April 11, 2008
The Eligible-Bachelor Paradox
How economics and game theory explain the shortage of available, appealing men.
Mark Gimein in Slate:
It is a truth universally acknowledged that the available, sociable, and genuinely attractive man is a character highly in demand in social settings. Dinner hosts are always looking for the man who fits all the criteria. When they don't find him (often), they throw up their hands and settle for the sociable but unattractive, the attractive but unsociable, and, as a last resort, for the merely available.
The shortage of appealing men is a century-plus-old commonplace of the society melodrama. The shortage—or—more exactly, the perception of a shortage—becomes evident as you hit your late 20s and more acute as you wander into the 30s. Some men explain their social fortune by believing they've become more attractive with age; many women prefer the far likelier explanation that male faults have become easier to overlook.
The problem of the eligible bachelor is one of the great riddles of social life. Shouldn't there be about as many highly eligible and appealing men as there are attractive, eligible women?
More here.
Posted by Abbas Raza at 03:21 AM | Permalink
Comments
To boil this down: attractive women are unrealistic and seek perfection, while attractive men are more realistic and will settle for less than perfect. So a lot of great looking women wind up living with cats.
Posted by: Jared | Apr 11, 2008 11:07:27 AM
So why do the better women hold out, if they're so likely to fail to marry altogether?
Posted by: Sagredo | Apr 11, 2008 9:52:19 PM
I read on another article that women tend to underestimate themselves. This finding fits in with that, because women who underestimate themselves are going to be soft bidders, and therefore going to have advantage in "bidding."
Posted by: MS | Apr 12, 2008 4:05:29 AM
"It is a truth universally acknowledged that ...."
...Jane Austen never married! She wrote those opening words, and was apparently too clever for the men in her vicinity.
Young men go out with women just to get laid and can often be maneuvred into marriage precisely because they don't give much thought to the possibility.
Now, a more profound question for those who are already married: If you don't want to commit adultery, is there any point in going to parties anymore?
Posted by: aguy109 | Apr 12, 2008 9:55:07 AM
Aguy, you are a deep reader indeed. Jane Austen, by the lights of this article, would have needed to be very "decisive" to have married, for she was plain and lacked a dowry, the latter being an asset the writer doesn't mention because the insights of the article are geared to today's world, when women bring earning power rather than a portion of their father's wealth to marriage. But maybe Jane was decisive about one important thing -- protecting her time on earth for writing rather than child-bearing, household management, and doing the bidding of a man who was her best prospect, not her soul-mate.
Long before Jane's time, women entered convents for this kind of freedom -- Hildegard of Bingen, Sor Juana, inter al.
I was hoping the article would at least glancingly address why some women in the arts married not at all or married men of the patron class (Edna St. Vincent Millay, Angelica Kauffman) -- but it was after all an article about the marriage market, not about outliers.
Men in the arts, traditionally, need not be outliers -- they can marry managers, women whose egos are subordinate, and who make their life's work attending to minutiae too boring for the attention of the resident genius but necessary to his success.
And -- Jared and Sagredo -- you have probably seen the bumper sticker: It Takes a Hell of a Man to Beat No Man at All. Don't you imagine, even for the time it takes to consider it, that this is what highly attractive and confident women are thinking? They're not sitting around thinking, "What's the best I can do -- fast -- with the little I've got?" The point of the article is that decisive women with comparatively few other natural advantages are likelier to marry early, and reproduce. This prevents great-looking, high-earning and horribly intelligent people from marrying one another exclusively just as niftily as it does mousy people with tight lids on their potential. And this may be why we have a human race and not a super race trailed by a race of drones.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Apr 12, 2008 11:52:55 AM
Elatia,
My understanding from reading books on genetics is that people generally do marry partners of similar intelligence and therefore intelligence does get more concentrated over time. I think it is called "sexual selection". The implication is that the gap between the intelligent and the less intelligent will get wider. On the other hand, due to global mobility, the gap between races will eventually be eliminated. So perhaps, in the future, class divisions will increase while racial divisions decrease.
Posted by: Jared | Apr 12, 2008 12:35:34 PM
That's an interesting idea, Jared. We're already seeing an economic gap created by high-earning people who select one another, thus an indirect stimulus to generational poverty. And breeding is assortative -- just not if you're a really smart cute girl who waits too long from sheer confidence, the writer seems to be saying. In that event, just what did you select, huh? But an article like this, though it does not say so, offers yet another explanation for how nature is successfully pulling for a regression to the mean in the next generation, so that norms are safeguarded by certain behaviors that are the opposite of what they seem.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Apr 13, 2008 12:43:30 AM
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