Investing in Love

We are always in constant search for someone to love and hoping that if we find it, our affection gets reciprocated. Most often than not, we give almost everything from our time to our rationality when we fell in love. We get blinded by the euphoric feeling of love that made us vulnerable. At times, when our feelings are not commensurately reciprocated, we tend to feel the lack of self worth and a lot of self pity. And when things get from bad to worse and reach the tipping point, we snap. We then drown ourselves to too much crying and drinking.

This is a classic example of investing your time and emotion to an overrated concept of loving. You weren’t wise enough to think of the different possibilities of engaging to an investment that may or may not give you the worth of what you have invested such as time and feelings. Some will say, when you love someone, you are willing to give everything without expecting anything in return. I guess these are the people we all call as “saints”. I guess not every one of us will fall to that kind of love. And so, we shall differ ourselves from a martyrdom love to a romantic love.

Let’s try to walk ourselves through the process of love investment rudimentarily. First step before getting to a relationship is to know your worth. This is like knowing how much money you currently have. Second step is, after knowing your value you should know how much of your personal space and time are you willing to give up for your partner. This is like knowing the proportion of your current wealth you are willing to put into investment. Third step is to learn your risk aversion (I’ll probably devote another post on tackling risk aversion). This is the time when you ask yourself whether you are a risk seeker, a risk averse, and a risk neutral. This is where most people commit mistakes. They mischaracterize themselves because they no longer care who they are for the sake of their partner. In investment you have to learn this to know where to put your investment. If you are a risk averse person, you wouldn’t put your money into a stock that is volatile and register extremes in prices. In retrospect, if you are a risk averse person you should not get into relationship without clarity. You wouldn’t get into a relationship where there are too many complications like third party or unrequited past relationships.

Now, it is funny though that in investment the higher the risk on your stock the higher the returns could be (Generally speaking). This is the reason why a lot of people in Finance stumble because they automatically look at the returns and totally forgetting about the risks involved. In simple terms, if you are to go into a relationship, how much are you willing to forego just to be with the man/woman of your dream? Will it be at the expense of your friends? Will it be at the expense of your family? Will it be at the expense of your career? Being realistic, you wouldn’t really gain and retain everything you want, at some point in time you have to give up on it. This is the point in loving that you get or SHOULD rationalize (in my opinion).

What should I propose then as a solution? In investment the common solution to this dilemma is diversification. This is where you try to mitigate the ill effects of your probable bad decisions. (I’ll probably devote another post on this one).

In the end, we all want to be winners in love. But in doing it, we need to still balance out our heart, our mind, our gut feel and our faith with “love”.