So Priyanka and I were talking about a mutual acquaintance, and the odds of her (the acquaintance) being in a relationship, or trying to get into one. I offered “evidence” that this acquaintance (who I meet much more often than Priyanka does) has been dressing progressively better over the last year, and from that evidence, it’s likely that she’s getting into a relationship.
“It can be the other way, too”, Priyanka countered. “Haven’t you seen countless examples of people who have started dressing really badly once they’re in a relationship?”. Given that I had several data points in this direction, too, there was no way I could refute it. Yet, I continued to argue that given what I know of this acquaintance, it’s more likely that she’s still getting into a relationship now.
“I can explain this using Hooke’s Law”, said Priyanka. Robert Hooke, as you know was a polymath British scientist of the seventeenth century. He has made seminal contributions to various branches of science, though to the best of my knowledge he didn’t say anything on relationships (he was himself a lifelong bachelor). In Neal Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle, for example, Hooke conducts a kidney stone removal operation on one of the protagonists, and given the range of his expertise, that’s not too far-fetched.
“So do you mean Hooke’s Law as in stress is proportional to strain?”, I asked. Priyanka asked if I remembered the Hooke’s Curve. I said I didn’t. “What happens when you keep increasing stress?”, she asked. “Strain grows proportional until it snaps”, I said. “And how does the curve go then”, she asked. I made a royal mess of drawing this curve (didn’t help that in my mind I had plotted stress on X-axis and strain on Y, while the convention is the other way round).
After making a few snide remarks about my IIT-JEE performance, Priyanka asked me to look up the curve and proceeded to explain how the Hooke’s curve (produced here) explains relationships and dressing sense.
“As you get into a relationship, you want to impress the counterparty, and so you start dressing better”, she went on. “These two feed on each other and grow together, until the point when you start getting comfortable in the relationship. Once that happens, the need to impress the other person decreases, and you start wearing more comfortable, and less fashionable, clothes. And then you find your new equilibrium.
“Different people find their equilibria at different points, but for most it’s close to their peak. Some people, though, regress all the way to where they started.
“So yes, when people are getting into a relationship they start dressing better, but you need to watch out for when their dressing sense starts regressing. That’s the point when you know they’ve hooked up”, she said.
By this point in time I was asking to touch her feet (which was not possible since she’s currently at the other end of the world). Connecting two absolutely unrelated concepts – Hooke’s Law and hooking up, and building a theory on that. This was further (strong) confirmation that I’d married right!