 friends on Facebook while an average student would only have access to 200 different profile pages.

Assuming that the average person has a network that consists of 800 individuals, out of these 800 individuals, how many of those are already in a relationship, engaged and married? Furthermore, how many from the total amount consists of grandparents, parents, aunties, uncles, brothers, sisters, “bros”, “BFFs”, facebook stalkers, real life stalkers, gym instructors, creepy guy I met at the gym, work colleagues, bosses, seniors who are too old, juniors who are too young, ex-boyfriends or ex-girlfriends, ex-boyfriends and ex-girlfriends, ex’s cute brother, ex’s sexy sister, ex’s hot cousin, flings that never get a call back, dates that come on too strong, date’s group of friends, snobby rich kid, snobby smart kid, socially inapt losers, handsome but gay guy, happily married guy, unhappily married guy, and last but not least, cousins.

While it is true that there are 6.7 million of us inhabiting this beautiful planet, but every one of us only know a fraction of these million people. Out of these fractions and rounding error for some, the amount of potential suitors does not look as promising, and it certainly does not guarantee it would be more promising as the social circle increases.

A head start wouldn’t seem like such a bad idea.

4. The Biological Clock

"...I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire...I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. –The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner.

Time remains the luxury that we do not have, or so we are taught to think. I’ve seen my peers chasing after time, struggling and determine to complete education and get into the workforce as soon as possible, with the promise of the pot of gold waiting at the end of the rainbow. I had a friend who got sent to kindergarten a year earlier, hence primary school entrance is a year earlier compared to peers his age. Even at my current pursuit of an ACCA qualification, I’ve come across students who had done their CAT(foundation studies) during their high school years, so they could “save time” and graduate earlier from college and work as quickly as possible, believing that one decision could spark a domino effect leading to earlier promotion and subsequently wealth and retirement.

Thus, it would seem highly inconsistent given that our parents would expose us to all sorts of materials before school in order to prepare us for a better life- to give us the edge and yet deprive us the early experience of interpersonal relationship. Do the complexities of the subjects in education surpass the intricacies of interpersonal relationship in such a way that the former is preferred to be given priority over the latter?

It can certainly be assumed to be the case, at least in Malaysia. This results in a distortion of growth; we see people who have enormous capacity for academic excellence are generally socially awkward, littered with poor communication skill and are the frequent tease of cum-at-first-sight instead of love at first sight. In normal circumstances, we see a slower growth in interpersonal relationship maturity and understanding.

(Personally, given that both are a vital component of a person’s life; I am certainly more comfortable in developing both at equal footing, with extra emphasis on protection for the latter.)

Although the effect of the problem affects both men and women, admittedly it has a larger impact upon the females of society, specifically females who are looking to reproduce. Due to medical opinion on optimum child birth age that is pegged to be before 30 (conservative estimate), women are under more pressure to find the suitable would be fathers of their child, meaning they need to have a stable relationship that could marry before they hit 30, assuming the couple only desires one child.

And even though as we grow older, the criteria that we would have to select a potential suitor which should be more detailed and specific is usually discarded, caving in to the pressure of biology clock among other factors. We start to look to the ones closer to us, some even relapse to previously failed relationships, disregarding obvious incompatibilities and impervious to difference in philosophy and values believing in the fact that we-can-work-things-out. A poor excuse for sexual intercourse by any standards.

5. The Butterfly Effect

Sitting upon the couch with a gigantic pot for a belly, with two kids to feed, the wife who once was the object of desire of the plenty is in the corridor nagging about the leaking faucet, the insufficient dough along with the mountain of bills accumulating on the table next to the door, along with the looming college education that costs a bomb and the dead end job that overworks and underpays.

Amidst all of the headaches, one wonders where it all went wrong.

As illustrated at the beginning: A butterfly flutters its wing in New Delhi and half way across the globe, Taiwan is hit by a tornado.