Decoding Love (14 page)
Authors: Andrew Trees
This is a problem that is only likely to worsen with time. One examination of the 2005 census data has revealed that women in their twenties earn higher salaries in several major cities than their male counterparts. The reason for this is largely due to education. Fifty-three percent of these women are college graduates versus only 38 percent of men—a double whammy for women from a dating perspective since, on average, men and women prefer for the man to have an equal or greater amount of education. According to a recent
New York Times
article, the salary differential has become a source of hostility between men and women, and many women now downplay their success, even as they still find themselves struggling to overcome their own expectations about men being the primary breadwinners.
New York Times
article, the salary differential has become a source of hostility between men and women, and many women now downplay their success, even as they still find themselves struggling to overcome their own expectations about men being the primary breadwinners.
All of these issues were regularly voiced by the women I interviewed. One woman said that she took her title off her e-mail to avoid intimidating men, while another said that she tried not to mention her degree from Wellesley because she didn’t want to sound like “a Gloria Steinem type.” Another made a point of emphasizing certain weaknesses, such as always joking about her inability to find her keys, as a way to come across as less intelligent. And a number of women hid the fact that they owned their apartments. Success at work also creates its own identity issues. A successful marketing executive said that she had problems when she would go out on a date directly from work. At work, she had a serious, no-nonsense attitude, and she would carry this attitude into the date, which immediately turned off most men who wanted to feel that they were in control. She kept hearing from mutual friends that the men found her “intimidating.” She now goes home after work, changes clothes, and consciously tries to act more feminine and demure.
While men are hesitant to say that they are turned off by female success, most admit that it does play a role in their dating. All of the men I interviewed said that they did not like “hard-core feminists.” Most also expressed doubts about a relationship in which the woman was more successful. Only a few men would say that they were actually threatened. Most preferred to couch their concern in a more oblique way by saying that it was a sign that the woman “didn’t share my values” or “wouldn’t be a good mother.”
All of this reveals a gap that has opened up between the environment we were shaped for and the culture in which we now find ourselves. Common sense suggests that a successful working woman should be interested in a man’s genes, not his salary. Not only does she not need the money, it could be argued that going after a very successful man is counterproductive for the relationship. At the very least, such a man is probably committed to his work in a way that will force the woman to make sacrifices in her own career and that two high-powered careers could very well place additional strains on the marriage. Despite that, nearly every woman I interviewed said that she would not go out with someone less successful than she was.
Of course, this is what happens when a culture of abundance runs into evolution based on scarcity. For most of our history, we have struggled to feed ourselves. But too few calories is no longer the problem. Too many calories is. We have been conditioned for hundreds of thousands of years to stock up on calories when they are available, which is a great strategy when you are grubbing in the dirt for food but is a big problem when the 7-Eleven is right around the corner. The same sort of thinking is at work when it comes to women and financial resources. Study after study has shown that after you get past the deprivations of poverty, more money does not do much to increase your happiness. In a study asking people to report how much of the time they were in a bad mood the previous day, people earning less than $20,000 clocked in only 12 percent higher than people earning more than $100,000, which is less than most of us would have guessed. But we are programmed to secure as many resources as we can, even if those come at the cost of our own happiness. If you don’t believe me, let’s try a little experiment. Imagine you are faced with two propositions. You can either earn $40,000 a year and live a very happy life, or you can earn $500,000 a year and live a mildly unhappy life. Which option is more appealing?
Most of us would be better off in our relationships if money played a smaller role in our decisions about which people we should date. Successful women, if they can overcome their natural prejudice, would especially benefit from looking for relationships with men who are less successful financially, and there are occasional glimmers of this, such as articles about white-collar women dating blue-collar men. The competition is less fierce for those men, and there is a very good chance that the man will devote more time and energy to the relationship than a high-powered careerist—if both partners can overcome their innate prejudices about who should bring home the bacon.
Education for women has also been a mixed blessing when it comes to dating. I realize that one of the fundamental pillars of feminism is opening wide the doors of academia for women, and I support that. But it comes with a definite cost. In the first place, the more education a woman has, the older she is when she marries. On average, American women marry when they are twenty-five. If they have a college degree, that average rises to twenty-seven. A master’s or professional degree lifts that to thirty. The reason this matters is because age is a crucial component of a woman’s prospects. Men tend to marry younger women, so the older a woman gets, the smaller her dating pool becomes. In addition, education shrinks a woman’s dating pool because men also tend to marry women with less education than they themselves have. Finally, intelligence itself appears to be a hindrance for women looking to marry. According to one study, women who had never married were much more intelligent than average—of course, feminists can claim that more intelligent women are too smart to fall for a patriarchal trap like marriage.
If you have any doubts about the larger cultural anxieties currently surrounding the dating scene for successful women, you only need to look at recent movies, which have offered a never-ending stream of stories about confident, capable women and the feckless men they are trying to shoehorn into marriage:
High Fidelity, About a Boy
(virtually the entire Nick Hornby oeuvre, in fact),
Old School, Failure to Launch, Knocked Up,
and
Wedding Crashers
just to name a few. Although the overt message of
Sex and the City
was that single, professional, successful women in New York City had sustaining friendships and exciting lives in which men were more accessory than essential, the implicit message was the opposite—that they desperately needed a man in their lives.
High Fidelity, About a Boy
(virtually the entire Nick Hornby oeuvre, in fact),
Old School, Failure to Launch, Knocked Up,
and
Wedding Crashers
just to name a few. Although the overt message of
Sex and the City
was that single, professional, successful women in New York City had sustaining friendships and exciting lives in which men were more accessory than essential, the implicit message was the opposite—that they desperately needed a man in their lives.
Of course, one key element is out of the control of men, women, culture, or evolution—demographics. Because, to some extent, it is all a question of numbers, and when you tally up the latest population figures, what you discover is that the odds are currently stacked against women when it comes to dating.
If you are old enough, you probably remember a famous article that
Newsweek
ran back in 1986, which reported that single women in their forties were more likely to be killed by a terrorist attack than to get married. What is particularly interesting about this bogus factoid is the willingness of so many of us to believe it for so long. Why would we be willing to accept something that should have sounded about as plausible as the idea of aliens abducting humans? The reason is that the theory spoke to a larger cultural anxiety. It may not have accurately described the situation, but for many single women it offered confirmation of what they were feeling at the time. And what they were feeling—without realizing it—was a massive demographic shift.
Newsweek
ran back in 1986, which reported that single women in their forties were more likely to be killed by a terrorist attack than to get married. What is particularly interesting about this bogus factoid is the willingness of so many of us to believe it for so long. Why would we be willing to accept something that should have sounded about as plausible as the idea of aliens abducting humans? The reason is that the theory spoke to a larger cultural anxiety. It may not have accurately described the situation, but for many single women it offered confirmation of what they were feeling at the time. And what they were feeling—without realizing it—was a massive demographic shift.
The women who found that statistic so plausible were the first generation of women to grow up after the feminist revolution. They were the proud inheritors of the right to work, and many of them pursued careers. But those careers came with a price. And that price was a shrinking dating pool.
The fear of a shortage of marriageable men has a long and proud history in our culture. Just think of all of the portrayals of spinsters, with their powerful reminders to women of what happens if they fail in the dating game, going all the way back to colonial times. Lest women think that their worries today are fundamentally different than those of some earlier golden age, such as the 1950s, they only need to read women’s magazines from that period, which published articles on where to find eligible husbands and even ran data from the U.S. Census to determine which areas of the country had the most favorable ratios for women.
But the feminist revolution of the 1960s and 1970s accelerated certain demographic trends that significantly worsened the problem. With women pursuing careers, they were also marrying later, and this had profound repercussions because it ran into another trend that probably goes all the way back to our days on the grassy savannas—men tend to marry women younger than they are. According to studies, women look for men who are three and a half years older on average, while men prefer women roughly two and a half years younger. As we saw in the chapter on evolution, there is a fairly obvious reason for these preferences: men want access to women who can successfully reproduce, and so they seek out younger women. Women want men who can provide for them, so they seek out men who are older and more established. This is largely unconscious but no less potent because of that. And marriages do generally conform to these desires. In 1996, first-time brides were on average 24.8 years old, and first-time grooms were 27.1 years old.
All well and good, but that still doesn’t explain why anyone found it even remotely plausible that a woman would have a greater chance of dying in a terrorist attack after the age of 40 than she would of marrying. To see why that struck some people as plausible, we have to consider the implication of this skewed age preference as it works over time. Because women prefer to marry someone older, their dating pool naturally shrinks with each passing year, while the dating pool of men expands with each year. In other words, men find their stock rising as dating prospects at precisely the moment that women find their stock falling. So, while the Enjoli perfume ad may have promised women that they could bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan, it neglected to tell them that they might not have someone to cook for—namely, a man.
And age is not the only criteria that feminism has influenced. As I’ve discussed, men and woman also pay attention to things like education, income, and professional status. So, men tend to marry women who are younger, make less money, have less education, and are lower on the corporate ladder (there are many stories of male bosses marrying their secretaries, but I have yet to hear one about the female boss who married a male secretary). This is why the dating scene is not necessarily the friendliest place for successful, single women in their thirties or forties—and why that ridiculous terrorism statistic gained such widespread currency.
An added twist worsens this demographic trend for older women—age preferences do not remain stable. As men grow older, they are no longer satisfied with a woman only two to three years younger. They want a woman even younger. According to statistics taken from personal ads in newspapers, men in their thirties want a woman roughly five years younger, while men in their fifties want a woman ten to twenty years younger. Marriage statistics bear this out. For first marriages, American grooms are roughly three years older. By their second marriage, that number climbs to five years, and by third marriages men are on average eight years older.
What all this means is that the gains of feminism in the workplace are a double-edged sword. Although women are rising to ever-greater positions of power in corporations around the country, they are often putting their romantic lives on hold to do so.
Feminism has empowered women, but it has left them with a stark choice: improve their career prospects or improve their marriage prospects. If women really want the best partner, they should look for him when their stock is highest, while they are in their twenties. If enough women do this, there will also be fewer single women in their thirties, which would improve the dating situation for those women as well. Of course, early marriage comes with a career cost, particularly if marriage also leads to motherhood. One ingenious economist has discovered that a woman in her twenties will increase her lifetime earnings by 10 percent if she delays the birth of her child by a year. That’s
lifetime
earnings, not a 10 percent increase for one year but a 10 percent increase (on average) each and every year for the rest of her life, just for waiting an additional year to have a child. It’s enough to make a Chia pet start to seem like a plausible alternative to children.
lifetime
earnings, not a 10 percent increase for one year but a 10 percent increase (on average) each and every year for the rest of her life, just for waiting an additional year to have a child. It’s enough to make a Chia pet start to seem like a plausible alternative to children.
I consider myself a feminist, and I am certainly not trying to argue that women shouldn’t pursue a career if that is what they want to do. But I don’t think it serves anyone’s interest to deny that a woman’s career carries a romantic cost, particularly if her career delays her interest in marriage. If women can be honest with themselves about that cost from the start, then it may alleviate some of the angst that often afflicts so many single women in their thirties and forties.
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