Decoding Love - Andrew Trees [47]
IT’S ALL IN THE NUMBERS
Of course, one key element is out of the control of men, women, culture, or evolution—demographics. Because, to some extent, it is all a question of numbers, and when you tally up the latest population figures, what you discover is that the odds are currently stacked against women when it comes to dating.
If you are old enough, you probably remember a famous article that Newsweek ran back in 1986, which reported that single women in their forties were more likely to be killed by a terrorist attack than to get married. What is particularly interesting about this bogus factoid is the willingness of so many of us to believe it for so long. Why would we be willing to accept something that should have sounded about as plausible as the idea of aliens abducting humans? The reason is that the theory spoke to a larger cultural anxiety. It may not have accurately described the situation, but for many single women it offered confirmation of what they were feeling at the time. And what they were feeling—without realizing it—was a massive demographic shift.
The women who found that statistic so plausible were the first generation of women to grow up after the feminist revolution. They were the proud inheritors of the right to work, and many of them pursued careers. But those careers came with a price. And that price was a shrinking dating pool.
The fear of a shortage of marriageable men has a long and proud history in our culture. Just think of all of the portrayals of spinsters, with their powerful reminders to women of what happens if they fail in the dating game, going all the way back to colonial times. Lest women think that their worries today are fundamentally different than those of some earlier golden age, such as the 1950s, they only need to read women’s magazines from that period, which published articles on where to find eligible husbands and even ran data from the U.S. Census to determine which areas of the country had the most favorable ratios for women.
But the feminist revolution of the 1960s and 1970s accelerated certain demographic trends that significantly worsened the problem. With women pursuing careers, they were also marrying later, and this had profound repercussions because it ran into another trend that probably goes all the way back to our days on the grassy savannas—men tend to marry women younger than they are. According to studies, women look for men who are three and a half years older on average, while men prefer women roughly two and a half years younger. As we saw in the chapter on evolution, there is a fairly obvious reason for these preferences: men want access to women who can successfully reproduce, and so they seek out younger women. Women want men who can provide for them, so they seek out men who are older and more established. This is largely unconscious but no less potent because of that. And marriages do generally conform to these desires. In 1996, first-time brides were on average 24.8 years old, and first-time grooms were 27.1 years old.
All well and good, but that still doesn’t explain why anyone found it even remotely plausible that a woman would have a greater chance of dying in a terrorist attack after the age of 40 than she would of marrying. To see why that struck some people as plausible, we have to consider the implication of this skewed age preference as it works over time. Because women prefer to marry someone older, their dating pool naturally shrinks with each passing year, while the dating pool of men expands with each year. In other words, men find their stock rising as dating prospects at precisely the moment that women find their stock falling. So, while the Enjoli perfume ad may have promised women that they could bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan, it neglected to tell them that they might not have someone