How Many Friends Does One Person Need? (25 page)

So my appeal is not to the hackneyed Victorian virtues of rote learning for the sake of parroting knowledge, but to the crucial role that rote learning seems to play in our intellectual development. In all our enthusiasm for new ways to make the school curriculum more interesting and more relevant – both laudable objectives in their own terms – we ought not to overlook the functions that apparent anachronisms in the curriculum actually served. Appearances are too often deceptive.
[Page 226]

In the Darwinian world of natural selection, reproduction is the motor of evolution. Success in the business of reproducing means making one’s biological mark on the species’ future gene pool, though it all depends on producing offspring that in their turn reproduce. Being a grandparent is what the evolutionary processes are all about. But producing offspring in either generation is only the end point of a long process that begins with courtship and choosing a good mate. Darwin hovers over our shoulders as we make our choices.

In traditional societies, men seek women who are young and fertile, while women seek men with prospects of status and wealth. Consider the marriage patterns of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German peasants. Eckart Voland’s researches into the parish registers of Krummhörn (see Chapter 4) showed that, matched for age, wealthier landed peasant farmers married significantly younger brides than landless day labourers did. In addition, it was clear that the women from the lower socio-economic classes were trying to hold out as long as possible for the opportunity to marry up the social scale.

For women, the benefits of marrying up the social scale
[Page 227]
were significant. The wives of men higher in the social scale produced up to a third more surviving offspring, mainly as a result of higher rates of infant survival rather than higher birth rates. So the benefits of hypergamy (marrying up the social scale) were enormous. Not every woman could expect to succeed, of course. Eventually women of low status would be forced to cut their losses and make the best of a bad job within their own social circle. Like Jane Austen’s eligible spinsters, they were eventually forced to bale out of the competition for Mr Darcy and settle for the curate when they felt that time was no longer on their side.

Lonely Hearts columns have come to be an important venue for contemporary mate-finding. So they provide us with a unique glimpse into the bargaining processes that underpin our choice of mate, a glimpse of what characteristics people seek in a partner and those they believe a prospective mate might be looking for in them. They amount to the opening bids in what in some cases will turn into a long chain of negotiation ending with some form of long-term relationship or marriage.

Devotees of Finlay MacDonald’s wonderfully evocative account of his childhood in the Western Isles between the wars,
Crowdie and Cream
, will remember that Old Hector agonised a good deal about how to find himself a wife –not just about what the rest of the village might say if their aged bachelor turned up with one, but also how you went about finding someone suitable when living in a remote island community. The answer, as the worldly-
[Page 228]
wise eleven-year-old Finlay pointed out, was to advertise.

Finlay’s carefully constructed advertisement duly appeared in the
Stornoway Gazette
:

Retired seaman wants woman used to croft work with a view to matrumony [
sic
].

It had all the directness and lack of delicacy – as well as spelling mistakes – that an eleven-year-old could muster. But it worked. Hector was even spoiled for choice: he had three replies. Finlay’s advice was to plump for the one that could spell best, commenting as an afterthought that she ‘sounded like a good woman’. Whether by luck or instinct, he turned out to be right, and Hector lived into a contented old age with his Catriona.

Personal adverts have remained a popular means for finding love to this day. Think of it as the opening bid in a game of poker where, thanks to years of experience in the playground of life, you have some general rules about the kinds of things that appeal to the opposite sex, but no knowledge at all of who is actually out there looking for a mate. The name of the game is to stay in the frame – to ensure that you get enough replies that, like Old Hector, you can at least choose from what’s on offer.

Most of us take the unwritten rules of this contractual bidding for granted. We accept that younger women find it easier to attract eligible men. We accept, too, that elderly male millionaires are more likely to marry twenty-year-old models than are their poorer contemporaries. But what are the origins of these preferences and to what extent do they influence our search for partners?

First the preferences. Psychologists Douglas Kenrick and
[Page 229]
Richard Keefe of Arizona State University at Tempe have examined more than one thousand Lonely Hearts advertisements from the US, Holland and India. Their findings confirm what most of us might already suspect. As male lonely hearts age, they seek women who are increasingly younger than they are; they tend to opt consistently for women who are at the peak of fertility (in their late twenties). Female lonely hearts, by contrast, tend to prefer men who are three to five years older than themselves, with the age gap tending to diminish as they get older. So we end up with an inevitable mismatch: men want younger women, but women want men more their own age. In most cases, real life intervenes to find a compromise, since it’s better to accept second best than have nothing at all. However, as the choosier sex, women have a slight advantage. What that means in practice is that they can afford to trade one trait against another with less disappointment because they have a greater number of traits to choose between. Older men only get young catches when they have something else to put on the table – and that invariably means wealth, and lots of it (or its surrogate, fame).

This is a particular problem for older women, because men’s first thoughts focus so heavily on youth. Knowing that they have a weaker hand, older women are less demanding in their ads, seemingly being more willing to settle for anything rather than nothing. Catriona honestly declared her age, and offered nothing but her loneliness as a fifty-year-old spinster to entice Old Hector. But her sting in the tail was to call down the wrath of the Almighty if Hector was intent on making a fool of her. She was putting Hector to the test, while at the same time recognising that, in reality, her own choices were very limited.
[Page 230]

Some older women get around this by not mentioning their age. This allows them to behave more like women in their twenties, in particular by being much more demanding than women who declare their age. More importantly, it allows them to stay in the game longer and at least retain the capacity to choose between respondents. The chink in the armour on this one is they still show the same age-related preference for a partner of similar age. So, if she doesn’t say how old she is, just take five years off the age of the partner she is looking for and you won’t go far wrong.

But age is only one criterion. What do the columns reveal about looks and money? To find out, David Waynforth, now at the University of East Anglia, and I analysed nearly nine hundred advertisements in four US newspapers. Male advertisers were more likely than females to seek a youthful mate (forty-two per cent of the men versus twenty-five per cent of the women) or a physically attractive one (forty-four per cent versus twenty-two per cent). No surprises there, perhaps. But male advertisers were also more coy about their own looks. We found that while fifty per cent of female lonely hearts used terms such as ‘curvaceous’, ‘pretty’, or ‘gorgeous’, only thirty-four per cent of the males used comparable terms (‘handsome’, ‘hunk’ or ‘athletic’).

It was a different story with money and status. Here, it was the female lonely hearts who made most demands. When specifying their requirements in a mate, they were four times more likely than males to use terms like ‘col-lege-educated’, ‘homeowner’, and ‘professional’ as desirable in a prospective partner – all indicative of earning power or prospects. Male lonely hearts, on the other hand,
[Page 231]
were much keener than women to advertise such attributes. The cues can be quite subtle. In London, men will declare their postal area if it is up-market (Kensington or Hampstead), but never if it is down-market (Hackney or the Isle of Dogs).

Of course, no two cultures are the same, and the mag-nitude of these differences between the sexes is bound to vary from place to place. What surprised us, however, is how robust the general trends are. For example, when Sarah McGuinness and I studied six hundred ads placed in two London magazines, we found trends similar to those seen in the US ads. Sixty-eight per cent of women advertisers offered cues of physical attractiveness, compared to only fifty-one per cent of men.

There is a consistency, too, with findings from other types of research. One well-known scholar of the human ‘mating game’ is David Buss, a psychologist at the University of Texas, Austin. In 1989, he analysed questionnaires about marital preferences completed by over ten thousand people in thirty-seven different countries ranging from Australia to Zambia and from China to the US. Irrespective of culture, women tended to be more choosy than men, evaluating prospective partners on a much broader range of social and personality-based criteria. Women also consistently ranked the status and earning potential of a prospective mate higher than men did, while men rated youth and physical appearance more highly.

The trends that we find in the Lonely Hearts adverts fit nicely with what we expect from evolutionary considera-
[Page 232]
tions. The biological processes of reproduction have very different implications for male and female behaviour, and so we would anticipate that men and women would focus on different aspects of the mating market. This is because, in mammals, the long-drawn-out processes of internal gestation and, later, lactation mean that males cannot contribute much in any direct sense to the business of reproduction once conception has taken place. This is a peculiarity of the fact that we are mammals. If human reproductive biology were more like that of birds or fishes, the story would be very different.

But mammals we are, so it is mammal biology that drives our mate-choice patterns. So males who want to maximise their reproductive success have only one option: to fertilise as many eggs as possible. For humans, that essentially means seeking a young, fertile partner with many child-bearing years ahead of her, or marrying as many women as possible at the same time. Females, on the other hand, are better placed to influence the infant’s development directly. That means they are more likely to emphasise the business of rearing and look for mates with helpful resources. Wealth, status and occupation (all surrogates for wealth) feature highly as criteria in their ads. But they also give considerable weight to cues that signal commitment to the future relationship, and to cues that signal social skills. Men’s ads then tend to offer those as self-descriptors – though you have to know how to read the code. Modern cues like ‘GSOH’ (good sense of humour) are intended to signal social skills, the ability to keep the partner interested and entertained.

The reason men place such a high premium on physical attractiveness in women? Once again, says biology, it is all
[Page 233]
to do with the quest for physical cues linked to age, health and, ultimately, fertility – cues that in the conventional world of our evolutionary past were difficult to fake. Take the case of women’s typically hour-glass figure. Common experience suggests that men (by and large) prefer women with low waist-to-hip ratios, and research bears this out. Psychologist Devendra Singh, of the University of Texas, Austin, asked 195 men aged eighteen to eighty-five to rate drawings of women of different shapes and sizes from least to most attractive. The men rated women of average weight as more preferred than thin or fat women, but rated those with low waist-to-hip ratios the most attractive of all. Ratios of around 0.7 scored especially highly (healthy women in their twenties typically have waist-to-hip ratios of between 0.67 and 0.8). Significantly, perhaps, this turned out to be the shape of centrefold pin-ups from
Playboy
magazine over the past thirty years.

The preference is unlikely to be an accident of fashion. Women with low waist-to-hip ratios are on average more fertile than women with higher ratios. They enter puberty earlier and, according to studies of married women, conceive more easily. Although the precise reasons are not yet known, this almost certainly relates to the ‘Frisch Effect’, first identified by American reproductive biologist Rose Frisch in the 1980s: women only ovulate when their ratio of fat to total body mass reaches a certain level. The enlarged hips and thighs that give women their hour-glass shape are largely due to natural fat deposits in these areas. It seems that the wasp-waists and bustles of the Victorian period may have been attempts at exaggerating just these kinds of cues.

Similarly, our ideas about what characteristics go to
[Page 234]
make a pretty face may also be rooted in the different reproductive strategies of the two sexes. Some of the most direct evidence has come from the neuropsychologist David Perrett and his laboratory at the University of St Andrews. Using composite pictures built up from ‘pre-ferred’ faces, he and his colleagues were able to piece together the features that people find most attractive.

Women seem to find especially attractive in men those features that indicate sexual maturity, such as a strong jaw line and a prominent chin, as well as traits such as large eyes and a small nose. In women, it is large pupils and widely spaced eyes, high cheekbones, a small chin and upper lip and a generous mouth that most men find attractive. Many of these female traits are characteristic of children and could signal youth and hence higher fertility. Men are also attracted by soft glossy hair and by smooth shiny skin – two of the features that the cosmet-ics industry has latched on to. Both are the product of high oestrogen levels and are therefore difficult-to-mimic cues of youth and fertility.