Decoding Love - Andrew Trees [46]
Of course, this is what happens when a culture of abundance runs into evolution based on scarcity. For most of our history, we have struggled to feed ourselves. But too few calories is no longer the problem. Too many calories is. We have been conditioned for hundreds of thousands of years to stock up on calories when they are available, which is a great strategy when you are grubbing in the dirt for food but is a big problem when the 7-Eleven is right around the corner. The same sort of thinking is at work when it comes to women and financial resources. Study after study has shown that after you get past the deprivations of poverty, more money does not do much to increase your happiness. In a study asking people to report how much of the time they were in a bad mood the previous day, people earning less than $20,000 clocked in only 12 percent higher than people earning more than $100,000, which is less than most of us would have guessed. But we are programmed to secure as many resources as we can, even if those come at the cost of our own happiness. If you don’t believe me, let’s try a little experiment. Imagine you are faced with two propositions. You can either earn $40,000 a year and live a very happy life, or you can earn $500,000 a year and live a mildly unhappy life. Which option is more appealing?
Most of us would be better off in our relationships if money played a smaller role in our decisions about which people we should date. Successful women, if they can overcome their natural prejudice, would especially benefit from looking for relationships with men who are less successful financially, and there are occasional glimmers of this, such as articles about white-collar women dating blue-collar men. The competition is less fierce for those men, and there is a very good chance that the man will devote more time and energy to the relationship than a high-powered careerist—if both partners can overcome their innate prejudices about who should bring home the bacon.
MEN DON’T MAKE PASSES AT WOMEN WHO WEAR GLASSES
Education for women has also been a mixed blessing when it comes to dating. I realize that one of the fundamental pillars of feminism is opening wide the doors of academia for women, and I support that. But it comes with a definite cost. In the first place, the more education a woman has, the older she is when she marries. On average, American women marry when they are twenty-five. If they have a college degree, that average rises to twenty-seven. A master’s or professional degree lifts that to thirty. The reason this matters is because age is a crucial component of a woman’s prospects. Men tend to marry younger women, so the older a woman gets, the smaller her dating pool becomes. In addition, education shrinks a woman’s dating pool because men also tend to marry women with less education than they themselves have. Finally, intelligence itself appears to be a hindrance for women looking to marry. According to one study, women who had never married were much more intelligent than average—of course, feminists can claim that more intelligent women are too smart to fall for a patriarchal trap like marriage.
If you have any doubts about the larger cultural anxieties currently surrounding the dating scene for successful women, you only need to look at recent movies, which have offered a never-ending stream of stories about confident, capable women and the feckless men they are trying to shoehorn into marriage: High Fidelity, About a Boy (virtually the entire Nick Hornby oeuvre, in fact), Old School, Failure to Launch, Knocked Up, and Wedding Crashers just to name a few. Although the overt message of Sex and the City was that single, professional,