The Unmuddled Mathematician

Actuarial Marriage

By Chris Coray, The Unmuddled Mathematician

Go ahead, re-read the title.  It is not “Actual Marriage”, but Actuarial Marriage.  There is a

difference.  In my professional career one of the things I worked on was establishing an Actuarial Science program at Utah State.  This is a field in advanced applied mathematics where graduates can get really good jobs.  But that has nothing to do with the topic of this article.

There are volumes of data used by actuaries, including what are called Mortality Tables, which pretty much contain information about questions like this, “If you are currently age X, what is your life expectancy?”  This information is used by insurance companies.  It is also the source of a commonly held belief that women live longer than men.  The difference is quantifiable.  So I've pondered (slowly, like most men) about why this is so and have finally had an epiphany.  It is just not so.  There is no biological reason of which I am aware that provides an argument about why the difference is life expectancies.  In fact, my argument is that there is no biological difference.  But there are reasons for the actuarial difference.

Aha, you say, then how do I account for the difference?  The answer hit me when I was doing what all humans should spend more time doing, i.e., fishing.  The words of Isaac Walton were floating in my thoughts, especially the sentence, “The hours a man spends fishing are not subtracted from his life.”  There is no proof of this claim, but it seems like it is almost like scripture.  And then it hit me.  Hours spent fishing are not subtracted from a life, but maybe there are other activities that are subtracted, sometimes with multipliers.   This revelation started a whole chain of possibilities.  A partial list is included, but feel free to add those about which you are as certain as I am about my partial list.

Item 1---Waiting.  How much time does the average male spend waiting for his spouse.  This waiting can occur in many places, like in the garage as the spouse, who has urged her mate to be on time while he is in fact sitting behind the wheel cooling his jets as he waits for his dearest to actually show up at the vehicle.  Is it possible to become a fossil hardened statue while sitting behind the wheel of a car just waiting?  I think likely.  And if the waiting happens while the female spouse is shopping then a multiplier of 2 or 3 is applied to that waiting time and it is subtracted immediately from his life.   You show me a man who is peaceful while waiting for a shopping wife and I will show you a man who has been dead for some time and has assumed room temperature.  If the engine is running it also adds to global warming as ancient dinosaurs are consumed while the husband (if he is still alive) guesses how long this wait will be. 

Item 2---Dressing.  Is it important that a man’s tie matches his pants and coat, or anything else for that matter?  Or that he is wearing a navy blue shirt and black pants?  Or one of the other deadly sins?  Not to your average guy, who would be happy in Levis any day but must be inspected by the spouse before appearing in public and changing colors if told to do so.  This wasted inspection and change time has a multiplier of 4 on the life expectancy shrinkage scale.

Item 3---Sports.  This life shrinkage is entirely self inflicted.  Using a vocabulary that contains at most 100 words, sports announcers (there are thousands in the world, all of whom attended at least 1^st grade) can hold the attention of single cell amoebas (men) for what is close to infinite time during a game of any kind, as no upper limit has ever been reached.  The “unforgettable” games are of course completely forgettable and so much alike that the synapses in our male brains become brittle, like aluminum wire, and fail much earlier than would be the case if we were just engaged in human conversation.  “This is a “critical third down” describes something for which I can imagine nothing less critical.  We are saved a little bit by the fact that the multiplier here is only ½ in decrease of life expectancy. 

Item 4---Doing dumb things.  Again, self inflicted but without limits, and way tipped toward males.  There is a group each year who earn what is called a Darwin award, which is given to a man who manages to get himself killed doing something really stupid he chose and executed himself, and it earns the name since the fellow has removed himself from the gene pool.  You can look up winners on the web.

Finally, I close with an example of something like those in item 4 but which will not cause gene pool removal.  My dear friend the Muddled Male just had made and sent off to the state a new photo of himself so he could get his concealed carry permit renewed.   Darth Vader (also known as Ann to civilized people) allows him to do this because she does not allow him to actually own a gun.  None.  So in an extreme situation I guess he could flash his card and save a damsel or some other person in distress.  The saving would occur only if the person viewing the card laughs himself to death, which has a probability greater than zero.

Taken together these situations and others are in fact the cause of the actuarial difference in life expectancies.  I am surprised the difference is not larger.