Decoding Love Page 11
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.
MEN DON’T MAKE PASSES AT WOMEN WHO WEAR GLASSES
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.
IT’S ALL IN THE NUMBERS
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
THE CONSOLATIONS OF SINGLENESS—AT LEAST FOR WOMEN
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 cultura
l 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.