Decoding Love - Andrew Trees [59]
Of course, exploiting undervalued areas of the dating market or avoiding overvalued areas is different than trying to beat the market, which is one thing that daters should avoid. If you consider dating as a market, the natural assumption is that you want to get a mate with the highest market value possible, but that isn’t necessarily a good idea. Snaring a partner who is far more valuable than you are in market terms is a recipe for disaster in the long run. A variety of studies have shown that people who do find mates who are out of their league are also more likely to find that their partner will later desert them for someone of greater value. A relationship is not a one-time negotiation. If one partner feels they aren’t getting adequate value in return, he or she always has the option to look somewhere else. So, caveat emptor! Even in relationships, a deal can be too good to be true.
There is evidence that women, if not men, are more sophisticated in their analysis of the dating market than one might expect. Given the market-driven and somewhat crass nature of my analysis, you would expect that every single man and woman would simply try to get the partner with the highest value. According to a new study, though, women actively avoid maximizing mate value. In the study, women were asked to choose men ranging from low attractiveness to high and from low financial success to high. Market logic dictates that the women should have chosen men who were both very attractive and very successful, but they avoided those men and preferred guys who qualified as very attractive but were only a medium on the financial success scale. When the researchers tried to understand this puzzling result, the only theory they came up with was that women were worried that attractive, successful men were more likely to cheat on them or to leave the relationship altogether.
All of us, often unwittingly, are responding to what economists would call market pressures, which brings us to perhaps the most dramatic lever women have to manipulate their market value—sex. Typically, men are much more eager for sex, so women hold a huge negotiating advantage before a couple consummates the relationship. Withholding sex for at least some period of time is one of the best ways for a woman to manipulate a man’s perception of her market value, by convincing him that sexual intimacy with her is a rare privilege. It is also the single easiest strategy to convince a man to think of a woman as a long-term partner, rather than a short-term conquest. According to one unsurprising study, college men viewed women who were easy to get as desperate and possibly even diseased. Even in applying this tactic, though, there are some subtleties. Another study found that playing hard to get was very effective—if it was done in a targeted manner. Acting coy was not successful when women practiced it all the time, but it was a particularly good technique when it was combined with the pursuit of one person. By spurning others while actively showing interest in one man, a woman can effectively signal to that man that she will be faithful and that she is an excellent value on the marriage market.
Despite the hesitations many readers may naturally feel when asked to think about dating in market terms,