Decoding Love - Andrew Trees [51]
4
The Dating Game
What I Learned About Dating from Adam Smith
THERE IS A PARLOR GAME I’VE INVENTED CALLED The Dating Game (patent pending). It’s simple. Each life choice you make either increases or shrinks your potential dating pool. Let’s take my own life as an example. I went to an Ivy League college. That’s excellent news for my dating pool. Women tend to marry someone with as much or more education than they have, and I get an added bonus for going to a prestigious school. After a few years in journalism (subtract points for low-earning potential but add some back in for having an interesting job), I went back to school for an advanced degree, which turned out to be a mixed blessing. I should have increased my dating pool because I could add women with advanced degrees to the mix, except that I made a fatal miscalculation. I did not get an MBA or a law degree, two very dependable engines of economic success; instead, I earned a Ph.D. in history. The job prospects are not great for humanities Ph.D.s, and even if you get a job, you will never achieve great financial wealth, although you will live a very comfortable middle- to upper-middle-class life. Since economic resources play an outsized role in a man’s desirability, that put a definite ceiling on my dating prospects.
After graduate school, I moved to New York City, which also had a mixed effect on my dating. On the one hand, New York has a great many men who are successful financially. I came for a high school teaching job, which put me at the lower end of professional salaries and also shrunk my dating pool by losing me the status points I might have had as a college professor. On the other hand, I did have demographics in my favor since New York has fewer men than women. Being in my midthirties also helped because, as you know from the last chapter, women tend to marry older men.
In the dating pool at this point, I was in reasonable shape, although hardly a blockbuster candidate. I had some of the things women look for (education, financial stability, no excessive problems with halitosis), but I fell short in one crucial area, financial success. My prospects were middling. In certain dating microclimates, such as a culture with a greater-than-average respect for education, I would probably have a better chance than in the population at large. So what happened? I won’t keep you in suspense any longer about our hapless, overeducated hero. I am currently married. Interestingly, my wife is Korean American, so there are possibly cultural factors that have given her a greater respect for education than your typical American, although she seems thoroughly unimpressed with my advanced degree when it comes to the usual marital disagreements.
But things would have been much worse for me if I were a woman. As we’ve already seen, men tend not to marry a woman with more education, so a Ph.D. would have been a real albatross. Also, moving to New York would have been a lousy idea because of the shortage of men. Finally, with each year I failed to marry, a cruel mathematical logic would have been working against me. As Andy, male Ph.D., each year that passed increased my dating pool. But as Andi, female Ph.D., each year would have shrunk the dating pool.
While I don’t think that The Dating Game is going to turn out to be the Monopoly of the twenty-first century, it does provide a valuable lesson about the way that dating itself is susceptible to a certain kind of market analysis in which you can predict how each move in your life can increase or decrease your value. Of course, no game can ever master the unpredictability of life. As Andi, female Ph.D., I was perhaps