Authors: Andrew Trees
Decoding Love (18 page)
Of course, exploiting undervalued areas of the dating market or avoiding overvalued areas is different than trying to beat the market, which is one thing that daters should avoid. If you consider dating as a market, the natural assumption is that you want to get a mate with the highest market value possible, but that isn’t necessarily a good idea. Snaring a partner who is far more valuable than you are in market terms is a recipe for disaster in the long run. A variety of studies have shown that people who do find mates who are out of their league are also more likely to find that their partner will later desert them for someone of greater value. A relationship is not a one-time negotiation. If one partner feels they aren’t getting adequate value in return, he or she always has the option to look somewhere else. So, caveat emptor! Even in relationships, a deal can be too good to be true.
There is evidence that women, if not men, are more sophisticated in their analysis of the dating market than one might expect. Given the market-driven and somewhat crass nature of my analysis, you would expect that every single man and woman would simply try to get the partner with the highest value. According to a new study, though, women actively avoid maximizing mate value. In the study, women were asked to choose men ranging from low attractiveness to high and from low financial success to high. Market logic dictates that the women should have chosen men who were both very attractive and very successful, but they avoided those men and preferred guys who qualified as very attractive but were only a medium on the financial success scale. When the researchers tried to understand this puzzling result, the only theory they came up with was that women were worried that attractive, successful men were more likely to cheat on them or to leave the relationship altogether.
All of us, often unwittingly, are responding to what economists would call market pressures, which brings us to perhaps the most dramatic lever women have to manipulate their market value—sex. Typically, men are much more eager for sex, so women hold a huge negotiating advantage before a couple consummates the relationship. Withholding sex for at least some period of time is one of the best ways for a woman to manipulate a man’s perception of her market value, by convincing him that sexual intimacy with her is a rare privilege. It is also the single easiest strategy to convince a man to think of a woman as a long-term partner, rather than a short-term conquest. According to one unsurprising study, college men viewed women who were easy to get as desperate and possibly even diseased. Even in applying this tactic, though, there are some subtleties. Another study found that playing hard to get was very effective—if it was done in a targeted manner. Acting coy was not successful when women practiced it all the time, but it was a particularly good technique when it was combined with the pursuit of one person. By spurning others while actively showing interest in one man, a woman can effectively signal to that man that she will be faithful and that she is an excellent value on the marriage market.
Despite the hesitations many readers may naturally feel when asked to think about dating in market terms, it appears that Americans in general are more comfortable with the idea of a marriage market than one would expect for a culture so besotted with the romantic story line. What else would explain the proliferation of dating sites such as dateamillionaire.com? A recent poll asked people of median income (earning between $30,000 and $60,000 a year) if they would marry an average-looking person if that person had money. Two-thirds of the women and half of the men said they would be “very” or “extremely” willing to marry for the money for an average price of $1.5 million. Showing an acute sensitivity to the importance of age for their market value, the price at which women were willing to marry varied widely. Women in their twenties wanted $2.5 million, and women in their forties wanted $2.2 million, while women in their thirties lowered their price all the way to $1.1 million, which the pollsters suggested was due to the additional biological pressure on women in their thirties to have children. Men were willing to sell themselves for less, settling for an average of $1.2 million. This is perhaps an intuitive recognition of the Darwinian logic of cheap sperm and precious eggs. While you may be somewhat aghast at these cold, hard calculations, the study reveals that a price can be put on virtually anything, even your own betrothal.
The use of market-driven thinking is not the only way to apply mathematical rationality to the world of dating. Another area that has gained increasing prominence in understanding animal mating, including the human variety, is game theory. Nobel Prize-winning mathematician John Nash, the subject of the movie
A Beautiful Mind
, made his most important contributions in the area of game theory. He came up with something now known as the Nash equilibrium, which allowed game theory to be applied to a much wider variety of issues, including dating (although no one would get around to applying it to that until the last couple of decades).
A Beautiful Mind
, made his most important contributions in the area of game theory. He came up with something now known as the Nash equilibrium, which allowed game theory to be applied to a much wider variety of issues, including dating (although no one would get around to applying it to that until the last couple of decades).
Game theory is a branch of applied mathematics that was initially used primarily in fields like economics and political science. There are a huge variety of “games” that one can play—zero sum and nonzero sum, symmetric and asymmetric, continuous and noncontinuous, cooperative and noncooperative, simultaneous and sequential to name just a few variations—but we’re not going to worry about those complexities; instead, we’re going to explore only a few areas where game theory might actually offer some practical assistance when it comes to dating.
First, some good news for women. They set the ground rules for the game. As I hope the chapter on evolutionary psychology proved, men want to have sex, and in general they want to have it more often than women do. Because of this, women are in the driver’s seat. Game theory can demonstrate this through an examination of a question we explored earlier: why monogamy? Using the techniques of game theory, biologists have been able to reduce that complicated question to four linked propositions that determine whether a society will be monogamous or polygamous. Without further ado, a quick and dirty guide to the mating game, compliments of Matt Ridley’s wonderful book on sex and evolution,
The Red Queen
:
The Red Queen
:
1. If females are in a better situation by choosing a monogamous relationship, a monogamous society will be the result;
2. UNLESS men can force women into polygamous relationships (the “grabbing the woman by her hair and dragging her back to the cave” school of dating);
3. If females are not in a worse situation by choosing men already paired with a woman, a polygamous society will be the result (the “it’s better to be the second wife of Brad Pitt than the first wife of Homer Simpson” school of dating);
4. UNLESS the females with mates can prevent their mates from adding an additional mate (the “don’t touch my man, or I’ll rip off your hair extensions” school of dating).
Did you see the role that men played in all of that? You have to look closely—male agency makes a brief appearance in proposition #2. Other than that, it’s girl power.
Of course, we already know that we live in a monogamous society, and all sorts of variables creep in that quickly complicate any simple scenario. Take, for instance, the issue of sex. Women willing to accept a short-term relationship can probably attract a much higher quality mate than if they hold out for a long-term commitment. But a single woman can’t completely alter her market value simply by withholding sex, because she is not only trying to attract a man but is also competing against other women.
Another classic game can illustrate the problems that this sexual uncertainty adds to the equation. Imagine that a group of hunters are chasing a stag. If they all work together, they will kill the stag and share in a vast quantity of meat. But there is a chance that they will fail to catch the stag. Then, no one will eat. A hunter can also desert the stag hunt and kill a rabbit. If he defects early, he has an excellent chance of killing one, although it won’t be the meat bonanza of the stag hunt. If enough hunters defect, the stag will definitely escape, and only those early defectors who went after the rabbits will eat. The game outlines the difficulties of cooperation.
Now, imagine a similar situation with women who are all pursuing a high-status male with little interest in a long-term commitment. Only these women face an added difficulty—they will not share in the spoils of the hunt, which makes cooperation among them virtually impossible. If they all agreed to abstain from sex with him, they could very likely force him to choose a long-term partner. But some of those women will know that they are unlikely to win the prize. They might be happy to have a short-term liaison with the man (the equivalent of going after a rabbit), rather than nothing at all. So, while a woman can exercise great power over her suitors by withholding sex, she is not doing this in a vacuum, and there are plenty of women around her who will choose to play the game differently.
As with analyzing dating as a market, people must first accept that there is an element of strategy in their own dating—another direct blow to the romantic story line, which insists that love is spontaneous and largely impervious to manipulation. Some people are reading this now and thinking, “I don’t play games.” You may very well believe this is true, but that is simply one more move that one can make in any game situation. By saying you don’t play games, you are signaling to others that you have certain traits (trustworthiness, sincerity, etc.) that make you more attractive. You may also be trying to rule some games out of bounds (for example, you may be signaling that you won’t tolerate deception). However, all but the most obtuse among us will admit that there are certain moves in the game of dating that we don’t make, no matter how much we claim not to believe in games. For example, no one wants to look desperate. We all know that on a first date, no matter how well it is going, we don’t blurt out that we think we might be falling in love or that the other person is “the one,” even if we have glancing thoughts in that direction. It’s a supremely bad move, more likely to signal that you are not a valuable dating partner.
There are an almost infinite number of moves in any encounter, but some basic ones frequently come into play. Men tend to deceive women about how committed they are, and women try to counteract that by imposing courtship costs. Some women even resort to what a game theorist would call the ultimatum game when they tell their partners that they have to be married (or engaged) by a certain date, or the relationship is over. Others try to impose strict rules for the games that are allowed by joining dating sites that have values built in, such as
conservadate.com
or
singleswithscruples.com
(which explicitly markets itself to people who are “tired of games”!).
conservadate.com
or
singleswithscruples.com
(which explicitly markets itself to people who are “tired of games”!).
My own personal favorite is the self-deprecation gambit. The appeal of the anti-appeal. In other words, you are such an attractive candidate that you can dispense with all the usual self-marketing, actively denigrate yourself, and still appeal to the opposite sex. This is more common that you might think. Just take a look at
They Call Me Naughty Lola
, a hilarious book on the self-immolating personal ads people have placed through the years in the
London Review of Books.
A few choice examples:
They Call Me Naughty Lola
, a hilarious book on the self-immolating personal ads people have placed through the years in the
London Review of Books.
A few choice examples:
“Shy, ugly man, fond of extended periods of self-pity, middle-aged, flatulent, and overweight, seeks the impossible.”“Blah, blah, whatever. Indifferent woman. Go ahead and write.”“Unashamed triumphalist male for the past forty-six years. Will I bore you? Probably. Do I care? Probably not.”
Not only hilarious, they illustrate Zahavi’s concept of the high-cost signal from the chapter on evolution. Only people with charm and looks and talent to burn (as well as excellent senses of humor) can afford to be so self-deprecating about themselves—which is a useful lesson for the rest of us: the soft sell is more effective than the hard sell.
For those interested in cleaning up the game of love, one simple change can help eliminate a great deal of bad behavior: increase the length of the game. That’s what a political scientist did when he invited experts in game theory to submit computer programs to play against one another in a game known as the prisoner’s dilemma. Several dozen programs were submitted, and they “played” for hundreds of rounds. The winner? The shortest program submitted—a mere five lines—which its creator dubbed “Tit for Tat.” The program did exactly what you would expect. In its initial encounter with any program, it would cooperate. In all future encounters, it would do what the other program had done in the previous encounter. If the other program cooperated, it would cooperate. If the other program acted selfishly, “Tit for Tat” would behave selfishly. This simple idea of rewarding good behavior and punishing bad behavior bested every other program. To create a similar situation in the dating world, though, you would need to have the same two people “play” (i.e., date) each other multiple times. Under these conditions, people would quickly clean up their behavior because deception and other bad behavior would simply be punished in the next round.
Other books
Forever and Forever (Historical Proper Romance) by Josi S. Kilpack
I see you everywhere by Julia Glass
Murder of a Royal Pain by Swanson, Denise
The Aurora (Aurora Saga, Book 1) by Adrian Fulcher
Raw Edges by C. J. Lyons
Military Daddy by Patricia Davids
Heloise and Bellinis by Harry Cipriani
The Yearbook by Carol Masciola
Lucky Number Four by Amanda Jason
The Lipstick Laws by Amy Holder