Great Expectations, Dating, and the Battle of the Sexes

Sec­ond in a series of essays

In the so-called war between the sexes, men had been on the offen­sive by wield­ing most of the power in rela­tion­ships for thou­sands of years — but women had been turn­ing the tide back over the last forty. The result? Now, the two armies have stopped mov­ing. They have com­pletely sep­a­rated from each other, sit­ting motion­less while star­ing at each other across a no-man’s land of lone­li­ness and bro­ken hearts as a result of great expec­ta­tions in dat­ing.

How do I know this? I see the headlines.

A major­ity of mar­riage­able women are liv­ing with­out hus­bands. An increas­ing num­ber of sin­gle women are pur­chas­ing homes by themselves. The total num­ber of sin­gle Amer­i­cans is also grow­ing. More men say they never want to get mar­ried. In Britain, there are more sin­gle men than unat­tached women. Hun­dreds of web­sites offer advice for sin­gles rang­ing from pick­ing up a one-night stand to find­ing the love of one’s life.

More and more dat­ing web­sites exist for those who are unable to find a part­ner. (In busi­ness par­lance, the size of the mar­ket is increasing.) There are dozens of blogs on dat­ing on just this one list. Teenagers, col­lege stu­dents, and recent grad­u­ates are hooking-up rather than form­ing sig­nif­i­cant rela­tion­ships. Men and women are mar­ry­ing at increas­ingly older ages — now twenty-seven for men and twenty-five for women. “Starter mar­riages” are becom­ing more common.

Well, what’s going on in online dating-services, online-dating web­sites, and friend-finder dat­ing?

Argu­ments Against Feminism

First, we need to under­stand the basic men­tal­i­ties of men and women in the con­text of evo­lu­tion­ary psy­chol­ogy.* For tens of thou­sands of years, men were the providers of resources and pro­tec­tion while women took care of hearth and home. Nature pro­grammed men to spread their seed as far as pos­si­ble while women wanted men to stay and take care of their chil­dren. So, soci­ety founded the insti­tu­tion of mar­riage to get men to stay with the chil­dren. (I believe there are spir­i­tual aspects to mar­riage as well, but its prac­ti­cal­ity can­not be overstated.)

These needs and desires were pro­grammed into our soci­eties – and our brains — over mil­len­nia. Men and women needed each other because each half of a cou­ple pro­vided things that the other could not. Women wanted men who would pro­vide resources, and men wanted fer­tile women who would bear and raise their chil­dren. Women date up; men date beauty. Forty years of fem­i­nism can­not change these sub­con­scious attitudes.

Over the last sev­eral decades, how­ever, the roles have changed. Women have become inde­pen­dent, and men have become less nec­es­sary. (New York Times colum­nist Mau­reen Dowd even wrote a book with that as its title.) The end result — and the rea­son for the increas­ing preva­lence of sin­gle­ness – is sim­ple. Men and women feel that they no longer need each other, and this atti­tude is sep­a­rat­ing men and women:

That bat­tle of the sexes, accord­ing to Pro­fes­sor Andrew Hacker, a New York soci­ol­o­gist, will not be won any time soon. In a 2003 book Hacker argued that mar­riage rates may con­tinue to fall if young pro­fes­sional women seek only their finan­cial equals as mates.

“There is a greater divide between the sexes than at any time in liv­ing mem­ory,” Hacker said. “The result will be a greater sep­a­ra­tion of women and men, with ten­sions and recrim­i­na­tions afflict­ing beings once thought to be nat­u­rally companionable.”

Fem­i­nism Essay

What caused this? Fem­i­nism. More specif­i­cally, the unin­tended con­se­quences of fem­i­nism. Fem­i­nism helped women to over­come their lowly, unde­served sta­tus as non-voting cit­i­zens whose only duties were to get mar­ried and have kids, but like every social move­ment, it has had effects that no one could have foreseen.

First, we must start with women. After all, women make the choices in the dat­ing game: Women choose which suit­ors have a chance, but men hit on every sin­gle girl above a cer­tain gen­eral thresh­old of attrac­tive­ness. When a man makes the “first move,” he is usu­ally respond­ing to a sub­con­scious sign of inter­est that the woman has already sent. This is an impor­tant prin­ci­ple. Women make most of the choices in the dat­ing scene because they must be picky: They only have one fer­tile egg per month, and they lit­er­ally live with the con­se­quences of sex. Now that women are becom­ing equal to – and even sur­pass­ing – men in school and in the work­place, they can take care of them­selves. They do not need a provider.

How­ever, this con­flicts with the sub­con­scious atti­tudes that women have. Girls are raised with tales of a per­fect Prince Charm­ing who will res­cue them. They idol­ize their fathers (for bet­ter or worse, depend­ing on what type of men they were). They are treated like princesses. Most impor­tantly, they have the evo­lu­tion­ary impulse to “date up.” They want some­one amazing. Women, indeed, want it all. (This atti­tude can lead to more regret later in life when they real­ize that no one can have it all.)

This desire, how­ever, works against a woman’s inter­ests. Women are pro­gress­ing along a set path – high school, col­lege, grad­u­ate school/career, mar­riage, and then fam­ily – and only worry about hav­ing fun while they are teenagers and twen­tysome­things. Mar­riage and fam­ily now seem to be bur­dens to delay as long as pos­si­ble rather than won­drous joys. The irony of the sit­u­a­tion is that women have the great­est chance of attract­ing a part­ner before the age of twenty-five, roughly when they are most attrac­tive. Biol­ogy, after all, is work­ing against them. There is noth­ing wrong with get­ting mar­ried in col­lege or grad­u­ate school and wait­ing to have chil­dren, but this thought rarely crosses anyone’s mind.

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