Dating Service: The Marriage Market

Tim Har­ford, a colum­nist for The Econ­o­mist who has writ­ten a new book, says what I’ve been say­ing all along in the mod­ern world of a dat­ing ser­vice, dat­ing web­sites, and a dat­ing agency:

Young black men who stay out of prison in a place like New Mex­ico rarely marry, and this is prob­a­bly because they real­ize they do not need to marry to get sex. The con­tra­cep­tive pill also makes it eas­ier for men to get sex out­side of mar­riage. The logic of evo­lu­tion­ary psy­chol­ogy says that women should be choosy about who they have sex with, because preg­nancy in the wrong cir­cum­stances is extremely costly—but the logic of a woman who has con­trol of reli­able con­tra­cep­tion is quite dif­fer­ent. The pref­er­ences that evo­lu­tion has shaped still exert pow­er­ful influ­ence on our instincts, and many women remain extremely choosy and refuse to have sex out­side mar­riage. But oth­ers, once armed with the pill, decided they could afford to have a lit­tle more fun.

The choosy ones are unlucky: the exis­tence of other women who are a lit­tle freer with their favors weak­ens the bar­gain­ing power of the Madon­nas, and means that men have less incen­tive to marry. Some men will not bother at all, feel­ing that they can get all they want from a play­boy lifestyle. Or they may delay mar­riage until mid­dle age, cut­ting down on the pool of mar­riage­able men and increas­ing male bar­gain­ing power.

As I wrote in a lengthy essay, the unin­tended con­se­quences of fem­i­nism have made the dat­ing scene more dif­fi­cult for women (and, to an extent, men). Many suc­cess­ful, sin­gle women are com­plain­ing that “there are no good men left,” but the fact is that men now have few ratio­nal incen­tives to marry. Fem­i­nism — along with the birth-control pill — allowed women to behave sex­u­ally like men stereo­typ­i­cally do. As a result, men have become so used to promis­cu­ous sex that they are com­pletely ignor­ing the women who do not act like “Girls Gone Wild.” (I go into more detail here.)

So, in eco­nom­ics ter­mi­nol­ogy, women needed to find a way to increase their value in the mar­ket­place. As Har­ford writes:

As we have seen, the ratio­nal response is for women to go to col­lege, bring­ing them both bet­ter prospects in the job mar­ket and bet­ter prospects in the mar­riage mar­ket. Mean­while, the more capa­ble women become of look­ing after chil­dren by them­selves, the less men need to bother. It’s a text­book case of free-riding: with highly-educated women in excess sup­ply, men have real­ized that they can get sex, and even suc­cess­ful off­spring, with­out ever mov­ing too far from the La-Z-Boy chair and the potato chips.

I would add one addi­tional com­ment: As end­less jokes state, women are rarely sat­is­fied because they “want it all.” There is a log­i­cal rea­son for this men­tal­ity. In terms of evo­lu­tion­ary psy­chol­ogy, women desire as much secu­rity and sta­tus as pos­si­ble because they are phys­i­cally weak. In the prim­i­tive state of nature, this was a death sen­tence. (Forty years of fem­i­nism can­not change thou­sands of years of instinc­tual pro­gram­ming.) In short, women want the “whole pack­age.” But they make the mis­take of assum­ing that men are look­ing for the same things as well, so they focus on obtain­ing grad­u­ate degrees, man­age­ment posi­tions, and other things that increase a man’s mar­ket value.

How­ever, men and women want dif­fer­ent things. Men are sim­ple crea­tures; they do not look for a resume. Men crave food, beer, sex, sports, and a good mother for their chil­dren. That’s really about it. Any woman who can pro­vide four of these five things — and do them well — will prob­a­bly receive numer­ous mar­riage proposals.

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