Decoding Love - Andrew Trees [39]
Perhaps choosing a pen is too insubstantial to prove anything definitive about decision making. But what if I told you that professionals, trained for years to make certain kinds of decisions, were flummoxed in exactly the same way as the students? It’s true. A group of doctors had the same difficulty choosing among three alternative medical treatments when two of them were similar and changed their decision in exactly the same “irrational” way.
So what does all this have to do with love? Nothing if you believe in the romantic story line—and everything if you want to look at love through the lens of science. Imagine that you are trying to choose among three potential boyfriends. Two are similar. Let’s say they are both young associates at a law firm who like to play golf on the weekends. The third is a musician who keeps odd hours and promises to write a song about you. In the end, you choose the musician. If you believe the romantic story line, your choice reflected an innate sense that the musician was the right partner for you. If you believe the science, there is a very good chance that you chose the musician to avoid the complexity of choosing between similar alternatives.
This is exactly what I have found in my interviews with men and women. When most of them tried to choose among several people at the same time, they had enormous difficulty. As one of them said to me, “No one is perfect, so you are left trying to compare very different traits.” Not only did these people feel more uncertainty about their choices, they had more difficulty even deciding on what grounds they should choose. A couple of them admitted to being so immobilized that they never made any choice and simply waited for some of the people to fall away until they were left with only one option.
The reason that choice is increasingly becoming not just a consumer problem but a dating problem is that we value quantity as the means of achieving quality, even when it comes to trying to meet someone. You only have to look at the explosion of Internet dating to see how the consumer model of expanding choice is shaping our approach to relationships. Fill out a personality profile, click on a few criteria, and you are suddenly presented with hundreds, if not thousands, of possibilities. According to a recent Pew study of online dating, people think that is a good thing, and they use Internet sites because they believe that having lots of choices will lead to a better match. But studies have shown that this increased choice is having exactly the effect that the consumer research would suggest. In one study of online dating, fewer than 1 percent of possible candidates are chosen. One woman admitted to me that, in an effort to cut down on her choices, she developed absurd physical criteria. Another confessed to endless scanning of profiles and said, “With ten thousand page views to go, you feel like you can’t afford not to be choosy.” A man I interviewed dubbed his Internet dating compulsion the “curse of the composite.” Over time, he has developed a vision of his ideal woman based on the various qualities that he likes—only now he has created a composite standard that is impossible to meet. He is thinking of taking a break from Internet dating because he believes it is eroding his ability to commit to a single woman.
And that’s leaving aside the whole issue of deception and Internet dating. If lying is a problem for regular dating, it’s an epidemic for Internet dating. Various studies estimate that between one-fifth and one-third of all online daters are married, and that is just the tip of the iceberg. Stories abound of photos that are twenty years out of date or forty pounds lighter. Wall Street bankers who turn out to be Wall Street baristas. One woman has had so many outlandishly terrible experiences using Yahoo Personal Ads that she has rechristened the site “Yahoo Psychos” with even more colorful nicknames for the men themselves. The situation is so bad that some dating sites