Decoding Love - Andrew Trees [65]
Of course, life is never so simple. There are numerous ways that the dowry game does not reflect real life, although it would be nice to lie on plush cushions, eat grapes, and wait for beautiful women to be brought to you. We are going to focus on the most important one: mutual choice. The dowry game assumes that you simply get to choose whichever woman (or man) you want. What it fails to recognize is that in our society, the women (and men) also exercise their own choice. They are perfectly free to look at your lazy, grape-eating ass and decide to marry that ruggedly handsome camel trader back in their hometown.
Miller and Todd ran the game again with one hundred men and one hundred women, and they found that the more possible partners both sexes checked out, the lower the rate of people who ended up in a relationship. The reason was that people began setting their aspiration level too high. You may set your sights on a woman in the top 10 percent, but if you are in the bottom 25 percent, you are going to end up single. For people to find their way into a relationship, a new element needed to be added: people had to adjust their aspiration level based on the feedback they were getting. A great deal of math is involved, and Miller and Todd experimented with a number of scenarios on how to determine mate value. To put it in simple terms, if you use the twelve-bonk rule, your expectations are likely going to be too high.
It is also important to remember that many aspects of dating are not susceptible to mathematical analysis. For instance, women would find it very useful to know the ratio of men who are likely to be loyal partners versus those who will cheat. Unfortunately, there is no definitive answer to this question, for the simple reason that the ratio will change depending on the social environment. The best strategy for men is mixed. In other words, depending on the context, it may make sense for a man to be faithful, or it may make sense to pursue opportunistic sex. Game theory itself predicts that players will cultivate unpredictability as a way to avoid being easily manipulated in the game.
Worse, it is quite possible that the players might not even be aware of their own gamesmanship. Our old friend Trivers of the parental investment theory has called this “adaptive self-deception.” If you buy this theory—and anyone who has listened to a friend justify some completely preposterous course of action will—we are so good at deception that we often manage to deceive ourselves as well. This self-deception is incredibly useful to us from an evolutionary standpoint because successfully masking our intentions from ourselves makes it much more likely that we will also deceive those around us. You can see the benefit of this in a host of situations. Just think of a single man on the prowl for a one-night stand. He might meet a woman in a bar and immediately become convinced that she is the love of his life. He woos her intensely and is able to look her in the eye and tell her with great sincerity that he thinks she is far more than some easy sexual conquest for him. Because of this, he convinces her to spend the night with him. When he wakes up in the morning, he realizes that he was deceiving himself the entire time. In the cold light of day, he knows that he has no interest in a long-term relationship with the woman, but his self-deception has already served the purpose that evolution designed it to serve—to spread his genetic material.
ENDGAME
Although amusing to examine dating using economics and game theory, these approaches are limited by their failure to account for the irrationality that guides so much of our behavior, particularly when it comes to love. To see this, let’s play a game called How Much Would You Pay For a Dollar? I don’t think it takes a mathematical genius to determine that you should pay no more than ninety-nine cents. What if a wrinkle is added, though, and