Picking the Perfect Spouse as a Poor Provider
While variation obviously exists amongst individuals, in our society, there exist widely held beliefs with regards to what traits make a particular person a favorable spouse. These traits usually are related to the roles that the person, as a spouse, would play. For instance, because a spouse is someone you will have to look at for what might be the rest of your life, one trait to consider is hotness. You’d want a hot husband or wife rather than some ugly dude. Since you are the spouse of your spouse, while you are evaluating a person based on how many of the traits they exhibit and to what degree, the person might also be evaluating you in the same way. It is not my intention to make a list of all the traits that make someone a desirable spouse. This would be unnecessary, particularly if, as I claim, the beliefs regarding these traits are indeed widely held across our society. Instead, I aim to determine the best course of action when one finds themselves lacking in a particular trait: being a good provider.
If you are a good provider, have lots of hotness and exhibit all the other traits that make you a great spouse, the popular conception is that you can marry anyone you want. If you are lacking, however, the popular conception is that you will have to settle. In our society, men are usually expected to be the primary breadwinners in marriages between men and women, so for a man looking to take a wife, being a good provider is especially crucial. This poses a potential problem for people like me, who, due to lack of ambition, talent or motivation, expect to be poor providers. What is a guy to do? More importantly, what am I to do?
I am totally full of hotness, so chances are I can compensate for my failures as a provider with my overabundance of being a looker. So my desirability is not an issue. What is an issue, however, is that without proper providing, my future wife will face starvation, and as a result, poor health. I wouldn’t wish poor health on anyone, but I especially don’t want it for the woman I love, nor for the woman that I don’t love anymore but I’m too set in my ways to do anything about it. I figure my future wife is going to be one of these, so my status as a poor provider is a grave concern. However, no concern is too great that it can’t be handled by calculus.
Right off the bat, let’s get a functional definition of what it is to be a poor provider. To be considered a good provider, one needs to provide what is necessary to live, like food, shelter and oxygen. Oxygen is free, and the amount of shelter you need to live is vastly overrated, so the critical thing to provide is food. Dieticians hold that the average person needs 2000 calories per day. So, why don’t we define a poor provider as someone that can only provide half of what is necessary:
2000 calories/day * 50% = 1000 calories/day
So 1000 calories is what I am going to be providing. To those that think this is too small, I’d remind you that when I say calories I really mean kilocalories, and 1000 kilocalories can heat a lot of milliliters of water one degree centigrade. I’d also remind you that I have to eat too. To those of you that think this is too large, I’d let you know that 1000 calories is less than one value meal at a fast food chain, jerks.
1000 calories a day is well below the caloric need of a normal woman, and, given I’m not planning on marrying any abnormal women, weight loss is going to be a problem. My goal is to prevent my wife from becoming dangerously underweight. Let’s assume my wife is of the average height for an American woman, 5’6”. I have no particular fondness for this specific height, but I have no specific fondness for any specific height except for a negative fondness to the freakishly tall and the freakishly short. For an approximate relationship between weight, height and health, one calculates the body mass index (BMI). This is defined as:
BMI = Weight in pounds * 703/ (Height in inches)2
The lowest healthy BMI is 18.5, so given a height of 65.0 inches, we can find the lowest weight my wife can reach before our marriage is considered a failure. The operational definition of failure in this marriage is her becoming dangerously underweight, by the way.
18.5 lb/in2= Weight * 703/ 65.0 in.2
Weight = 111 lbs
How many calories is my 65 inch bundle of love going to need in a day? Perhaps the 1000 calories will be enough. The caloric need of a lady is a function of her weight:
Calories needed per day = (Weight * 11 cal/day*lb)/.70
Turns out, based on this equation, which is actually pretty generous with regards to minimizing the unnecessary activity, states that my wife, even at her minimum weight, 111 lb, would need around 1750 calories a day. Clearly, we are going to need another fuel source besides food. Turns out, this is true:
1 lb body weight = 3500 calories
Fat is AMAZING! One pound of it achieves the same affect as three and a half days doing whatever it is I am doing to provide for my lady. An easy solution to my problem presents itself, and that is to use my wife’s body fat to compensate for my inadequacies as a husband, which are functionally defined as the difference between my wife’s caloric need per day and what I am feeding her per day:
(Weight * 11 cal/day*lb)/.70 - 1000 cal/day
Her weight is going to be 111 + all the body fat she’s going to be bringing into the relationship, so let me put plug that in all nice and cozy:
5740 cal/year*lb * extra fat + 272000 cal/year
I converted the time units from days to years, because this is a long term relationship. I decided to multiply and divide and round off everything I had, because that’s how I roll and precision is for suckers. Anyway, at this point, you can get the rate at which fat is spent by dividing my inadequacies as a husband by the 3500 cal/lb, the tradeoff between calories and pounds mentioned earlier. The extra fat is going to be designated with the letter w.
1.64w + 77.7 = dw/dt
Then, calculus happens. There’s some integration involved, it’s pretty fabulous stuff. Having forgotten all calculus besides how to find the derivative and integral of ex, I had to have a mechanical engineer give me a brief refresher. After the refresher, I totally multiplied both sides by dt and then integrated both of them. I was going to find the indefinite integral for both sides, but then my mechanical engineering friend told me why don’t I get the definite integral for one of them. I said cool. I got the definite integral for the closed interval between now and fifty years from now. I figure if I can have my marriage last for fifty years, that’s a successful marriage and whatever happens after that is just static. Anyway, I reached the conclusion that for fifty years of marriage my wife would need to bring 5940 pounds of fat into the relationship. Add this to the 111 pound wife for a whopping total of 6051 pounds.
Conclusions to be drawn:
1. Yes fatties.
2. The 6051 lb number seems a bit low, and probably resulted from a mathematical error on my part. I don’t care.
3. Easier solutions include: a massive dowry, a really short person, a more realistic definition of a poor provider and finally, my favorite, me not being the primary breadwinner. Those familiar with my stand-up comedy tour of the East Coast know my feelings on that last one.