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By Root 396 0

it appears that Americans in general are more comfortable with the idea of a marriage market than one would expect for a culture so besotted with the romantic story line. What else would explain the proliferation of dating sites such as dateamillionaire.com? A recent poll asked people of median income (earning between $30,000 and $60,000 a year) if they would marry an average-looking person if that person had money. Two-thirds of the women and half of the men said they would be “very” or “extremely” willing to marry for the money for an average price of $1.5 million. Showing an acute sensitivity to the importance of age for their market value, the price at which women were willing to marry varied widely. Women in their twenties wanted $2.5 million, and women in their forties wanted $2.2 million, while women in their thirties lowered their price all the way to $1.1 million, which the pollsters suggested was due to the additional biological pressure on women in their thirties to have children. Men were willing to sell themselves for less, settling for an average of $1.2 million. This is perhaps an intuitive recognition of the Darwinian logic of cheap sperm and precious eggs. While you may be somewhat aghast at these cold, hard calculations, the study reveals that a price can be put on virtually anything, even your own betrothal.

THE GAME OF LOVE

The use of market-driven thinking is not the only way to apply mathematical rationality to the world of dating. Another area that has gained increasing prominence in understanding animal mating, including the human variety, is game theory. Nobel Prize-winning mathematician John Nash, the subject of the movie A Beautiful Mind, made his most important contributions in the area of game theory. He came up with something now known as the Nash equilibrium, which allowed game theory to be applied to a much wider variety of issues, including dating (although no one would get around to applying it to that until the last couple of decades).

Game theory is a branch of applied mathematics that was initially used primarily in fields like economics and political science. There are a huge variety of “games” that one can play—zero sum and nonzero sum, symmetric and asymmetric, continuous and noncontinuous, cooperative and noncooperative, simultaneous and sequential to name just a few variations—but we’re not going to worry about those complexities; instead, we’re going to explore only a few areas where game theory might actually offer some practical assistance when it comes to dating.

First, some good news for women. They set the ground rules for the game. As I hope the chapter on evolutionary psychology proved, men want to have sex, and in general they want to have it more often than women do. Because of this, women are in the driver’s seat. Game theory can demonstrate this through an examination of a question we explored earlier: why monogamy? Using the techniques of game theory, biologists have been able to reduce that complicated question to four linked propositions that determine whether a society will be monogamous or polygamous. Without further ado, a quick and dirty guide to the mating game, compliments of Matt Ridley’s wonderful book on sex and evolution, The Red Queen:

1. If females are in a better situation by choosing a monogamous relationship, a monogamous society will be the result;

2. UNLESS men can force women into polygamous relationships (the “grabbing the woman by her hair and dragging her back to the cave” school of dating);

3. If females are not in a worse situation by choosing men already paired with a woman, a polygamous society will be the result (the “it’s better to be the second wife of Brad Pitt than the first wife of Homer Simpson” school of dating);

4. UNLESS the females with mates can prevent their mates from adding an additional mate (the “don’t touch my man, or I’ll rip off your hair extensions” school of dating).

Did you see the role that men played in all of that? You have to look closely—male agency makes a brief appearance in proposition