let's see: assuming frictionless spherical dating partners, if we're optimising over the period 16-86 this formula yields M* of 11, suggesting that one should have started dating the person one will marry in one's late 20s. That smoke check passes...

(M* could also be used to determine the cutover point at which one should stop exploring critical mass geometries and start engineering a bomb around the best geometry discovered so far, but surely nothing of that sort ever happened!)

Not that Feynman was involved in the Manhattan Project or anything like that.

Also, for the dating problem you propose I think it's better to frame it as the "secretary problem", which similar but slightly different.