Decoding Love - Andrew Trees [49]
How tough a town is New York for a single woman in her thirties? One British woman signed up for a slew of dating services, hoping to find a husband, and became so disheartened after two years of looking that she left the country and returned to Great Britain to look for a husband on native soil. And a number of women complained of the gross disparity in standards. While they were supposed to have all sorts of wonderful qualities, any man who was single, heterosexual, and had a job was considered a catch.
My interviews also revealed that for many men the demographic imbalance has made New York into a sexual Shangri-la (especially if they are reasonably successful). If I had to sum up in one word the attitude of a number of single men I interviewed, it would be “smug.” Many of the men were uncomfortable even applying the word “dating” to what they were doing because that imposed too many constraints. They preferred to speak about “hanging out” and “hooking up,” phrases too nebulous to be defined as anything implying commitment.
You don’t need to look at a city-sized population to see how sensitive dating is to numbers. A study of speed daters turned up a similar effect. No matter how many people were participating on any given night, men’s selectivity did not change. Bigger groups simply meant that they would ask out greater numbers of women. But women were highly sensitive to group size. When the groups were small (fewer than fifteen people), women were no more selective than men, but as the group size increased, so did the selectivity of the women.
Marcia Guttentag wrote an entire book about this, titled appropriately enough Too Many Women? Before World War II, there was always an excess of men, but the post-war decades have reversed that, providing a ratio of ninety-five men for one hundred women. As her work reveals, this small gap has surprisingly large consequences. Let’s look at one representative year from her book. In 1970, among Americans fourteen years and older, there were ninety-two men for every one hundred women. That represented a surplus of roughly five million women. Once she removed married women from the count, though, the gap may have remained at five million, but the ratio significantly worsened, leaving only eighty-one men for every one hundred women. According to my own rough calculations based on the census data from 2006, there are approximately ninety-four men for every one hundred women today in America.
Of course, different demographic categories can have wildly different prospects. For instance, people tend to marry someone of their own race and ethnicity. For all white men and women between the ages of fifteen and forty-four, the ratio is a balanced one hundred three men for every one hundred women, based on the 2006 census, while the ratio of all black men to women from the ages of fifteen to forty-four is eighty-seven men for every one hundred women.
These skewed numbers don’t simply have ramifications for a woman’s ability to get a date. They also have a profound influence on society as a whole. As Guttentag realized, sex ratios shape sex roles. Looking at the historical record, Guttentag found that societies with more women than men shared a number of characteristics, such as a rise in illegitimate births and an increase in sexual libertarianism. Of course, none of this means that demographics is destiny. After all, no one marries .94 of a partner, even if our mates do sometimes fall short of our ideal.
THE CONSOLATIONS OF SINGLENESS