Decoding Love Page 10
Imagine a dating world where the opposite rules applied, where people were not given the freedom to opt into or out of a relationship, such as a culture that still practices arranged marriages. What researchers have found will seem pretty amazing to Westerners weaned on the romantic story line. According to a study by two Indian researchers, the levels of self-reported love in arranged marriages increased over time until they surpassed the level of self-reported love in marriages that were freely chosen. Incredible as it sounds, people with a very limited say in choosing their own spouses eventually became happier with their relationship than people with the freedom to choose anyone they wanted. Think of all the advantages that the unfettered couples have. They know each other’s personalities and their tastes and whether or not there is any physical attraction, and so on. Despite all of that, the arranged marriages do better over the long haul. Why? I believe the secret has a lot to do with the discontent that is a by-product of a society predicated on choice. Cultures that use arranged marriages also frown on divorce, so a married couple knows that they are going to have to make things work. If the relationship sours, they face a lifetime of marital misery, and that offers a powerful incentive for making the best of things. To misquote JFK, it creates a mind-set where you ask not what your marriage can do for you but what you can do for your marriage. Western marriages place such a premium on personal fulfillment that the opposite mind-set prevails.
I’m not advocating a return to arranged marriages. I’m still a fan, albeit a critical one, of romantic love. But I do think that arranged marriages have a valuable lesson to teach all of us consumers. In Schwartz’s terms, we need to learn to be “satisficers,” rather than “maximizers.” What does that mean? Maximizers are the tireless shoppers of the consumer world. They search out every option, try every product, and work very hard to get the best there is. Satisficers search only until they find something good enough, and then they stop looking. Living in a consumer society has a strong tendency to make us into maximizers. And while maximizers may find a better deal, studies show that they are less happy, less optimistic, and more depressed. In looking for love, the time has come for us to learn to be satisficers, not maximizers. That does not necessarily mean settling, but it does mean giving up on the idea of “the one.” When you find someone you think will make you happy, you stop looking, even though there might be someone better out there. Don’t feel that you have to sample every flavor, to chase every opportunity. As the students who sampled all those jams discovered, there is such a thing as too much jam—and too much choice. And there can also be too much dating. If you follow that path, you’re likely to feel less satisfied, no matter whom you choose.
KEEPING UP WITH THE JONESES
Of course, any consideration of consumer society comes with its own neatly prepackaged moral problem, consumerism’s evil henchman—envy. Call it what you will—keeping up with the Joneses, the rat race, status anxiety—the simple fact is that our culture generates a lot of envy and that envy has crept into our judgments about our relationships as well. I live in New York, which is an envy engine if ever there was one. The city not only has greater concentrations of wealth than ever before—it also has created a greater scope to display that wealth than ever before with everything from restaurants that cost one thousand dollars a person to apartments that cost tens of millions of dollars. Imagine Thorstein Veblen’s theory of conspicuous consumption on steroids, and you have a pretty good idea of what I’m talking about.
Unfortunately, all of our struggles to get ahead have put a kink in our souls. Being rich is great, but it turns out that being richer than other people is what really gets our juices flowing. Most of us can accept the fact that in the big scheme of things we are not going to be the wealthiest person in the country or the state or even the city we live in, but we damn well want to make sure that we are the richest on the block. There are plenty of studies to back this up. For instance, a group of students were presented with a simple choice: would you rather live in a world where you made $50,000 a year, while other people made $25,000, or a world in which you made $100,000 while other people made $200,000? The majority said that they would prefer to live in the first world. In other words, what was most important to the students was not their absolute wealth but their relative wealth compared to other people. Researchers have asked similar questions about IQ and education. Time after time, a majority chose the option that improved their relative position. Not only that, but we always assume the grass is greener. When we compare ourselves to other people, studies show that we overestimate how great things are for our neighbors.
In many ways, we are mired once again in the problem of comparison shopping but with a twist—more important than finding the best car or the nicest house is finding one that is better than those of the people around you. And relationships do not escape the pernicious effect of this desire. Just think of how saturated our world is with advertisements filled with beautiful people, and imagine the effect this has on the way we view our romantic partners. In one study, groups of men were shown photographs of either highly attractive women or average women and then asked to judge their commitment to their current romantic partner. Men who looked at the attractive women judged their partner to be less attractive than the men who viewed the average women. Worse, the men who viewed the attractive women rated themselves as less satisfied, less committed, and less close to their partner than their counterparts. If I could offer one piece of advice when it comes to consumerism and dating, it would be for people to spend less time trying to increase the number of choices available and more time trying to enjoy those they already have.
3 ½
The Dating Culture, Part II
What I Learned About Dating from Sex and the City
WHILE CONSUMERISM AFFLICTS ALL OF US, OUR CULTURE has changed in ways that, looked at from the standpoint of dating, is an ongoing disaster for women. Earlier chapters focused on how evolution has shaped men and women to behave in certain ways, and almost all of that behavior qualified in one way or another as politically incorrect, so it should not come as a surprise when I say that feminism as a social and political movement conflicts with some of the most basic and deep drives of evolution. And because social and cultural change occurs with lightning quickness when compared with biological evolution, man and woman as shaped by culture exist uneasily at best with man and woman as shaped by evolution, leading to all sorts of strange lacunae in the mating dance. I have to warn female readers: The following pages are a grim catalog of how our culture is screwing with women.
WHY PRUDISH IS BETTER THAN SLUTTY
Let’s look first at sex. By most accounts, feminism has made real strides in this area. And if the movement hasn’t entirely knocked down boardroom doors, it has certainly done so with bedroom doors. Despite women’s sexual liberation, though, the double standard persists. As anyone who has spent time in an American high school knows, boys who hook up a lot are still considered studs, while girls who do the same are still considered sluts. Even with all of feminism’s advances, it sometimes seems as if the only two sexual positions for women are the Madonna or the whore. Obviously, these stark poles are a completely unrealistic picture of female sexuality, but this dichotomy may play a bigger role in our minds than we think. The world is a complex place, and scientists have found that all of us employ something called “heuristics,” which is a fancy way of saying that we carry around a few simple rules in our heads that help us make many of our decisions. For example, when we taste something bitter, we spit it out. There are very good reasons for this. Many bitter foods are poisonous, and we probably evolved a dislike of bitter foods. But we don’t go through this conscious thought process every time we eat. We don’t consider each mouthful and weigh its various properties. That would be too time consuming. So, avoiding bitter foods acts as a simple heuristic to help us get on with the actual task of eating.
It is possible that the Madonna-whore distinction serves exactly
the same function because it occurs in a number of different cultures around the world. All of us know that this dichotomy is an oversimplification, but I am talking about a level of thought that is below the chatter of our conscious minds. On this deeper level, the Madonna-whore divide serves as a simple heuristic for mating, and you can see the obvious advantages from the male point of view. In the first place, any sexually promiscuous woman is going to be a greater risk for a man when it comes to the task of determining paternity. But there is an even more fundamental reason that takes us all the way back to evolutionary fitness. Remember that the woman is the holder of the precious egg. By that logic, she should be quite choosy when it comes to selecting a mate. If she isn’t, that sends a powerful message—that she is unable to secure a long-term mate and has decided to settle for whatever short-term relationship she can get. In evolutionary terms, she is sending a signal that she is not a particularly desirable mate. And my interviews with men confirmed that this signal comes through loud and clear. The quickest way for a woman to turn herself from a long-term prospect into a short-term hookup is to sleep with a man too soon. How soon is too soon? That’s a little more vague, but if she wants to have a serious relationship, she should definitely prolong the period of waiting.
I know that on a conscious level all of this seems a little far-fetched. But remember—heuristics are a way to help us simplify a complex world. To try to determine precisely the degree of promiscuity that is acceptable, by taking into account individual and societal factors, is an enormously difficult task. The Madonna-whore dichotomy is a way to cut through all of that and divide women quickly and easily into suitable and unsuitable mates. At the very least, women’s sexual liberation has played a direct role in decreasing male commitment. According to a national marriage survey by Rutgers University, the No. 1 reason men give for not committing to one woman is that they know they can get sex without marrying.
There’s also another twist to this story, one that carries a pointed betrayal of sisterhood. It is quite possible that the currency of a term like slut is largely due to women, not men. A sexually promiscuous woman is, in many ways, a larger threat to women with partners than she is to men, because that sexual availability can lure away a boyfriend or a husband for a short-term or even a long-term relationship. The use of a term like slut is a way for women to police the sexual practices of other women and to convince men that certain women are to be avoided precisely because of how sexually available they are.
The obvious advice to take from this if you are a woman is that you should avoid having sex until a man is fully committed to you and that you should not offer your charms to many men. And many of the women I interviewed adopted precisely this strategy once they became more serious about finding a longtime partner. As one woman said, “You need to wait as long as possible. Once you have sex, you lose your uniqueness and become more of a commodity.” Many of the women said that, paradoxically, the more that they like a man, the longer they make him wait before having sex.
But there are obvious drawbacks to this. In the first place, women enjoy sex just as much as men. In the second place, our culture has become so promiscuous that a policy of strict celibacy practiced by any individual woman is likely to keep men away as much as it attracts them. Perhaps the wise strategy is for women simply to increase the amount of time that must pass before they will have sex. With this in mind, I offer my completely unscientific and tongue-in-cheek rule to women trying to decide how long is long enough: double down! In other words, if you typically have sex on the third date, wait until the sixth date. If you typically wait four weeks, try to wait eight. Although this will involve some self-sacrifice in terms of short-term sexual pleasure, it will strengthen the signal that you are a high-quality woman who can afford to be selective about your sexual partners.
It is also worth considering the flip side of this, the stud. Academic studies and common sense both agree on a simple point: attractive men have more sexual partners than average men. Going back once again to our sperm/egg distinction, the reason why becomes obvious: women are willing to sacrifice long-term partnerships for good genes—and they do this quite knowingly. According to one study, women put more emphasis on a man’s looks when they expect the relationship to be short term. For women interested in a relationship, the paradoxical advice is to avoid this type of man altogether. Even if you can convince such a man to commit to you, studies show that he is much more likely to be unfaithful. In other words, the term “stud” should worry women just as much as the term “slut.”
HOW WOMEN CAN BE TOO SUCCESSFUL FOR THEIR OWN GOOD
Sex is not the only area where cultural feminism has run ahead of evolutionary biology. This tangled web has invaded our pocketbooks as well as our bedrooms. Remember that according to evolutionary psychologists women look both for good genes and good resources when selecting a mate. In our postfeminist world, though, more and more women are successfully pursuing high-powered careers and achieving economic success. Given this development, you would expect that these women would place much less emphasis on a man’s resources and much more on his genetic quality. But culture changes much more rapidly than evolution. Nowhere is this more evident than in a successful woman’s attitude toward how successful her future husband needs to be. It turns out that successful women don’t place less importance on a man’s financial success—they place even more emphasis on it. They still want the man to earn more than they do. In fact, injecting female success into relationships has added a new layer of instability. According to one study, when women earn more than their husbands, they are 50 percent more likely to get divorced than a couple in which the wife earns less, and divorce itself is closely linked with women’s economic independence.
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.
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?