Optimization in Relationships

I do not remember, it might have been in high school or college, but we were introduced to the field of mathematics called linear algebra. It returns often to mind when I teach my courses on Artificial Intelligence as it did in the class I am teaching now, and the specific segment that fascinated me was the process of mathematical optimization where decisions have to be made between available choices and eventually find a solution that fits all the criteria. This process forces one to accept and reject some set of variables. Optimization presents a set of choices. To make this mathematical construct accessible to all, I often turn to relatable experiences in our everyday life – such as making choices between relationships and people. In human relationships, there is an unceasing process of trimming, adjusting, and deciding what is essential and what can be let go. We rarely name it “optimization” in the moment - it feels more like instinct, or practicality, or even compromise. Yet underneath, the same mechanics operate. As we learn in mathematics, eliminating a variable from the optimization curve leaves the lingering question – was that variable important? In life it is simply – was that person important? Every choice carries risk. When we decide to let go of a relationship, we do so under the hope that what is cut out will not matter too much. That it is dispensable. That it will not change the core of our life that we are trying to optimize. But in relationships, what is jettisoned is rarely abstract – it is not a variable in a mathematical equation. It is people. Friends, lovers, companions - those who once had significance but now discover, often painfully, that they have been optimized out - replaced as redundant. The hurt here is profound because it is not simply the pain of absence; it is the pain of replacement. To be optimized out is to realize that one’s place has been evaluated against alternatives and found lacking. It is to be reduced to a variable in someone else’s private calculation of efficiency, pleasure, or need. The experience unsettles identity itself, because what is lost is not only a relationship but the confirmation that one mattered. When ejected from the optimization curve one realizes, that even if the person mattered before, now the person deserves no further attention or time. And often, the jettisoning is camouflaged. It does not arrive with open confrontation or honest words, but with phrases of reassurance, gestures of politeness, promises that “nothing has changed.” The words soften the edges, but the reality is visible in the action - or rather, the inaction. The silences stretch longer. The messages remain unanswered. The invitations stop coming. The phone calls disappear and the memories become insignificant. The person is not told they have been discarded, but they feel it in the steady drip of neglect. The contradiction between words and action compounds the wound: one is not only cut away, but also made to question one’s perception of reality. This hurt lingers. It resists closure because it comes with mixed signals, because it is not clean but disguised. Those optimized out often carry the unanswered question: If the words say I still matter, why do the actions say I do not? This tension corrodes trust, making future connections feel dangerous, fragile, conditional – respect disappears. And deeper still, there is the inhumanity of being optimized out, for it is to be subjected to a kind of arithmetic that erases dignity in the cold calculus of another’s efficiency, a silent cruelty that strips a person of humanity by treating them as if they were numbers that can be dropped without residue, yet unlike numbers people bleed, they remember, they ache, they are haunted by the knowledge that they once mattered and were later discarded not with the honesty of rejection but with the cowardice of silence, and when optimized out the message sent is that the variable is either redundant or is a burden in the optimization process and so best jettisoned, and in that silence the cruelty resonates because to be optimized out is to be told one’s humanity has no enduring value, that one’s place was always contingent and provisional, waiting for a better option to arrive, and scholars of relational loss like Bauman (2003) have described this as “liquid love” where attachments are constantly dissolved to make room for new ones, while Bowlby (1980) has shown how the rupture of attachment is not a neutral subtraction but a violent tearing that scars identity, and Laing (1960) reminds us that such ruptures create ontological insecurity where even one’s sense of self becomes unstable, so the wound is not just loss but annihilation of worth, leaving behind not only pain but the chilling recognition of being treated as less than human. Meanwhile, those who remain - those “optimized in”- may rest in fragile comfort, believing themselves secure, chosen, essential. Yet their security is provisional, built on the same logic that once discarded others. What shields them today may exclude them tomorrow, when new options appear or old ones resurface with fresh value. The folly is in mistaking temporary survival in the optimization process for permanence. Time has a way of revealing these dynamics. What was once deemed unnecessary may later be seen as the very thing most vital, and the person optimized out becomes a ghostly presence in memory - irreplaceable, but gone, the switch that will no more offer the current flow. What was once deemed essential may, in turn, be cut away. In this way, optimization ensures that hurt is never far from either side: the wound of rejection for the one discarded, and the quiet fear - though often unacknowledged - that the axe may fall for the one retained. To live in relationship, then, is to live in the paradox of optimization: a process that sustains bonds even as it wounds them, that clarifies what matters even as it diminishes possibilities. It is to exist always within the risk that someone will be declared unnecessary - and to know that such declarations, however camouflaged in words, always reveal themselves in the unmistakable language of inaction. And at that point the words of the song by Spice Girls come alive: "So glad we made it, time will never change it, no, no, no." But, yet, everything is changed for the one who is no longer a part of the optimization equation.