Decoding Love - Andrew Trees [55]
You also need to be honest about your own sticker price. If you are rich and beautiful and talented and funny and kind, you have tremendous market value and can get just about everything you could possibly want in a mate. But what if you are only average or, worse, below average? As many studies have shown, we are very reluctant to admit that and usually inflate our market value to the detriment of our love lives. In a recent survey, fewer than 1 percent of people rated themselves as less attractive than average, which means that 49 percent of us are fooling ourselves. Unfortunately, the cruel logic of the market applies not only to others but to ourselves, and the sad truth is that almost all of us like to imagine that we are more of a catch than we actually are.
What if we could be brutally honest and admit our inadequacies? What should we do then? In the open market, how should we go about selecting a mate? One researcher decided to find out. He set up an experiment in which he created a “mating market.” People were given a certain number of mating dollars to spend on the qualities they wanted in their partner. By giving some people tight budgets (in effect, giving them a low market value), he was able to find out what were the absolute necessities of mate choice and what were the luxuries. Women with small budgets spent their precious dollars on intelligence, money, work ethic, and a sense of humor. Men with only a few dollars proved to be much simpler creatures. They spent their money on physical attractiveness, which is something that women consider a luxury.
The real dating market is not as simple as the experiment, though, nor is it as straightforward as it was when Becker wrote his groundbreaking articles in the 1970s. It has become much larger and more complicated. There used to be all sorts of constraints—geographic, social, economic—that limited your dating choices at any one time to a relatively small set of people. Now, though, the Internet offers almost limitless choices unfettered by any of the usual restraints—what you might call the globalization of dating. As you’ll remember from the last chapter, multiplying the number of choices is not necessarily a good thing, and according to one recent study, many people are finding this expanded market overwhelming. The authors of the study call it “the chaos of love.”
This unfettered market has created entirely new problems. In the first place, you have a much greater chance of a mismatch than you did when your dating pool was a small town with local men or women you had known for years. We live in massive societies in which we are—wittingly and unwittingly—competing with friends from our own social circles, random passersby, waiters and waitresses, old flames from college, and so on. In the second place, people are becoming increasingly befuddled about their own criteria for selecting a partner. In many species, there is only one criteria that determines who will mate with whom. If you are a female lobster, you are looking for a male with big claws. If you are a female peacock, you are looking for a big tail on your bird. If you are a female sperm whale, you are looking for—well, who knows what female sperm whales want? But it’s not that simple for us. Perhaps it once was. Back on the African savanna, there weren’t many things to consider. Perhaps Moog was a good hunter, while Horg built great fires. Today, on the other hand, we face a virtually endless number of criteria. Is he funny? Does she like emo rock? Does he cook? Does she look too much like his ex? When anything is possible, it becomes less clear what is essential. In response to this complexity, people are increasingly