Decoding Love (16 page)
Authors: Andrew Trees
If you don’t believe me, all we need to do is analyze a few dating books with the tools of economics to see that they are almost woefully simplistic. Take, for instance, that dating sensation of the 1990s,
The Rules.
As the title suggests, it contained a number of rules to guide women’s behavior when they were dating, rules about how much to talk on the phone and when to go on a date and on and on. This book spawned an entire dating industry—
The Rules II, The Rules for Online Dating, The Rules for Marriage, The Rules Dating Journal.
Ironically, one of the authors ended up divorced, although, given divorce rates, I would argue that she was a victim of percentages, rather than a victim of her own rules. Looked at from the standpoint of economics, though, only one rule was at work—creating an artificial scarcity to drive up a woman’s market price. All the rules were designed to make the woman less available to men, to create the sense that any time with her was something of great value. I’m not arguing against the effectiveness of this strategy. I’m simply trying to show how, when you strip away the rhetoric, most dating advice is very simple.
The Rules.
As the title suggests, it contained a number of rules to guide women’s behavior when they were dating, rules about how much to talk on the phone and when to go on a date and on and on. This book spawned an entire dating industry—
The Rules II, The Rules for Online Dating, The Rules for Marriage, The Rules Dating Journal.
Ironically, one of the authors ended up divorced, although, given divorce rates, I would argue that she was a victim of percentages, rather than a victim of her own rules. Looked at from the standpoint of economics, though, only one rule was at work—creating an artificial scarcity to drive up a woman’s market price. All the rules were designed to make the woman less available to men, to create the sense that any time with her was something of great value. I’m not arguing against the effectiveness of this strategy. I’m simply trying to show how, when you strip away the rhetoric, most dating advice is very simple.
And the same lesson applies to dating books for men. As you would expect given the earlier chapters about men’s desire for more frequent and more varied sex, most of these books are written to help men seduce women and not to put them into a long-term relationship. Let me take one representative example, Neil Strauss’s
The Game.
The book is even printed to look like a bible, as if it contains the eternal secrets of male seduction. As with
The Rules
, it contains a wealth of complicated techniques. The book becomes incredibly basic, though, when looked at through the lens of economics. It simply applies the logic of the market to dating: it treats each and every encounter with a woman as a negotiation in which you are trying to undermine a woman’s sense of her own value and inflate her sense of your value. Again, I’m not trying to argue that this technique is not effective. I’m sure men who master it are very successful. What I am trying to suggest is that economics and game theory might be able to provide a deeper level of insight.
The Game.
The book is even printed to look like a bible, as if it contains the eternal secrets of male seduction. As with
The Rules
, it contains a wealth of complicated techniques. The book becomes incredibly basic, though, when looked at through the lens of economics. It simply applies the logic of the market to dating: it treats each and every encounter with a woman as a negotiation in which you are trying to undermine a woman’s sense of her own value and inflate her sense of your value. Again, I’m not trying to argue that this technique is not effective. I’m sure men who master it are very successful. What I am trying to suggest is that economics and game theory might be able to provide a deeper level of insight.
Let’s start with the idea of analyzing dating using that powerful tool first developed by Adam Smith: the market. This is not as strange as it may sound. Attempts to understand relationships using the decidedly unromantic methods of economics have been going on for quite some time. It all began with the economist Gary Becker who wrote an article back in 1973 titled, “A Theory of Marriage: Part I” in the
Journal of Political Economy
(Part II was published the following year). He assumed that rational-minded daters would search for the most desirable mates, which led him to predict “positive associative matching” or, in plain English, the idea that men and women with roughly similar levels of desirability would pair off. This simple conclusion involved numerous equations and lots of math. Becker is, after all, a Nobel Prize winner, not just some loudmouth down at your local bar, and he won his Nobel for finding ways to apply economic analysis to all sorts of human behaviors not usually associated with economics, such as marriage. Unwittingly, Becker provided the first tentative hints of how to apply theory and mathematical rigor to the distinctly fuzzy world of male-female relationships, and that initial inquiry has spawned thousands of followers.
Journal of Political Economy
(Part II was published the following year). He assumed that rational-minded daters would search for the most desirable mates, which led him to predict “positive associative matching” or, in plain English, the idea that men and women with roughly similar levels of desirability would pair off. This simple conclusion involved numerous equations and lots of math. Becker is, after all, a Nobel Prize winner, not just some loudmouth down at your local bar, and he won his Nobel for finding ways to apply economic analysis to all sorts of human behaviors not usually associated with economics, such as marriage. Unwittingly, Becker provided the first tentative hints of how to apply theory and mathematical rigor to the distinctly fuzzy world of male-female relationships, and that initial inquiry has spawned thousands of followers.
Before I dive into this world, though, I want to emphasize that while the mathematical analysis is valid, it can get pretty weird pretty fast. Economists are busy these days slapping values on all sorts of things that you probably thought were impossible to quantify. For example, if you increase the amount of sex you have from once a month to once a week, economists estimate that it has the same effect on your happiness as a $50,000 rise in your yearly income. Has “earning” an extra $50,000 a year ever sounded easier? Marriage is worth an extra $115,000. For a woman, semen is worth $1,500 because there are a variety of chemicals in it that boost a woman’s mood when absorbed vaginally, and touch brings us an additional $26,000 in well-being by reducing stress levels and boosting our serotonin and dopamine levels. Economists have even put dollar figures on things like orgasms ($7,000) and sweat ($15,500). Interesting? Yes. But all of this is likely a classic example of the old saying about knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing. A mathematician named Sergio Rinaldi has even developed equations to quantify love. Sounds great, doesn’t it? The mystery of love solved with the precision of a mathematical formula. The mathematically inclined among you are probably already perking up and thinking that all of your problems are over. Well, let me keep you in suspense no longer. Here are the equations he developed:
Helpful? I didn’t think so. The equations come from Clio Cresswell’s
Mathematics and Sex.
Her book is filled with equations like that and is quite an enjoyable read. The main thing it taught me, though, was not that math can explain the mysteries of love but that math itself is fairly mysterious for a layman like myself. When it comes to remembering numbers, most of us are not much more sophisticated than our ancestors on the savanna. George Miller, a cognitive psychologist, wrote a famous essay in 1956 called “The Magical Number Seven.” He found that most of us can’t hold more than about seven things in our short-term memory at any one time. So, I offer this chapter to you with one caveat. Take everything in it with a grain of salt. Will it contain some interesting information? Yes. Should you take it all literally? No. While game theory and economics can provide incredibly powerful analytical tools for understanding dating, real life can never be reduced to simple formulas.
Mathematics and Sex.
Her book is filled with equations like that and is quite an enjoyable read. The main thing it taught me, though, was not that math can explain the mysteries of love but that math itself is fairly mysterious for a layman like myself. When it comes to remembering numbers, most of us are not much more sophisticated than our ancestors on the savanna. George Miller, a cognitive psychologist, wrote a famous essay in 1956 called “The Magical Number Seven.” He found that most of us can’t hold more than about seven things in our short-term memory at any one time. So, I offer this chapter to you with one caveat. Take everything in it with a grain of salt. Will it contain some interesting information? Yes. Should you take it all literally? No. While game theory and economics can provide incredibly powerful analytical tools for understanding dating, real life can never be reduced to simple formulas.
With that said, let’s see if we can’t ferret out some useful ideas from the dismal science and its equally gloomy cousin, game theory. First of all, let’s start with the idea of the “marriage market.” We all like to believe that we fall in love with someone for individual and idiosyncratic reasons. It makes us feel much better about ourselves because we can imagine that we are not the sort of people who make cold-blooded decisions about relationships. It also makes us feel better about love by providing a far more uplifting conception of our relationships than the cold, hard logic of the marketplace. But there is good evidence that the dating world really does function as a market and an efficient one at that. Researchers can literally chart on a graph the values that people place on various qualities, and despite our complexities as individuals, most of dating can be boiled down to a stunningly simple list of attributes. In broad terms, a woman’s market value is dependent on her fecundity and attractiveness, while men are judged based on their earning potential and their commitment. It may seem entirely too simplistic to reduce dating to these criteria. After all, each of us has many more individual preferences. In general, though, these few variables are the key determinants of market value. In one study of lonely hearts ads in four major newspapers, the ads offered a perfect confirmation of this market-based approach. The older the women were, the less demanding they became in their advertisements. The higher a woman rated herself in terms of attractiveness, the higher the demands she made in her ad. Men who claimed to have greater resources were also more demanding, while men with fewer resources offered more commitment. I don’t think we go around with well-defined market values in our head as we search for a mate. But I do think that, over time, our dating experiences gives us a sense of our worth, and we naturally gravitate to people of similar market value. In other words, I’m not saying that we fall in love with someone just because we think we are getting fair value for our own appeal; rather, our sense of our own appeal predisposes us to fall in love with someone of similar market value.
Although most people I interviewed were understandably hesitant to confess to such crass calculations, almost everyone admitted that marketlike thinking shaped his or her own approach to dating whether that was by listening to a friend arguing “that you could do better” or not approaching someone because he or she was “out of my league.” One woman even confessed that she made a regular assessment of the “breakup value” of the relationship after it ended. She would inventory all the gifts she had received, tote up their value, and decide if the compensation “had made it worth the effort or not.”
Despite the stigma associated with a market-oriented approach, one woman was an exuberant practitioner of market-style negotiations when it came to dating. As an MBA student, she was given a certain number of points each semester to bid for a place in popular classes. One semester, she blew her entire allotment to get into a class on negotiation, which was either a sign of her passion for the subject or a recognition of an abject lack of negotiating skills. The next semester, she immediately used what she learned in her dating. She was taught to analyze what the best alternative was to what she was offering and then work to weaken that alternative at the same time that she strengthened her position. In her own case, she found herself interested in a man who already had a girlfriend. So, she set about pointing out all the ways that his current girlfriend fell short. To increase her own appeal, she engaged in a variety of tactics to make herself seem more desirable. She flirted with other men in front of him and talked to him about their interest in her. She also downplayed her own career ambitions, which she feared would be a stumbling block. Finally, after softening him up, she brought him to the table and negotiated explicitly with him, noting all the reasons a relationship with her would benefit him and putting the squeeze on him by saying that she was going to move on if he was not ready to commit. Romantic? No. Effective? Yes. They are currently dating. Regardless of whether or not they stay together, I think it is safe to say that she is a woman who will go far. I’m not suggesting that everyone should start treating dating like haggling for a used car, but I do hope you find it reasonably convincing that the principles of the market can be applied to the world of dating.
If you accept that the logic of the market also rules the dating world to some extent, you can map out all of your moves according to one simple guideline. Is this likely to increase or decrease my market value? As much as possible, you want to position yourself as an object of scarcity and value. This sounds stunningly simple, so much so that I almost feel I am insulting your intelligence to state it so baldly, but it is also stunning how often people act in ways contrary to this, such as inundating an ex with phone calls or e-mails.
You also need to be honest about your own sticker price. If you are rich and beautiful and talented and funny and kind, you have tremendous market value and can get just about everything you could possibly want in a mate. But what if you are only average or, worse, below average? As many studies have shown, we are very reluctant to admit that and usually inflate our market value to the detriment of our love lives. In a recent survey, fewer than 1 percent of people rated themselves as less attractive than average, which means that 49 percent of us are fooling ourselves. Unfortunately, the cruel logic of the market applies not only to others but to ourselves, and the sad truth is that almost all of us like to imagine that we are more of a catch than we actually are.
What if we could be brutally honest and admit our inadequacies? What should we do then? In the open market, how should we go about selecting a mate? One researcher decided to find out. He set up an experiment in which he created a “mating market.” People were given a certain number of mating dollars to spend on the qualities they wanted in their partner. By giving some people tight budgets (in effect, giving them a low market value), he was able to find out what were the absolute necessities of mate choice and what were the luxuries. Women with small budgets spent their precious dollars on intelligence, money, work ethic, and a sense of humor. Men with only a few dollars proved to be much simpler creatures. They spent their money on physical attractiveness, which is something that women consider a luxury.
The real dating market is not as simple as the experiment, though, nor is it as straightforward as it was when Becker wrote his groundbreaking articles in the 1970s. It has become much larger and more complicated. There used to be all sorts of constraints—geographic, social, economic—that limited your dating choices at any one time to a relatively small set of people. Now, though, the Internet offers almost limitless choices unfettered by any of the usual restraints—what you might call the globalization of dating. As you’ll remember from the last chapter, multiplying the number of choices is not necessarily a good thing, and according to one recent study, many people are finding this expanded market overwhelming. The authors of the study call it “the chaos of love.”
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