Decoding Love (15 page)
Authors: Andrew Trees
None of this means that older women are doomed. These are only averages, and if averages told the whole story, we would all have 1.86 children. There are plenty of couples among whom the woman is the same age or older. But it does help to be aware of these preferences because when they are multiplied over entire populations, they can have enormous consequences. That’s why the loudest complaints about dating usually are heard in large cities where these imbalances can be felt more powerfully (you could also argue that living in a large city is bad for a couple, regardless of any other factors. According to one study, proximity to many potential partners has a powerful effect on marriage and leads to more divorce even for couples who consider themselves happy).
Call it the multiplying power of small preferences. I live in New York City, which is one of those places where the numbers are particularly hard on women. In Manhattan and the outer boroughs, there are roughly ninety men for every one hundred women. That ratio may not sound that bad. After all, it leaves us with just one female lonely heart for every eighteen contented people. But that ratio understates the case because many people are already in relationships of one sort or another, so 9:10 could turn out to be something like 4:5, in which case you’ve just doubled the number of lonely hearts and laid the groundwork for the popularity of a show like
Sex and the City,
which echoed the feelings of many professional women who had been told they could have it all but hadn’t been told that there might be a price to pay.
Sex and the City,
which echoed the feelings of many professional women who had been told they could have it all but hadn’t been told that there might be a price to pay.
How tough a town is New York for a single woman in her thirties? One British woman signed up for a slew of dating services, hoping to find a husband, and became so disheartened after two years of looking that she left the country and returned to Great Britain to look for a husband on native soil. And a number of women complained of the gross disparity in standards. While they were supposed to have all sorts of wonderful qualities, any man who was single, heterosexual, and had a job was considered a catch.
My interviews also revealed that for many men the demographic imbalance has made New York into a sexual Shangri-la (especially if they are reasonably successful). If I had to sum up in one word the attitude of a number of single men I interviewed, it would be “smug.” Many of the men were uncomfortable even applying the word “dating” to what they were doing because that imposed too many constraints. They preferred to speak about “hanging out” and “hooking up,” phrases too nebulous to be defined as anything implying commitment.
You don’t need to look at a city-sized population to see how sensitive dating is to numbers. A study of speed daters turned up a similar effect. No matter how many people were participating on any given night, men’s selectivity did not change. Bigger groups simply meant that they would ask out greater numbers of women. But women were highly sensitive to group size. When the groups were small (fewer than fifteen people), women were no more selective than men, but as the group size increased, so did the selectivity of the women.
Marcia Guttentag wrote an entire book about this, titled appropriately enough
Too Many Women?
Before World War II, there was always an excess of men, but the post-war decades have reversed that, providing a ratio of ninety-five men for one hundred women. As her work reveals, this small gap has surprisingly large consequences. Let’s look at one representative year from her book. In 1970, among Americans fourteen years and older, there were ninety-two men for every one hundred women. That represented a surplus of roughly five million women. Once she removed married women from the count, though, the gap may have remained at five million, but the ratio significantly worsened, leaving only eighty-one men for every one hundred women. According to my own rough calculations based on the census data from 2006, there are approximately ninety-four men for every one hundred women today in America.
Too Many Women?
Before World War II, there was always an excess of men, but the post-war decades have reversed that, providing a ratio of ninety-five men for one hundred women. As her work reveals, this small gap has surprisingly large consequences. Let’s look at one representative year from her book. In 1970, among Americans fourteen years and older, there were ninety-two men for every one hundred women. That represented a surplus of roughly five million women. Once she removed married women from the count, though, the gap may have remained at five million, but the ratio significantly worsened, leaving only eighty-one men for every one hundred women. According to my own rough calculations based on the census data from 2006, there are approximately ninety-four men for every one hundred women today in America.
Of course, different demographic categories can have wildly different prospects. For instance, people tend to marry someone of their own race and ethnicity. For all white men and women between the ages of fifteen and forty-four, the ratio is a balanced one hundred three men for every one hundred women, based on the 2006 census, while the ratio of all black men to women from the ages of fifteen to forty-four is eighty-seven men for every one hundred women.
These skewed numbers don’t simply have ramifications for a woman’s ability to get a date. They also have a profound influence on society as a whole. As Guttentag realized, sex ratios shape sex roles. Looking at the historical record, Guttentag found that societies with more women than men shared a number of characteristics, such as a rise in illegitimate births and an increase in sexual libertarianism. Of course, none of this means that demographics is destiny. After all, no one marries .94 of a partner, even if our mates do sometimes fall short of our ideal.
But, single women, take heart! I also come with some very good news, which should liberate you from certain stereotypes with which you are bludgeoned. Even if demographics and our culture are working against you, the latest science reveals that it is men who should be far more worried about finding the right partner. All those jokes about inept bachelors living in a sinkhole of their own filth appear to contain some truth. You only need to take a look at average life expectancy for married men and women versus single men and women. To pick the starkest example, nine out of ten married men alive at forty-eight will still be alive at sixty-five. The corresponding rate for single men? Six out of ten (with divorced and widowed men faring only slightly better than confirmed bachelors). Not getting married is worse for a man than heart disease. While heart disease will shorten a man’s life by a little under six years, not being married will shorten it by almost a decade. Women benefit from marriage as well. A nonmarried woman has a 50 percent higher rate of mortality. But men benefit far more—a nonmarried man has a mortality rate 250 percent higher. So, despite the cultural stereotypes, men seem to need marriage more than women do. You can see this by how eager each sex is to remarry. Men are four times more likely to remarry, and they remarry sooner as well, averaging only three years between wives compared to nine years for women.
When you look at more nebulous measures, such as life satisfaction, the contrast is also stark. While married men have greater life satisfaction than single men, the situation is reversed for women. Single women actually have greater life satisfaction than their married counterparts. One study has even identified a “happiness gap” that has opened up between men and women. In the early 1970s, surveys showed that women were slightly happier than men, but that situation is now reversed, leaving men as the happier sex. The reason for this is likely due to the incomplete gains of feminism. Since the 1960s, the amount of time men spend working has gone down, while the amount of time they spend relaxing has gone up. Meanwhile, woman may do less housework, but they have also added a great deal more paid work to their schedules. Forty years ago, women spent about two hours a day doing work they found unpleasant, about forty minutes more than men. Now, that gap has grown to ninety minutes. Perhaps never before has the old country and western lament about how hard it is to be a woman been more true.
Unfortunately, the idea that being single is worse for men than it is for women is rarely the message that our culture sends out to single women. Just think of our cultural stereotypes. A single woman is expected to sink gradually into the slough of despond, alone except for her cats. By contrast, a man alone still inspires—although to a lesser degree than he used to—thoughts of a swinging bachelor along the lines of George Clooney. Unsurprisingly, this causes a certain amount of defensiveness in single women. Maureen Dowd, a successful single woman if ever there was one, titled her most recent book
Are Men Necessary?
It is almost impossible to imagine a successful single man giving his book the title
Are Women Necessary?
You could argue that men are simply too egotistical to worry that much about the opposite sex. For example, Christopher Hitchens wrote a book entitled
God Is Not Great
, which, translated into Dowd’s terms, could be called
Is God Necessary?
so men get to worry about God while women worry about men. In fact, there is a whole subgenre of advice books that reveal the pervasive anxiety of women through their very stridence. My personal favorite:
Why cucumbers are better than men.
These books are the result of the intense pressure that our society places on single women. This is hardly a new phenomenon. One theory behind the Salem witch trials is that they were largely caused by the fear of young women in Salem that they wouldn’t be able to find husbands.
Are Men Necessary?
It is almost impossible to imagine a successful single man giving his book the title
Are Women Necessary?
You could argue that men are simply too egotistical to worry that much about the opposite sex. For example, Christopher Hitchens wrote a book entitled
God Is Not Great
, which, translated into Dowd’s terms, could be called
Is God Necessary?
so men get to worry about God while women worry about men. In fact, there is a whole subgenre of advice books that reveal the pervasive anxiety of women through their very stridence. My personal favorite:
Why cucumbers are better than men.
These books are the result of the intense pressure that our society places on single women. This is hardly a new phenomenon. One theory behind the Salem witch trials is that they were largely caused by the fear of young women in Salem that they wouldn’t be able to find husbands.
That the reality of single women is so severely at odds with the stereotypical perception does not lessen the difficulties of a woman who wants to live her life in defiance of the romantic story line. But I hope that this data at least relieves some of the pressure, because the truth is, based on the available statistics, women should worry a lot less about getting married, and men should worry a lot more.
4
The Dating Game
What I Learned About Dating from Adam Smith
T
HERE IS A PARLOR GAME I’VE INVENTED CALLED The Dating Game (patent pending). It’s simple. Each life choice you make either increases or shrinks your potential dating pool. Let’s take my own life as an example. I went to an Ivy League college. That’s excellent news for my dating pool. Women tend to marry someone with as much or more education than they have, and I get an added bonus for going to a prestigious school. After a few years in journalism (subtract points for low-earning potential but add some back in for having an interesting job), I went back to school for an advanced degree, which turned out to be a mixed blessing. I should have increased my dating pool because I could add women with advanced degrees to the mix, except that I made a fatal miscalculation. I did not get an MBA or a law degree, two very dependable engines of economic success; instead, I earned a Ph.D. in history. The job prospects are not great for humanities Ph.D.s, and even if you get a job, you will never achieve great financial wealth, although you will live a very comfortable middle- to upper-middle-class life. Since economic resources play an outsized role in a man’s desirability, that put a definite ceiling on my dating prospects.
HERE IS A PARLOR GAME I’VE INVENTED CALLED The Dating Game (patent pending). It’s simple. Each life choice you make either increases or shrinks your potential dating pool. Let’s take my own life as an example. I went to an Ivy League college. That’s excellent news for my dating pool. Women tend to marry someone with as much or more education than they have, and I get an added bonus for going to a prestigious school. After a few years in journalism (subtract points for low-earning potential but add some back in for having an interesting job), I went back to school for an advanced degree, which turned out to be a mixed blessing. I should have increased my dating pool because I could add women with advanced degrees to the mix, except that I made a fatal miscalculation. I did not get an MBA or a law degree, two very dependable engines of economic success; instead, I earned a Ph.D. in history. The job prospects are not great for humanities Ph.D.s, and even if you get a job, you will never achieve great financial wealth, although you will live a very comfortable middle- to upper-middle-class life. Since economic resources play an outsized role in a man’s desirability, that put a definite ceiling on my dating prospects.
After graduate school, I moved to New York City, which also had a mixed effect on my dating. On the one hand, New York has a great many men who are successful financially. I came for a high school teaching job, which put me at the lower end of professional salaries and also shrunk my dating pool by losing me the status points I might have had as a college professor. On the other hand, I did have demographics in my favor since New York has fewer men than women. Being in my midthirties also helped because, as you know from the last chapter, women tend to marry older men.
In the dating pool at this point, I was in reasonable shape, although hardly a blockbuster candidate. I had some of the things women look for (education, financial stability, no excessive problems with halitosis), but I fell short in one crucial area, financial success. My prospects were middling. In certain dating microclimates, such as a culture with a greater-than-average respect for education, I would probably have a better chance than in the population at large. So what happened? I won’t keep you in suspense any longer about our hapless, overeducated hero. I am currently married. Interestingly, my wife is Korean American, so there are possibly cultural factors that have given her a greater respect for education than your typical American, although she seems thoroughly unimpressed with my advanced degree when it comes to the usual marital disagreements.
But things would have been much worse for me if I were a woman. As we’ve already seen, men tend not to marry a woman with more education, so a Ph.D. would have been a real albatross. Also, moving to New York would have been a lousy idea because of the shortage of men. Finally, with each year I failed to marry, a cruel mathematical logic would have been working against me. As Andy, male Ph.D., each year that passed increased my dating pool. But as Andi, female Ph.D., each year would have shrunk the dating pool.
While I don’t think that The Dating Game is going to turn out to be the Monopoly of the twenty-first century, it does provide a valuable lesson about the way that dating itself is susceptible to a certain kind of market analysis in which you can predict how each move in your life can increase or decrease your value. Of course, no game can ever master the unpredictability of life. As Andi, female Ph.D., I was perhaps destined to meet and marry that sensitive male English Ph.D. who shared my love of Austen and was happy to name our children after our favorite literary characters (Chuzzlewit Trees practically rolls off the tongue). But academic disciplines such as economics and game theory allow us to consider dating in a rational and unsentimental light. Needless to say, when you start talking about something like dating through the lens of the dismal science, you are about as far from the romantic story line as it is possible to be.
Oddly enough, the whole idea for
Decoding Love
first began to take shape when I was reading a book about economics—more specifically, a chapter on how game theory is being used by economists to run more effective auctions (that is, more effective from the sellers’ point of view since the new methods are all about squeezing the maximum number of dollars from the buyers). As I read about auctions, a question popped into my mind—why couldn’t you use game theory to help navigate the world of dating?
Decoding Love
has evolved a long way from that original question. But the core idea of whether or not science could provide better answers about the how and why of dating remained. And this chapter is my attempt to examine that question by using economics and game theory. Even if those two approaches offer no final answers, they can at least give us a clearer understanding of some of the forces at work.
Decoding Love
first began to take shape when I was reading a book about economics—more specifically, a chapter on how game theory is being used by economists to run more effective auctions (that is, more effective from the sellers’ point of view since the new methods are all about squeezing the maximum number of dollars from the buyers). As I read about auctions, a question popped into my mind—why couldn’t you use game theory to help navigate the world of dating?
Decoding Love
has evolved a long way from that original question. But the core idea of whether or not science could provide better answers about the how and why of dating remained. And this chapter is my attempt to examine that question by using economics and game theory. Even if those two approaches offer no final answers, they can at least give us a clearer understanding of some of the forces at work.
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