Recently, I gave a talk to 300 women entitled Hope After Heartbreak. I catalogued my emotionally devastating 30s; getting divorced, having a child with a younger man and being left a single mother.
Then I detailed how I'd overcome my grief and shame to find an unexpected level of contentment in my 40s.
When I was asked, as I knew I would be, had I found love again, my answer was 'sadly not'. Did I think I would? My honest response was that I hoped so, but that I no longer had any certainty.
Because when I look around at my girlfriends - bright, attractive, successful, fabulous women in their 40s who are single - I sincerely begin to wonder: Is there even one solvent, kind, desirable, heterosexual single man in his 40s left in Britain?
My friends and I have a horrible suspicion that the answer is no
.
The topic was much debated when I went on a detox holiday in Morocco at Easter with nine single women, ranging in age from mid-30s to late-40s and all looking for love.
At first I thought it would be an oestrogen-infused nightmare, but as I got to know the women, all well-educated and successful (including bankers, a lawyer, a top fashion buyer, a media executive and an art historian), we bonded over our inability to find our male match.
Some of the bankers confessed to resorting to affairs with married men at work, which was depressing, but mostly we concluded we were unable to find what we were looking for because like-minded men of our age didn't exist.
Why? Because our male counterparts were looking for something completely different.
I have been single for the past four years and have dated a handful of men. As far as I can see, they fall into two distinct camps.
There are the overgrown 'kidults' - men who have degenerated into hopeless commitment-phobes and just want to have 'fun' (ie lots of sex) with taut twenty-somethings. They just seem to seek endless couplings, often facilitated by the internet.
Two types of men: The overgrown 'kidults' - men who have degenerated into hopeless commitment-phobes and the successful, solvent divorcees who approach dating like a cold business transaction.
Then there are the successful, solvent divorcees who are so determined to find wife number two pronto that they approach dating like a cold business transaction.
A first date with a corporate-style player is as relaxing as a high-pressure job interview (for a job you're not sure you want) as they mentally tick boxes and suss your potential worth on the marriage market.
I have been asked before the starter 'So what is it that you are looking for in a relationship?' and by pudding I've been told in unstinting detail exactly what he wants.
Believe me, in all this it's not a case of us women being unrealistic or fussy. It's our male counterparts who are more exacting, arrogant and demanding than we could ever be, and who have this vile presumption that they are some kind of sought-after prize that we would be so lucky to 'get'.
For once, they feel in a position of power in the sex war - and they are exploiting it for all it's worth.
One City high-flyer told me over dinner in a slick Mayfair restaurant that he couldn't contemplate a relationship with a woman with whom he didn't have compatible skin tone. He ordered me to whip off my watch so we could compare our natural skin colour.
He also boasted that he had a strong awareness of aesthetics and had already clocked my accessories (yuk!). He turned out to be obscenely wealthy - when I asked where he lived, he said 'on a plane', meaning his private plane.
I realised, during our evening together, when he rattled off the story of his divorce, proudly announcing that he had left her, that he was one of the many male divorcees stung by handing over huge alimonies and who secretly hate women and are after only unchallenging trophy wives.
These men are so adept at sizing you up - your wealth and your looks - that they don't bother to see who you really are. And they don't care that an intelligent forty-something woman like me seeks a spark of recognition, of mutual companionship and respect.
My friend Lizzie, a 43-year-old art director, says it was a real surprise to start dating at 40 after her marriage ended.
'I've always had boyfriends before, but I've been single for three years now, as I'm not so attractive a proposition any more. I've had a child and have responsibility, which these immature men of our age see as terrifying baggage - which is hypocritical when many of them have ex-wives who are bringing up their kids.'
Her last date was with a freshly divorced executive on the prowl for his second wife.
'There was very little about him wanting to find out about me, but he wanted to find out if I suited him. It was a straightforward interrogation which left me feeling raw because I was trying to be honest in my answers. And afterwards, when he didn't call, I felt exposed and rejected, as if I'd failed an audition.'
Another girlfriend of mine, Francesca, 40, who works in advertising and has never married or had children, echoes the exasperation we feel.
'Of course I'd love to be in a relationship, but I haven't got the energy to waste with men who can't commit. I do think there are perfectly well-adjusted men out there, but they are already in relationships.'
Francesca was seeing a man who took her out to dinner often, yet told her he couldn't have a relationship with her because he was waiting for the woman who would 'knock his socks off'.
But, as she rightly points out: 'He doesn't let any woman close enough to knock his socks off, which is probably why he's having casual sex with a twenty-something work colleague.'
Francesca believes the problem is far worse in Britain than elsewhere. 'In Europe, the family is still so important that men do want to embrace being a husband. In America, to have a woman with a ring on her finger gives you status.
'If you are a straight American man and seen as incapable of having a relationship, you are seen as slightly deficient. Yet these British men in their 40s seem to celebrate playing the field, as though it is a badge of masculinity.
'Here, we are dysfunctional as a society because the family is not regarded as important any more. Divorce is increasing because it no longer affects your status in society. So these men have no cultural imperative to grow up.'
Relationship counsellor Tom McCabe says: 'There is a stunting of male emotional growth from about the age of 14, which they cover up with charm, good looks or cleverness as they grow up. If these men are still single in their 40s, or become single again, they look in the mirror and want to be 18, whereas a forty-something woman is more realistic about herself.
'These men are looking for girls, but women are looking for men. I continually have to say to men who come to me: "Please don't refer to women as birds, chicks, babes or even girls."
'The situation is worse today because more men are becoming single again in their 40s,' he says. 'It's all about recapturing their youth. They need to grow up, change their language and start seeing women for who they are.'
Well, we can't hold our breath for that, so do we continue searching for that elusive four-leafed clover mature man, or just give up?
Among my friends, we seem to have arrived at a similar place. We've stopped actively dating (I haven't dated for a year) and have learned to rely on ourselves more than ever before. Not in an outdated, strident, man-hating 'we're OK on our own' way, because we're not really OK.
We genuinely like men and would love affection and a loving relationship. But not at the cost of subjugating ourselves to the whims of a misogynist with his eye on the young girl across the restaurant.
We've learned to enrich ourselves, and our female friendships have become our lifeline. And we live in hope of a miracle.
Dating Strategies
Published 1n Psychology Today (http://www.psychologytoday.com)
Singles: Patterns of Pursuit
Dating Shake-Up #1: Get Out the Door
Lady luck can seat you next to a gorgeous stranger at an open-air jazz concert. Watching TV in your living room, however, hardly facilitates serendipitous encounters. Putting yourself out there is a prerequisite to curing the loneliness that settles over you when you spend too many nights in.
Maybe you dread getting overlooked by people you'd meet if you were socializing. Or perhaps you're afraid that if you do get into a relationship you'll be distracted from other important goals. Whatever the hesitation, online dating could be a good way to get to know who's out there while maintaining control and privacy. Still, if you want to partner up, you'll have to get out eventually.
Ask a trusted friend to act as social coordinator - and simply promise to show up. Talk to someone openly about your self-perceptions to see if they match others' ideas of who you are. Take on new work or extracurricular challenges to increase your self-esteem and your confidence that you can handle the pressures of the singles scene and are an attractive addition to it.
Dating Shake-Up #2: Cut out Choosiness - and Stop Choosing Poorly
Snapshot of the decision-making center of a twentysomething's mind at a dinner party: "The girl sitting next to Chris is friendly, and she's a politics geek, just like me. But there's that speed-dating thing at the brewery next week, plus I haven't written back to that blonde I met online last Thursday...."
Barry Schwartz, a professor of psychology at Swarthmore, has shown how gluts of products paralyze consumers, and he's convinced that dating overload can similarly hamstring singles. "The temptation to not choose is great in a world where there is a large number of options," Schwartz says. He advises shoppers to settle on "good enough" purchases, but finds it much harder to convince singles to apply the strategy to their love lives. "People think they need to find the absolute 'best' romantic partner for them," Schwartz says. "But I believe that making a commitment is an act of faith. If you wait until you're sure, you'll die alone."
Even if you're not too picky, you may consistently fall for people who aren't right for you. You're attracted to bad boys or girls - a shot of adrenaline into a routine-filled life, but a letdown when you need a dependable companion. Or you gravitate toward quiet types, but soon enough feel frustrated with their lack of verbal input.
We learn how to relate to people through our family members and other significant relationships in early life. Sometimes those relationships aren't easy or healthy, but they are what we know. We may have even developed a role to fit into our clan - say, the overachiever or the peacemaker. Say you were the charmer in your home, the one who pulled everyone else out of dour moods. If you were to meet a man who needed constant bucking up, you'd be comfortable and quite effective. But just because the arrangement would feel comfortable and familiar doesn't mean he'd be a great partner who could support you emotionally.
You may even be attracted to particular people out of a desire, conscious or not, to rewrite bad endings. Chicago therapist Wendy Wasson recalls a patient who had a critical, judgmental father. The patient began dating someone who was accepting at first. But when he became distant and negative, she was suddenly desperate to please him. She wasn't consciously aware that her boyfriend shared traits with her father, but Wasson helped her see that on some level she was trying to rework that family dynamic by winning the man over.
If you're not sure whether you have a misguided yen for a certain type, list your past sweethearts' prominent traits. While you're at it, write down ten qualities that describe your ideal relationship. Instead of a grocery list of what you want in another person (blue eyes, likes hockey), this should detail what you value and what you most want someone else to bring out in you (we would hold each other to our goals, we would laugh frequently).
Psychologist M.P. Wylie, a relationships coach, puts clients through this exercise to remind them that all pairings are a pas de deux of personalities. It also encourages people to separate real deal-breakers (doesn't want kids) from nitpicky requirements that might screen out true love. You say you require a college grad, but what if you meet an ambitious autodidact who doesn't have that piece of paper? He or she might fulfill your desire for a partnership that fosters intellectual growth, even though the person wouldn't meet your checklist.
Dating Shake-Up #3: Don't Fall in Love with Love
Nicole had been daydreaming about their third date when his email popped into her inbox. All week she'd built up an ironclad case for why he was perfect for her, and marveled at how their interests dovetailed. Her friends were going to be so impressed!
The message was an unaffectionate request to reschedule. She felt a surge of anger: How could he act like this? Why wasn't he at least excited to see her? She'd set herself up for disappointment because she expected him to conform to her fantasy, and not the reality - they barely knew each other.
Moving too fast, either by projecting hopes onto someone or by speeding up a natural getting-to-know-you phase, skews your ability to objectively judge a prospect.
"If attachment is the glue in relationships, then an accelerated attachment is like super glue. It activates a willingness to overlook and minimize obvious problems, it blinds your vision, and it intoxicates your emotions and hormones so that you feel safe and secure in this newfound love," proclaims psychologist John Van Epp in his book How Not to Marry a Jerk.
In the early stages of romance, it's wise to make non-date-related plans that are as exciting to you as your prospective partner is. And mom was right: Don't jump into bed right away. Sleeping with someone prompts your brain to release neurochemicals such as oxytocin that spur bonding and make you feel more connected to and dependent on your bedmate than is wise at an early juncture. The bonding phenomenon is stronger for women in general, though men who have been without someone for a while can also become overly attached to a new sex partner in the absence of genuine affection, Van Epp says.
Once you know you can truly trust a dating partner, sexual intimacy can strengthen the connections you've already forged. But if the physical aspect of the relationship swamps your total time spent together - ideally in a variety of situations - you're at risk of ending up with someone who won't be good for you in the long run.
You're probably marshaling counterevidence in the form of happily married couples who slept together on their first date and who are convinced that the amorous fast track had no negative impact on the ensuing relationship. That's great for them, but if you want to aim for better relationship outcomes overall, consider waiting it out.
Dating Shake-Up #4: Heed Early Clues to Character
One of my friends stopped dating a smart, sweet, beautiful woman after discovering she possessed, of all horrors, a Celine Dion CD. Another friend continued seeing a guy for six months even though he conducted lengthy phone calls with his ex and other women in front of her.
Assessing a partner's worthiness is part art, part science: You must measure and weigh a constellation of quirks and qualities without losing sight of the whole person. How can you tell whether a single incompatibility is a deal breaker or an annoyance worth tolerating? Keep your eyes open for behaviors that signify distasteful and deeply-rooted attitudes. Don't rationalize consistent displays of disrespect or irresponsibility - observe them carefully. Such bad behaviors will only get worse over time, when people are no longer out to impress you. The best marriages are the ones preceded by happy dating relationships, so take your partner at face value and don't expect situations to magically improve over time.
However, it's only fair to raise your concerns to your partner, and to give him or her a chance to change. Within a healthy relationship some behaviors are moldable. Gently bring up the issue ("sometimes it seems that you're not listening to me when I tell you stories") in order to put it into what Van Epp calls the "machinery" of the relationship. Your girlfriend may need to be reminded a few more times of her habit of spacing out while you talk, but it's possible that after that, she will become a rapt listener. If you catch her daydreaming three or four more times, however, you have your answer as to whether or not she is capable of tuning in. You then must decide if you can live with that trait or not. If you can, discipline yourself to not get upset at the behavior, since you decided to put up with it.
Dating Shake-Up #5: Push Yourself Out of Your Patterns
While it's a vital first step, understanding the patterns in your behavior isn't enough. You must continually make yourself do what doesn't come naturally. It's comfortable for you to reject short men. So say yes to the next one who flirts with you. It's easy for you to become overly dependent on new boyfriends, texting them every hour. So hide your phone and resist the urge. It's tempting to cut things off before your new love starts talking about "the future" - so bring up the topic yourself.
Consider a woman who was magnetized by macho men. Her alluring suitors quickly morphed into angry jerks. The consequent fights and breakups were devastating, and yet they never deterred her from going back for more with a new tough guy. Van Epp encouraged her to accept a date with a sensitive young man. Her mission was to expand her comfort zone: Even if it didn't work out, she'd be more open to prospects like him in the future. She began spending time with him, and he didn't thrill her. But she stuck to it and paced the relationship well, forgoing sexual contact. After a few months, she developed intimate feelings toward him that finally blossomed into a physical attraction. After a year, she fell deeply in love and married him.
Not all experiments in pattern breaking work out so well. Even after you've changed your counterproductive tendencies, you may still get your heart broken. In the face of such disappointments, you must be careful not to beat yourself up or write off every last member of the opposite sex.
Being single longer than you'd expected gives you the opportunity to find your way through a variety of entanglements and to understand how different sides of yourself emerge based on how you conduct your relationships and whom you choose to get close to. It also gives you the chance to build satisfying friendships.
"When singles realize that they need to take responsibility for themselves, they often feel empowered," says Wasson. "And learning to appreciate other emotional bonds helps them build resilience."
Wasson, who was single for much of her life, notes that when she met her partner in her 50s, he truly valued the life she had built for herself. It was, in fact, part of her appeal.
Wasson encourages single men and women to throw themselves into life when they least feel like doing so.
"If you take out a mallet or get cynical, it keeps you from moving on," Wasson says. "Staying confident is, after all, what attracts people."
In retrospect, although it wasn't always pleasant, being single lent me precious time to make and nurture a wealth of friendships. I might not have forged such strong bonds had I not needed dating advice and support. In this sense, my romantic quest was worthwhile in more ways than one. - Carlin Flora
The Commitment-Phobe The Dilemma:
A commitment-phobe might fear the end of youth, or he (yes, they are often, but by no means always, male) may just be itchy at the thought of a long-term vow. They are not likely to identify themselves as having commitment issues, however, since in their mind there is always a good reason not to move forward with a relationship. Their stasis breeds misery on both sides: The commitment-phobe is paralyzed and his or her partner is left feeling hurt and rejected.
The Plan:
Life sometimes catapults even the most reluctant lover into commitment: Advancing age, housing logistics, or a recognition that the perfect has become the enemy of the good can all reform the staunchest commitment-phobe.
"Sometimes it's easier to leap off the cliff than to walk slowly down the diving board," says psychologist and writer Judith Sills. Many people would be happier eloping than dragging out wedding proposals and plans.
Marriage is a big decision, but it doesn't determine everything that happens thereafter. "We don't make mistakes," says Sills. "We build or create mistakes over time." Paradoxically, the reluctant party's relationship may get much better after he takes the leap. This leaves commitment-phobes locked into a self-fulfilling prophecy: They don't feel passionate enough toward someone, so they break up and then think, "Thank God I didn't commit to her!" But if they had committed, the passion might have flowed after the fact.
There's at least one broad exception. Charles Waehler of the University of Akron found that middle-aged bachelors who are unsatisfied in life and ambivalent about marriage remain conflicted after marriage.
The Single Parent The Dilemma:
Single parents often fear that their desire to find someone will lead them to overlook their children's needs or feelings. They wonder how their kids will react, and how all of the moving parts of their family and their prospective new love's family will fit together.
The Plan:
Block out a privacy zone, counsels Sills. Kids don't need to know dating details, and they certainly don't need to be confronted with any aspect of their parent's sex life.
When someone is important enough to be introduced to a child, the parent should have him or her over for dinner. But they shouldn't stage-manage. Let everybody find out about each other naturally. And the parent shouldn't do a post-mortem on the encounter, warns Sills. "Sometimes when we put things into words we get committed to a point of view about someone."
Bringing home a new dating partner may very well stir up children's fears about divorce or death or the future. The important thing is to let the kids have such feelings. They will adjust to the situation over time.
And avoid the "pseudo-marriage" trap: If you've been married, it's tempting to rush into sharing lives and household duties with someone. But this can put undue strain on a budding relationship.
The Older Single The Dilemma:
Younger singles searching for love often look to midlife and beyond with a marked fear that they will still be alone. But midlifers often find the experience of being single easier than it was during their reproductive years, when they may have felt dramatically out of step with married friends, says Wendy Wasson. Suddenly, they're forging new connections with peers who are divorced or widowed.
The newly single camp can be more difficult: People feel like failures after the breakup of a long partnership, or undergo a lengthy grieving process after having experienced a partner's death. Yet Wasson sees a bright side: She's witnessed patients develop a renewed sense of vitality and optimism after a panicky adjustment period. People - especially women - often reorganize their lives around friendships (old and new) and look forward to a more independent and open-ended way of life.
The Plan:
Broadening one's horizons is not just a pragmatic way to approach the social scene; it's also the key to finding unexpected happiness in midlife. In her book Getting Naked Again: Dating, Romance, Sex, and Love When You've Been Divorced, Widowed, Dumped, or Distracted, Judith Sills argues that older singles should consider a wider range of prospects, since they're not looking to create a family. "It doesn't matter if a woman shares your religion, for example, if you're not raising children together," she says. Sills says that women concerned about the lack of available older single men, for example, should not evaluate men they meet in terms of whether they are marriage material, but should rather enjoy and embrace what they do have to offer - be it friendship, companionship, help, or guidance in cultivating new hobbies or interests.
Middle-aged singles may find that the autonomy and social skills they've built up over the years give them a confidence in the world that they never had as young people. In fact, several interview-based studies of single women aged 40 and above revealed that they felt a greater sense of clarity and agency than ever before. They'd managed to fulfill their needs to nurture others (perhaps via nephews and nieces) and to feel supported (often by strong friendships and family ties). Furthermore, they were freer to express themselves since they no longer felt constricted by expectations about marriage that may have once sparked regrets or insecurity.
Conversation
When going on a first date, we try to achieve a delicate balance between expressing ourselves, learning about the other person, but also not offending anyone - favoring friendly over controversial - even at the risk of sounding dull. This approach might be best exemplified by an amusing quote from the film Best in Show: We have so much in common, we both love soup and snow peas, we love the outdoors, and talking and not talking. We could not talk or talk forever and still find things to not talk about. Basically, in an attempt to coordinate on the right dating strategy, we stick to universally shared interests like food or the weather. It's easy to talk about our views on mushroom and anchovies, and the topic arises easily over dinner at a pizzeria - still, that doesn't guarantee a stimulating conversation, and certainly not a real measure of our long-term romantic match.
This is what economists call a bad equilibrium - it is a strategy that all the players in the game can adopt and converge on - but it is not a desirable outcome for anyone.
We decided to look at this problem in the context of online dating. We picked apart emails sent between online daters, prepared to dissect the juicy details of first introductions. And we found a general trend supporting the idea that people like to maintain boring equilibrium at all costs: we found a lot of people who may, in actuality, have interesting things to say, but presented themselves as utterly insipid in their written conversations. The dialogue was boring, consisting mainly of questions like, Where did you go to college? or What are your hobbies? What is your line of work? etc.
We sensed a compulsion to avoid rocking the boat, and so we decided to push these hesitant daters overboard. What did we do? We limited the type of discussions that online daters could engage in by eliminating their ability to ask anything that they wanted and giving them a preset list of questions and allowing them to ask only these questions. The questions we chose had nothing to do with the weather and how many brothers and sisters they have, and instead all the questions were interesting and personally revealing (ie., how many romantic partners did you have?, When was your last breakup?, Do you have any STDs?, Have you ever broken someone's heart?, How do you feel about abortion?). Our daters had to choose questions from the list to ask another dater, and could not ask anything else. They were forced to risk it by posing questions that are considered outside of generally accepted bounds. And their partners responded, creating much livelier conversations than we had seen when daters came up with their own questions. Instead of talking about the World Cup or their favorite desserts, they shared their innermost fears or told the story of losing their virginity. Everyone, both sender and replier, was happier with the interaction.
What we learned from this little experiment is that when people are free to choose what type of discussions they want to have, they often gravitate toward an equilibrium that is easy to maintain but one that no one really enjoys or benefits from. The good news is that if we restrict the equilibria we can get people to gravitate toward behaviors that are better for everyone (more generally this suggests that some restricted marketplaces can yield more desirable outcomes).
And what can you do personally with this idea? Think about what you can do to make sure that your discussions are not the boring but not risky type. Maybe set the rules of discussion upfront and get your partner to agree that tonight you will only ask questions and talk about things you are truly interested in. Maybe you can agree to ask 5 difficult questions first, instead of wasting time talking about your favorite colors. Or maybe we can create a list of topics that are not allowed. By forcing people to step out of their comfort zone, risk tipping the relationship equilibria, we might ultimately gain more.
Alpha and Beta Males and Females
Some people are almost invisible to other people.
You look out into the room and it's all just a bunch of faces.
But a few stand out.
For women surveying the room, they aren't "looking" for "anything."
What they see, though, are the few men in the room who clearly have status in the group.
Maybe it's the star player, the CEO, the Manager. It could be the top Harley rider or winner of the race.
Women see status and dominance.
But women aren't blind to physical appearance. Physical appearance is evolutionarily just as predictive of reproductive success as a man's status or dominance in a group.
The square jaw, the symmetrical facial features, each side a mirror of the other.
But she didn't see the face first. On the contrary, unlike men, women "look" at a man's body and his height (at the nonconscious level).
Research shows that taller men make more money than their shorter counterparts and men are getting taller with each generation.
50 years ago, a 5'8" man was normal. Today he is close to being filtered out of consciousness by Alpha Females...those women who can have the pick of the litter...
[Alpha Females are defined in this article as women in the top quintile of desirability by men. Beta Females are in the top 50%]
In 2009, the 5'10" man is the norm. And he needs every inch of that.
Better or worse depending on how you look at it, the taller men earn significantly more money than the shorter men.
Better looking men earn a little more than their shorter counterparts.
And if Alpha Women can't find status and dominance...or if status and dominance have been taken by someone else in the group, their genes move them in the direction of the most attractive of those who remain.
...with a caveat. The Alpha Woman has her choice. The other 80% have the choice of what is left.
The 80% won't connect with the high status or highly dominant males. They won't link up with the best looking man in the group.
But all is not lost.
The Beta Women, those in the top 50% of physical appearance, will almost to a woman connect with those Alpha and Beta Males of the group.
Isn't that a little shallow? Certainly women tell you they want a "nice guy," who will "care about me," "who will respect me."
And that can be true.
But conscious minds rarely make decisions in attraction.
That, however, is not what her genes are seeking. That nonconscious mind is fickle. It "wants" a man who will be successful from the standpoint of reproduction. Healthy, good looking, a man with resources, the top of the group. All of these criteria are unconscious filters.
Ask women how they ended up with the last man they broke up with and you'll find he was the most persistent of the men she had recent contact with.
In general, both women and men have seen plenty by the time they have dated seven members of the opposite sex.
Specifically, that means that the last seven were representative of the litter. Throw out the star and the loser and what remains is what remains. The woman, the man, has seen and dated what is in their "league."
If women are shallow, men are ankle deep.
Men have filtering systems just like women, except there aren't as many.
Men don't have a conscious or nonconscious filter for "resources" like knowledge, job, educational status/history, or frankly, anything.
At the nonconscious level, men filter women by physical appearance.
There is, however, a different system of calculation for men than women.
Once men have been in their seven "relationships," whether one night or one decade in duration, they "know" their value on the market.
The man entering the room with a random group of women will indeed instantly find the most attractive of the women. Almost all heterosexual men will.
But the Beta Male will not approach the Alpha Female.
There is a warning system for men that rejection is coming and it has a similar effect as a police car's siren or the Emergency Broadcast system.
All but the Alpha Males will avoid the Alpha Females.
And how does one become an Alpha Female?
Her job?
Her popularity with other women?
Her intelligence?
Her educational background?
Her propensity to smile?
The warmth you feel when sitting in front of the fireplace?
All meaningless.
The Alpha Female knows she is Alpha because of The Seven. She knows she is Alpha because everywhere she goes, she experiences the same behaviors from males.
Men tell her.
She knows they are right.
She is beautiful.
And that is all that matters to the nonconscious mind of a man.
Beta Females recognize they are in the top half of desirables and they know precisely what they means. They will almost always get second best, but they do fine.
As men age, their value reduces. But the dramatic declines in the Alpha Woman as she ages seem like a perfect example of unfairness and inequality between men and women.
And it is.
Attractive women enjoy a net worth that is 11 times greater than the net worth of average women. That's eleven times.
Attractive women are far more likely to get a job, get promoted and earn more money.
Working for men?
No. Men in the office treat the attractive woman far more equally than the other women in the office treat the same attractive woman. Women recognize Alpha Females and they, too, know they are in the top 20% of desirability. Women in positions to hire and promote consciously and nonconsciously show strong preference to attractive women.
What's more phenomenal is that mothers of children are far less likely to abuse their attractive babies than their unattractive babies.
From day one, literally, attractive children are treated very differently than unattractive children.
There is no other nonconscious filter for men.
From culture to culture, there are variations on just which women are the most attractive, but if you watch international beauty pageants it takes very little scientific analysis to know that these Alpha Females fit the perceptual "on" filters of almost all heterosexual men.
And what of the Beta Females?
What of those who miss the Alpha cut?
They can do quite well.
They will rarely land the highest of the Alpha Males.
However, because there are more ways for a woman to keep a man on the nonconscious possibility list, she will actually sample from a different plate than men do.
The Alpha Female may sample the high status male at church. She may sample the wealthy doctor. She may sample the winner of the city's Handyman of the Year award, if that's a field she finds important.
She will certainly sample the life of the party. She will easily intuit the obviously in-charge Alpha seated in the corner, holding court.
Unlike the Alpha Male who will filter in only the top 20%, the Alpha Female will filter in a group that could comprise as many as 40%.
And this is why that beautiful woman can end up with that greasy looking guy...who happens to be lead singer in a band or the winner of the Handyman Award.... but it doesn't work the other way around.
The Alpha Male will rarely enter into a relationship with anyone other than an Alpha Female.
It's not his fault.
It's in his genes.
What the Data Says
Looking for love on an online dating service?
If you're a man, don't smile in your profile picture, and don't look into the camera. If you're a woman, skip photos that focus on your physical assets and pick one that shows you vacationing in Brazil or strumming a guitar.
Those are some of the insights that OkCupid, a free dating site based in New York, has gleaned by using statistical tools to analyze how the mating game plays out on its site.OkCupid publishes the entertaining and potentially useful results of its number-crunching on a blog that has recently turned into a big source of publicity for the company, pulling in new members. We're not psychologists, said Sam Yagan, chief executive of the company. We're math guys.
Mr. Yagan and three other Harvard mathematicians founded OkCupid in 2004. In its fight against much bigger competitors like Match.com, PlentyOfFish and eHarmony, it has tried a number of marketing techniques, often with little success. But the blog, which OkCupid started in October, has helped get the company's name out on other blogs and social networks. A post last month that set out to debunk conventional wisdom about profile pictures brought more than 750,000 visitors to the site and garnered 10,000 new member sign-ups, according to the company.
For that analysis, the company catalogued the photos on more than 7,000 user profiles and looked at how many responses those users received from others. It found, among other things, that it didn't matter whether people showed their faces, as long as the photos were intriguing enough to start a conversation.
If you want worthwhile messages in your in-box, the value of being conversation-worthy, as opposed to merely sexy, cannot be overstated, wrote Christian Rudder, another OkCupid founder, in the post.
Last fall Mr. Rudder looked at the first messages sent by users to would-be mates on the site, and which ones were most likely to get a response. His analysis found that messages with words like 'fascinating' and 'cool' had a better success rate than those with 'beautiful' or 'cutie.'
As we all know, people normally like compliments, but when they're used as pick-up lines, before you've even met in person, they inevitably feel... ew, he wrote.
There are benefits to the company's data-baring tactics. Since OkCupid started its blog, the number of active site members has grown by roughly 10 percent, to 1.1 million, according to the company.
We've been up for six years, Mr. Yagan said. We've only had the blog for six months. It's a big deal for us.
OkCupid, which generates revenue from advertising and premium memberships, says it is profitable. The research firm comScore says the site had 735,000 unique visitors in January, up from 538,000 a year ago. Mr. Yagan said comScore was significantly undercounting the site's traffic.
The blog reports could help to build trust and add legitimacy to the site's matchmaking approach, said Andy Beal, an online marketing expert and co-author of Radically Transparent.
There is an underlying psychological benefit to publishing statistics that resonate with your target audience, Mr. Beal said. People will start to think that this is a site where others like them are hanging out, and they should join it instead of one of its competitors.
To find matches, OkCupid members answer questions, most of which are generated and submitted by users, that range from pedestrian to risque. The answers are weighted and analyzed by several sets of algorithms to calculate percentages of compatibility with other users.
In contrast to the more opaque approach taken by most dating sites, a special area of OkCupid uses detailed graphs and charts to walk users through the matching process.
If we can be completely transparent and help demystify dating with data, maybe you will trust us to help find you a match, Mr. Yagan said.
Greg Waldorf, chief executive of eHarmony, which says it has more than 20 million registered users, was dismissive of the marketing power of OkCupid's blog reports.
In general, I can understand why people are looking for any general direction or indication on how to exist in the online dating world, Mr. Waldorf said. But people come to us for our matchmaking skills. They don't want to worry about whether someone didn't start up a conversation with them because they didn't tilt a camera at a certain angle for their profile picture.
The early stigmas surrounding online dating are slowly being worn away as more people create and maintain a presence on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, where sharing personal information and pictures is commonplace.
OkCupid, whose users tend to be under 35, even resembles a social network. Members can surf through the profiles of potential matches and send messages or flirtatious digital winks to one another. The site also has quirky quizzes for members to determine which character on Lost they resemble and what kind of dating personality they have.
Suzanne White Montiel, 36, a blogger living in San Francisco, said the breezy tone of OkCupid was a refreshing alternative to mainstream online dating sites.
I don't want to waste my time answering a thousand questions so I can find my perfect someone, Ms. Montiel said. I'm not into that. I don't want the father of my children. I just want someone who can carry a conversation and is interesting.
But Terry Ip, a 23-year-old psychology student living in Queens, New York, said he preferred the approach of eHarmony and other dating sites over OkCupid's user-generated questions. And he said that after reading a blog post on OkCupid's site about how race affected messaging habits, he slowed down his use of the site.
It's kind of disappointing and says a lot about their user pool, he said. If you're a white male, you've got it made. If you aren't, you don't. It's very discouraging.
Mr. Yagan said that shedding light on what the data revealed - whether or not it was flattering - was part of the company's open approach. We're not saying what we've found is good or bad, Mr. Yagan said. But it's a dating phenomenon, and we're just trying to capture it.
London Review of Books
The internet generation of daters hasn't abandoned personal ads. Rather, lonely heart sections have raised their game. Advertisers have evolved the formulaic WTLM/GSOH standard of old into clever haikus of longing and desire. No longer the realm of (whisper it) losers, there is a sophistication to the modern day personal ad that is both fascinating and, for those who are compelled to respond, frequently thrilling.
Psychologist Abraham Maslow was cautionary about the difficulties of achieving self-actualisation - fulfilling every aspect of one's innate potential. So, as unobtainable as such a state of being is, the London Review of Books' personal ads ask: "Why bother?" Their appeal comes from subverting those archetypal elements of attraction that press so heavily on our insecurities but that few of us actually have; the six-pack, the firm buttocks, the non-lethargic sperm. Bespectacled and melanin-deprived, they tell us not to be ashamed; to relax a little and enjoy what's out there without feeling threatened by it.
Perhaps they create something of a Scheherazade effect - a term coined by psychologist Geoffrey Miller in reference to the ancient Persian queen and storyteller of One Thousand and One Nights. Like King Shahryar, beheading his virgin brides once he's had his way with them, we read personal ads ready to laugh and brush them aside. But, just as Scheherazade stays her execution and wins the king's affection with tales of history and humour, so LRB personals compel the reader with their inventiveness, engaging us in such a way as to keep us wanting more.
And yet, when all's said and done, their purpose is to attract a mate. Their absurdity and humour aren't disguises for some deeper intent. They are simple, genuine statements about the people who write them and the people they hope to find. They're modestly successful too. We've had many reports of romances, dalliances, marriages and children. Granted, their honesty subverts the traditional lonely heart form, and we're often surprised, delighted or infuriated by their unwavering and messy emotion, but if an advert doesn't garner a positive response - however witty it may be - its author will always consider it a failure.
I celebrated my fortieth birthday last week by cataloguing my collection of bird feeders. Next year I'm hoping for sexual intercourse. And a cake. Join my invite mailing list at box no. 6831. Man
If intense, post-fight sex scares you, I'm not the woman for you (amateur big-boned cage wrestler, 62). Box no. 8744.
My last seven adverts in this column were influenced by the early catalogue of Krautrock band, Paternoster. This one, however, is based entirely around the work of Gil Scott-Heron. Man, 32. Possibly the last person you want to be stood next to at a house-party you've been dragged along to by a friend who wants to get off with the flatmate of the guy whose birthday it is. Hey! Have you ever heard Boards of Canada? They're amazing; I'll burn you a CD. Box no. 3178.
Meet the new face of indoor bowling! More or less the same as the old face, but less facial hair and better teeth. M, 28. Box no. 3377.
The celebrity I resemble the most is Potsie from Happy Days. What feels so right can't be wrong. Man, 46. Box no. 2480.
Mentally, I'm a size eight. Compulsive-eating F, 52, WLTM man to 25 for whom the phrase 'beauty is only skin-deep' is both a lifestyle choice and a religious ethos. Box no. 5115.
I vacillate wildly between a number of archetypes including, but not limited to, Muriel Spark witticism-trading doyenne, Mariella Frostrup charismatic socialite, brooding, intense Marianne Faithful visionary, and kleptomaniac Germaine Greer amateur upholsterer and ladies' league darts champion. Woman, 43. Everything I just said was a lie. Apart from the bit about darts. And kleptomania. Great tits though. Box no. 2236.
Philanthropy is my middle name. It's just a name though so don't be expecting any free rides. You can call me Mr Wallace. My first name is none of your business. Applications to box no. 9741.
I have a mug that says 'World's Greatest Lover'. I think that's my referees covered. How about you? Man. 37. Bishopsgate. Box no. 8763
If clumsy, unfeeling lust is your bag, write to the ad above. Otherwise write to me, mid-forties M with boy next door looks, man from U.N.C.L.E. charm, and Fresh Prince of Bel Air casual insouciance. Wikky wikky wick yo. Box no. 2851.
All humans are 99.9% genetically identical, so don't even think of ending any potential relationship begun here with 'I just don't think we have enough in common'. Science has long since proven that I am the man for you (41, likes to be referred to as 'Wing Commander' in the bedroom). Box no. 3501.
Normally on the first few dates I borrow mannerisms from the more interesting people I know and very often steal phrases and anecdotes from them along with concepts and ideas from obscure yet wittily-written books. It makes me appear more attractive and personable than I actually am. With you, however, I'm going to be a belligerent old shit from the very beginning. That's because I like you and feel ready to give you honesty. Belligerent old shit (M, 53). Box no. 6378.
They call me Mr Boombastic. You can call me Monty. My real name, however, is Quentin. But only Mother uses that. And Nanny. Monty is fine, though. Anything but Peg Leg (Shrewsbury Prep, 1956, 'Please don't make me do cross-country, sir'). Box no. 0473.
All I need is the air that I breathe and to love you. And a five-door saloon (fully air-con). And minimum income of £55K per annum. And two holidays a year (Latin America plus one other of my choosing). If you can meet these requirements, apply to 'Evil Dragon Lady, Breaker of Men's Constitutions' (37), box no. 3685.
You're a brunette, 6', long legs, 25-30, intelligent, articulate and drop dead gorgeous. I, on the other hand, have the looks of Herve Villechaize and an odour of wheat. No returns and no refunds at box no. 3321.
If I could be anywhere in time right now it would be 17 December 1972. I have my reasons. Man, 57. Box no. 1553.
The usual hyperbole infuses this ad with a whiff of playful narcissism and Falstaffian bathos. But scratch below the surface and you'll soon find that I really am the greatest man ever to have lived. Truly great man, 37. Better than Elvis and Gandhi. You'll never be a genuinely worthy partner, but try anyway by first replying to box no. 7637. Include a full list of qualifications, your aspirations, and a full frontal nude body shot.
When not in my London city office overseeing the day-to-day business of my successful accountancy firm, I can be found leaning inside taxi cabs, spitting wild obscenities and challenging the drivers to fisticuffs. M, 47. We take the direct route home, we don't stop at Belisha beacons and we never - and I mean never - leave the impudence of a box junction unquestioned. Don't expect a tip from box no. 9091.
OMG! This magazine is the shizz. Seriously, dudes. Awesome! LOL! Classics lecturer (M, 48). Possibly out of his depth with today's youth. KTHX! Box no. 2680.
Google-search this: 'Inherited wealth real estate Bentley' - that's me, result 63 of 275. It'll take 0.21 seconds to find me online, but an eternity of heartache in real life. Save time now by writing to box no. 4511, or by just giving up. Mother says you'll never be good enough for me anyway. And you carry the odour of your class.
We've all made mistakes. Mine was a cerise pump during London Fashion Week 2004. Style troubadour, (M, 35). WLTM similar, or appropriately dour fag hag. Box no. 8643.
The toughest decision I ever had to make was choosing between soup and fish in a Brighton cafe in 1987 (I went for the fish, though later regretted my decision when I discovered the cod had been over-seasoned). Now, however, I'll have to pick one of you delicious women. The selection procedure will involve a four-part interview, along with an aptitude test and multiple-choice questionnaire. Apply now for full details to stupid man, 45. Box no. 6821.
Remember when all this was open fields, and you could go out and leave your door unlocked? Woman, 24. Inherited her mother's unreasonable and utterly unfounded nostalgia (and her father's hirsute back). WLTM barber with fondness for Sherbet Dib-Dabs and Parma Violets. Box no. 8486.
God appeared to me in a dream last night and spoke your name in my ear. He gave me the winning lottery numbers, too, though, so you can understand where my priorities lay when I raced to grab a notebook and pen. Man, 37, living on hope and the next seven weeks' bonus balls seeks woman whose first name begins with S, or maybe F, and rhymes with chicken, and has a surname that's either a place in Shropshire or the title of a 1979 Earth, Wind and Fire track. Shicken Boogiewonderland, I know you're reading this. Write now to box no. 5729
The Science of Love
Love has no secrets from neurologists and what they have found contradicts the cynics: there is such a thing as everlasting love.
Love, said Shakespeare, is an ever-fixed mark / That looks on tempests and is never shaken. On the contrary, wrote Swinburne, Laurel is green for a season, and love is sweet for a day; / But love grows bitter with treason, and laurel outlives not May. And so on . . . with infinite variations. Love is (or should be) the core of human experience, triggering every emotion from euphoria to despair as we write about it, sing about it, hope for it, worry about it and cry about its irrationality and transience. But the examination of love is no longer confined to the imagination. Where poets once conjured metaphors, scientists now probe the mental circuits that deliver its wild emotions. Love has no secrets from neurologists armed with an MRI brain scanner. What they have found contradicts the cynics: there is such a thing as everlasting love.
Researchers at Stony Brook University in New York have shown that the traditionally sorry path of sexual love - a downward spiral from lust to indifference over the space of a decade - is not an iron rule. Scanning the brains of people who have been together for 20 years, the scientists found that about one in 10 couples still display elements of limerence, the psychologists' term for the obsessive behaviour of new lovers. They enjoy intensive companionship and sexual liveliness but without the anxieties and tensions of early love. They are generous, calm and deeply attached. The scientists call them swans (swans mate for life). This is good news for the 10%, if not for the remaining 90% gripped by marital fatigue. But Arthur Aron, leader of the researchers, says the majority can learn from the minority. One clue he has found is that the swans share experiences and avoid stress. This may be a symptom rather than a cause, but Aron, 64, and his wife are copying the swans anyway in the hope of enjoying a little limerence themselves.
If we cannot all be swans, the other good news is that Aron's team has established a biological basis for romance. Science has long dismissed the idea of love as culturally determined, existing only in societies that believe in it. But Aron and co have found identical brain patterns in lovers from New York to Beijing. Unromantically, they say love is born in the brain's reward-seeking circuitry, not the heart, but we are no worse off for that. Love matters. It is not confined to Christmas repeats of Love Actually and other daft (but really not so wide of the mark) Richard Curtis films. The absence of love from generation to generation led to the death of Baby P and other outbreaks of depravity that scarred 2008. As we face the tempests of 2009, love must remain the ever-fixed mark that is never shaken.
Outsource The Emails
Want more success with women? Don't do it yourself
Jake is no Cyrano. He is a 29-year-old software sales executive who works about 60 hours a week from his home in a suburb of Miami. Even so, in the past three months he has had nine dates with women he had never met before, who have been unable to resist the charm and humour of his e-mails. He has slept with two of them.
One was a one-night stand, he says. We never talked again. The other, it was after a couple of dates and it has some potential.
What none of Jake's dates know, and probably never will, is that he has outsourced his entire online courtship operation to a team of professionals who for $600 a month draw up shortlists of potential matches, pique their interest with breezy introductory messages known as openers and reel them in with nicely judged closers that include the time and place of a real-world meeting.
In Jake's case that place is usually his local Starbucks. I'm risk-averse, he says.
He is also one of an expanding category of online socialites, most but not all of them American, who have decided to make a virtue of their anonymity by letting someone else do the flirting.
According to data from the $4 billion online dating industry, nearly one in six couples married in America last year met online, but 56 per cent of men who try online dating never get a single response.
This is because they create terribly boring profiles and send extremely pathetic messages, says Scott Valdez, co-founder of Virtual Dating Assistants, which this month marks its first full year in business.
Mr Valdez talks about virtual romance as Norman Vincent Peale used to talk about positive thinking. I have always believed in the power of online dating, he says.
He tried it himself and found that he was good at it ("I'm a sales guy, but I can write in a way that evokes emotion"). The trouble was, it took too long, so he recruited a writer from Craigslist, the small ads website, to handle his three dating accounts.
People loved talking about how outsourcing my dating was going for me, and I had an epiphany, he says. I realised I could make a lot of money doing this for other people. A year on, he has recruited 45 more writers as e-muses for the shy, the busy and the romantically tone-deaf.
Rory McClenaghan, 26, is one of them. A British philosophy graduate from University College London, he lives in Buenos Aires and he divides his time between teaching English, freelance journalism and knocking out between 40 and 50 openers a week for people such as Jake.
Since the goal is to elicit a response, mild teasing and questions based on a close reading of the target's profile are essential tactics. Being dull is a mortal sin, but so is being creepy - a term that covers talking about future plans in the first e-mail or trying to take the correspondence off the dating site and into the realm of private e-mail accounts too soon.
The rule of thumb is: wait until she has replied to at least two of your messages.
You have to strike a balance between not being boring and appearing to have dashed it off, Mr McClenaghan says. If someone says in their profile that they like Coldplay, don't say, 'Oh, I see you like Coldplay'. Reply with one of their lyrics.
His openers usually consist of two short paragraphs and take 15 minutes to write.
As a Briton writing mainly for American men to American women he observes another firm rule: project complete confidence at all times. Showing weakness is a no-no, he says.
The standard British self-deprecating sense of humour goes out the window. It took me a while to get my head around that but it does seem to reap rewards.
And cash. While the writers earn less than $15 an hour, clients pay the company $600 a month for two guaranteed dates, $1,200 a month for five, and $200 for a makeover of their own online profile.
As a service to romance, Mr Valdez has posted ten free online dating tips for those unable to afford his packages. He advises against posing with strippers for the all-important online picture, and notes that it is usually unnecessary to tell a woman how hot she is - because she already knows.
Spinning a line, online
Rory McClenaghan was asked by The Times to create a response to the following female online profile:
27-year-old estate agent from Brooklyn, NY
Clearly sarcasm, fun and adventure is all my style. My motto is work hard play hard. I'm a 27 yr old real estate agent in Brooklyn.
I love what I do and have been doing it for 8 years. I love to travel, love the beach . . . I'm a HUGE Yankee and Jets fan . . . Looking for someone who can be just as crazy, but who can also be down to earth and at times serious (yes, I have that side too).
Rory's response
Really? That sounds so mundane. I'm looking for a girl who always keeps a straight face, doesn't own a passport and whose idea of fun is sitting in a darkened room. Oh well, I guess I'll just have to keep on searching . . . ) OK, so maybe I'll give you another chance. I can be pretty spontaneous myself, not sure I've ever entrusted my belongings to a bum but I've been known to book same-day flights and just disappear somewhere for a while?
So tell me this . . . after a hard week at work, what would be your ideal weekend escape, from the instant you leave work to the moment your head hits the pillow on Sunday night?
How to meet a man at 40
It doesn't get any easier the older you get. So just how do you win the dating game?
Before we get started, you need to know that the man you fall in love with will bear absolutely no resemblance to the man you were planning to fall in love with. He will live an hour away from where you live, minimum. He will be wearing a shiny suit and, possibly, a brown shirt. And he'll have the sort of baggage that requires its own baggage handler. This much you can guarantee.
Because one of the reasons you are single (and this is the only one that is strictly your fault) is that you have written off every kind of man who might conceivably cross your path. You have built a fortress out of your preconditions and you are glowering down from the battlements. Men do approach from time to time, but then they see the vats of boiling oil teetering on the ramparts and think better of it.
As far as you are concerned, this fortress is a normal precaution for vetting prospective men, and so it was, initially. Then time passed, you settled into a routine and now you are mistress of the You Won't Get Past Me checklist.
As it happens, I was set up with the One at a lunch three years before the party at which we officially met. The reason the lunch doesn't count as the first meeting is because we barely spoke, and the reason we didn't speak is because I ran his details through the List database and, in 0.2 seconds, it came up with a You Cannot Be Serious rating. Of course it did! The One was very recently divorced (not for me, thanks). He had three children in tow (uh-oh). I think he'd had a savage £5 haircut, and I'm almost certain he was wearing the brown shirt. So, at that first meeting, I summoned the List and the List gave me permission to do nothing.
This List, let's be clear, is not made up of sensible broad guidelines such as must not be married or should live on same continent; it is extremely specific. Here are some edited highlights from my List, and I'm not making a word of it up:
- Must have hair. Hair is good, but what if top of his List was must have large breasts? That puts a rather different complexion on it, doesn't it?
- Must not have ex-wife or children. Like the pool isn't small enough as it is.
- Must not wear fleeces. The bulky navy ones. I'm not going to budge on this one. Fleeces say you're the kind of man who takes his wife to the pub for your anniversary dinner.
- Must not wear short-sleeved shirts. See fleeces. Add golf/ cricket/rugby club to anniversary venue.
- Must not wear jewellery. Although you can tell a lot from jewellery. Any man wearing a leather-thong necklace is certainly a narcissist who still imagines he could have been in the Rolling Stones. Pierced earrings past the age of 40 equal midlife-crisis man. Gold chains on a mahogany chest are the equivalent of the long little fingernail (just plain sleazy).
- Must have a good job, but not one that requires him to get up at 5.30am and take a laptop on holiday.
- Must not wear hoodies or V-neck sweaters with nothing underneath. Hoodies are for boys. And nothing underneath is another I Love Myself sign, only this time there's also the suggestion of And I Am Hot in Bed.
- Must not sing flat. This, too, I stand by.
- Should play sports to fairly high standard. No excuse for this. It's probably a hangover from school and the presex checklist of a boy's fanciability.
When you think about it, this List would be more appropriate for an 18-year-old girl. Right now, and without any further ado, you need to abandon the List. Come on, there is nothing on your List that is genuinely non-negotiable. So you hate goatees, get him to shave it off. So you're allergic to three-quarter-length trousers. Tell him. Liberate yourself. Start over. Not your type? Right, and that's been such a success for you so far.
After much deliberation, these are the only up-front non-negotiables:
- Must be kind. If you have heard him be vile about anyone, seen him be cruel to animals, children or boring hostesses, then this man is not kind.
- Must like women. You think this goes without saying. Of course every man you've ever been out with has loved women. But are you absolutely sure? Did they like it if you contradicted them in public? Were there many women they found attractive who were a) over 50, b) large, or c) noisy? Thought not.
- Must adore you.
- Must be smarter than you, or at least as smart. Smarter, probably, or you will keep looking for that Achilles heel.
- Must have bigger feet than you. Obviously. And must be hairier.
- Must be able to make you laugh in all situations, including when you get to the airport and discover he has no passport.
- You must fancy him unconditionally.
If you cannot put a tick next to all of the above, then I would seriously consider calling it off right now.
So you've dumped the List, or at least made a concerted effort to put aside your prejudices. Now what? First, a small pep talk: you need to be ready for this to happen. Long-term single women have been known to get hooked on keeping their options open. You secretly like the feeling that something life-changing might be just around the corner. And the reason you - who travels solo, makes friends easily and never says no to adventure - need to rethink your future is because you may be ready to try everything and risk everything but your heart.
GETTING IN THE ZONE
- Assume that you are going to be having sex in the very near future. It generates that mixture of adrenaline and pheromones that people have been trying to bottle since the beginning of time.
- Make the extra effort. If you go to the party wearing your second-hottest dress, because you are saving your No 1 dress and you've already decided that you'll only stay for an hour, then you might as well not bother. You will not exude the right anything-is-possible glow and the One will look in your direction and think Downer.
- Do something differently. Wear heels instead of flats, put on a slithery dress instead of jeans, do something unexpected with your hair (though obviously not involving an Alice band). You won't necessarily look any better, but you will feel like you've changed up a gear. Part of the game (after a period of being overlooked) is believing you are definitely worth some attention, rather than passable in a low-lit environment.
- Lose your friends. I know, this sounds like madness. Who has the single woman got if not her loyal girlfriends? Who is going to bung you in a cab at the end of the night and then ring to check you haven't fallen asleep in the stairwell? Nonetheless, as much as you love them and need them, your friends will cramp your style. What you don't need is one of them rolling her eyes as you nibble provocatively on the rim of your champagne glass, or another bellowing: Go on, do your Hoffmeister bear impersonation! Plus, if something should happen to develop when your friends are in the vicinity, you can expect them to react in one of the following ways: gawping, followed by circling at a not-discreet- enough distance, texting all your other mutual friends with updates on your progress; giving the double thumbs-up immediately behind his head; leaping in to help things along (Isn't she just gorgeous. I just love her! Doesn't she look amazing tonight? Isn't this brilliant?). Alternatively, if drunk enough, they may start popping up behind sofas, sniggering. This stuff doesn't change the older you get; if anything, it gets worse. So don't automatically arrange to go to the party with a couple of girls or, once you get there, rush to find the people you've known all your life.
- Pick your man. Don't wait for him to find you. The One says he saw me steaming across the room, nostrils flared, elbowing women out of my path, but this is not true. I did spot him in the distance and then sort of worked my way across the room in his direction. But it's true that I made it happen. And then, drum roll please, I did that thing happily single women so often forget to do. I set about making him like me (as opposed to waiting for him to prove to me that he was worth the trouble).
- Flirt and then some. However much you think you are flirting, double it. What the hell, quadruple it. Barely-there flirting will register as average civility, if it registers at all. Singledom makes a girl cautious. She is preoccupied with not looking like a mad, sad, ticking man-huntress. Trust me, you need to be flirting at a level where you think, Blimey, steady on, he'll think I'm a pro, before you can be confident that he has twigged you might quite like him.
SOME RULES OF FLIRTING
- Be intensely interested in everything he says. Casting your eyes around is counterproductive, especially if you're hunting the canapes.
- Maintain eye contact for long enough that you are both in no doubt it is not accidental.
- Be very impressed
- Tease, a bit, but not about any of the no-go areas - height, hair, lisp, mothers, his level of inebriation/sweating.
- Flatter, but only lightly, in passing, and not more than once.
- Don't touch. You could lightly touch his forearm, maybe. But better not.
- Disappear at some point. For roughly 10 minutes. You want him to have the chance to miss you.
- Some say fiddle with your hair, your cleavage, your earrings. I say don't risk looking like you have fleas. Don't lick your lips/teeth under any circumstances. He may think you are chasing canape particles.
- Be extravagantly open about everything (bar medical stuff). Honesty is disarming.
- Make him responsible for you. Say, Would you get me another drink?, Would you let me lean on you while I do up my shoe, Would you tell me what you think about buying property when the subprime market is in collapse? Just kidding.
BEING SUCCESSFULLY SINGLE
Look, meeting a man is not your only goal in life. It doesn't keep you awake at night (although it has been known to). But the key to being successfully single is keeping an open mind. You want to exude contentment and confidence, but also avoid giving the impression that you are so pleased with your single life, you wouldn't give it up for anything, including the right man. Its all about presentation:
- If there is one thing the single woman cannot afford to be, it's a burden. You must be sunny and amenable, the best guest, the most reliable friend, the tonic at the party and the one who blends in on the family holiday. Precisely because you are not part of a couple, you need to give out the message, loud and clear, that you are no trouble and guaranteed life-enhancing. Being successfully single means having lots of different options and knowing plenty of people who might think, Yes, bring her along! rather than, Maybe not.
- People notice single women getting drunk more than they would notice any other demographic. They are waiting for you to get swervy and take to the dancefloor, on your own, clutching a bottle of champagne, and then collapse sobbing on the shoulder of some man who has long since married your best friend. All men over the age of 35 have pretty fixed views about women and drink - not women in general, you understand, but women they could be interested in. They love women who drink. They're crazy about wild party girls. But they are all petrified of a genuinely drunk woman. Uninhibited is good. Determined to dance is good. Singing is good. Stumbling is less good. Slurring is worse. Shouty and argumentative is not good. Legs buckling is bad. Weepy is bad. Sick on floor is really bad. He decided not to call you, by the way, at slurring.
- The single woman must be prepared at all times. Even if you know that the chance of your freshly waxed areas getting man exposure is zero, there is a certain confidence that comes from being good to go at a moment's notice. Grooming (don't you hate that word?) works in mysterious ways. I have a friend who is living with a man she first slept with solely because, that same day, she had shelled out for a very expensive seaweed wrap. The seaweed wrap made her a) more confident on account of her baby-soft skin, and b) absolutely determined not to waste her investment. So there's a possible double incentive for grooming.
- A woman who has a boyfriend can turn up to a party wearing a holey jumper, a ripped skirt and trodden-down ballet pumps and this woman will look bohemian and sexy. A single woman wearing exactly the same, on the same night, will look scruffy, grubby and, possibly, a bit unstable. People will look at her and think: Poor Susie. She really has given up, hasn't she?
There is one unavoidable truth about clothes that many of us are still determinedly avoiding: if you want sex, then you need to dress with sex in mind. Dressing with sex in mind does not, repeat not, mean second-guessing men's fantasies. That could work, but it will not work nearly as effectively as you wearing whatever you think is blindingly sexy, for two reasons:
a) A woman in slit satin skirt, fishnet tights, clingy top or similar will look like the reluctant deputy headmistress in the school charity performance if she simply isn't that kind of girl. b) Who knows what men find sexy? It's different for all of them, and just when you think you have a handle on what they like, they'll remind you it isn't that simple. The look you really want to avoid (apart from goth) is what your mother might describe as lovely. Lovely is a bias-cut floral dress and kitten-heel slingbacks, wrap dresses worn with cashmere cardigans, and pastel ballerina tops over slinky skirts. Once, a long time ago, the brilliant Isabella Blow told me I must wear a hat if I wanted to find the One. You have to stand out in a crowd. You have to let them see you, she said. And men love a hat. They see the hat and they want to meet the girl.
I never got around to wearing a hat Isabella-style (shaped like a galleon, blocking out the sun), but I should have taken the point. You don't have to put a ship on your head to get men to notice you, but if you spend a decade wearing black trouser suits to parties, don't be surprised if they walk right past you to get to the girl with the parrot on her shoulder.
For many people in their twenties, Internet dating is no less natural a way to meet than the night-club-bathroom line.
In the fall of 1964, on a visit to the World's Fair, in Queens, Lewis Altfest, a twenty-five-year-old accountant, came upon an open-air display called the Parker Pen Pavilion, where a giant computer clicked and whirred at the job of selecting foreign pen pals for curious pavilion visitors. You filled out a questionnaire, fed it into the machine, and almost instantly received a card with the name and address of a like-minded participant in some far-flung locale - your ideal match. Altfest thought this was pretty nifty. He called up his friend Robert Ross, a programmer at I.B.M., and they began considering ways to adapt this approach to find matches closer to home. They'd heard about some students at Harvard who'd come up with a program called Operation Match, which used a computer to find dates for people. A year later, Altfest and Ross had a prototype, which they called Project TACT, an acronym for Technical Automated Compatibility Testing - New York City's first computer-dating service.
Each client paid five dollars and answered more than a hundred multiple-choice questions. One section asked subjects to choose from a list of dislikes: 1. Affected people. 2. Birth control. 3. Foreigners. 4. Free love. 5. Homosexuals. 6. Interracial marriage, and so on. Another question, in a section called Philosophy of Life Values, read, 'Had I the ability I would most like to do the work of (choose two): (1) Schweitzer. (2) Einstein. (3) Picasso.' Some of the questions were gender-specific. Men were asked to rank drawings of women's hair styles: a back-combed updo, a Patty Duke bob. Women were asked to look at a trio of sketches of men in various settings, and to say where they'd prefer to find their ideal man: in camp chopping wood, in a studio painting a canvas, or in a garage working a pillar drill. TACT transferred the answers onto a computer punch card and fed the card into an I.B.M. 1400 Series computer, which then spit out your matches: five blue cards, if you were a woman, or five pink ones, if you were a man.
In the beginning, TACT was restricted to the Upper East Side, an early sexual-revolution testing ground. The demolition of the Third Avenue Elevated subway line set off a building boom and a white-collar influx, most notably of young educated women who suddenly found themselves free of family, opprobrium, and, thanks to birth control, the problem of sexual consequence. Within a year, more than five thousand subscribers had signed on.
Over time, TACT expanded to the rest of New York. It would invite dozens of matched couples to singles parties, knowing that people might be more comfortable in a group setting. Ross and Altfest enjoyed a brief media blitz. They wound up in the pages of the New York Herald Tribune and in Cosmopolitan. The Cosmo correspondent's first match was with a gym teacher who told her over the phone that his favorite sport was "indoor wrestling - with girls." (He stood her up, complaining of a backache.) One of TACT's print advertisements featured a photograph of a beautiful blond woman. "Some people think Computer dating services attract only losers," the copy read, quoting a TACT subscriber. "This loser happens to be a talented fashion illustrator for one of New York's largest advertising agencies. She makes Quiche Lorraine, plays chess, and like me she loves to ski. Some loser!"
One day, a woman named Patricia Lahrmer, from 1010 WINS, a local radio station, came to TACT to do an interview. She was the station's first female reporter, and she had chosen, as her debut feature, a three-part story on how New York couples meet. (A previous installment had been about a singles bar - Maxwell's Plum, on the Upper East Side, one of the first that so-called 'respectable' single women could patronize on their own.) She had planned to interview Altfest, but he was out of the office, and she ended up talking to Ross. The batteries died on her tape recorder, so they made a date to finish the interview later that week, which turned into dinner for two. They started seeing each other, and two years afterward they were married. Ross had hoped that TACT would help him meet someone, and, in a way, it had.
After a couple of years, Ross grew bored with TACT and went into finance instead. He and Lahrmer moved to London. Looking back now, he says that he considered computer dating to be little more than a gimmick and a fad.
The process of selecting and securing a partner, whether for conceiving and rearing children, or for enhancing one's socioeconomic standing, or for attempting motel-room acrobatics, or merely for finding companionship in a cold and lonely universe, is as consequential as it can be inefficient or irresolute. Lives hang in the balance, and yet we have typically relied for our choices on happenstance - offhand referrals, late nights at the office, or the dream of meeting cute.
Online dating sites, whatever their more mercenary motives, draw on the premise that there has got to be a better way. They approach the primeval mystery of human attraction with a systematic and almost Promethean hand. They rely on algorithms, those often proprietary mathematical equations and processes which make it possible to perform computational feats beyond the reach of the naked brain. Some add an extra layer of projection and interpretation; they adhere to a certain theory of compatibility, rooted in psychology or brain chemistry or genetic coding, or they define themselves by other, more readily obvious indicators of similitude, such as race, religion, sexual predilection, sense of humor, or musical taste. There are those which basically allow you to browse through profiles as you would boxes of cereal on a shelf in the store. Others choose for you; they bring five boxes of cereal to your door, ask you to select one, and then return to the warehouse with the four others. Or else they leave you with all five.
It is tempting to think of online dating as a sophisticated way to address the ancient and fundamental problem of sorting humans into pairs, except that the problem isn't very old. Civilization, in its various guises, had it pretty much worked out. Society - family, tribe, caste, church, village, probate court - established and enforced its connubial protocols for the presumed good of everyone, except maybe for the couples themselves. The criteria for compatibility had little to do with mutual affection or a shared enthusiasm for spicy food and Fleetwood Mac. Happiness, self-fulfillment, 'me time,' a woman's needs: these didn't rate. As for romantic love, it was an almost mutually exclusive category of human experience. As much as it may have evolved, in the human animal, as a motivation system for mate-finding, it was rarely given great consideration in the final reckoning of conjugal choice.
The twentieth century reduced it all to smithereens. The Pill, women in the workforce, widespread deferment of marriage, rising divorce rates, gay rights - these set off a prolonged but erratic improvisation on a replacement. In a fractured and bewildered landscape of fern bars, ladies' nights, Plato's Retreat, "The Bachelor," sexting, and the concept of the 'cougar,' the Internet promised reconnection, profusion, and processing power.
The obvious advantage of online dating is that it provides a wider pool of possibility and choice. In some respects, for the masses of grownups seeking mates, either for a night or for life, dating is an attempt to approximate the collegiate condition - that surfeit both of supply and demand, of information and authentication. A college campus is a habitat of abundance and access, with a fluid and fairly ruthless vetting apparatus. A city also has abundance and access, especially for the young, but as people pair off, and as they corral themselves, through profession, geography, and taste, into cliques and castes, the range of available mates shrinks. We run out of friends of friends and friends of friends of friends. You can get to thinking that the single ones are single for a reason.
If your herd is larger, your top choice is likely to be better, in theory, anyway. This can cause problems. When there is something better out there, you can't help trying to find it. You fall prey to the tyranny of choice - the idea that people, when faced with too many options, find it harder to make a selection. If you are trying to choose a boyfriend out of a herd of thousands, you may choose none of them. Or you see someone until someone better comes along. The term for this is 'trading up.' It can lead you to think that your opportunities are virtually infinite, and therefore to question what you have. It can turn people into products.
For some, of course, there is no end game; Internet dating can be sport, an end in itself. One guy told me he regarded it as 'target practice' - a way to sharpen his skills. If you're looking only to get laid, the industry's algorithmic-matching pretense is of little account; you merely want to be cut loose in the corral. The Internet can arrange this for you.
But if you really are eager, to say nothing of desperate, for a long-term partner you may have to contend with something else - the tyranny of unwitting compromise. Often the people who go on the sites that promise you a match are so primed to find one that they jump at the first or the second or the third who comes along. The people who are looking may not be the people you are looking for. "It's a selection problem when you round up a bunch of people who want to settle down," Chris Coyne, one of the founders of a site called OK Cupid, told me. Some people are too picky, and others aren't picky enough. Some hitters swing at every first pitch, and others always strike out looking. Many sites, either because of their methods or because of their reputations, tend to attract one or the other.
'Internet dating' is a bit of a misnomer. You don't date online, you meet people online. It's a search mechanism. The question is, is it a better one than, say, taking up hot yoga, attending a lot of book parties, or hitting happy hour at Tony Roma's?
Match.com, one of the first Internet dating sites, went live in 1995. It is now the biggest dating site in the world and is itself the biggest aggregator of other dating sites; under the name Match, it owns thirty in all, and accounts for about a quarter of the revenues of its parent company, I.A.C., Barry Diller's collection of media properties. In 2010, fee-based dating Web sites grossed over a billion dollars. According to a recent study commissioned by Match.com, online is now the third most common way for people to meet. (The most common are 'through work/school' and 'through friends/family.') One in six new marriages is the result of meetings on Internet dating sites. (Nobody's counting one-night stands.) For many people in their twenties, accustomed to conducting much of their social life online, it is no less natural a way to hook up than the church social or the night-club-bathroom line.
There are thousands of dating sites; the big ones, such as Match.com and eHarmony (among the fee-based services) and PlentyOfFish and OK Cupid (among the free ones), hog most of the traffic. Pay sites make money through monthly subscriptions; you can't send or receive a message without one. Free sites rely on advertising. Mark Brooks, the editor of the trade magazine Online Personals Watch, said, "Starting a site is like starting a restaurant. It's a sexy business, looks like fun, yet it's hard to make money." There is, as yet, a disconnect between success and profit. "The way these companies make money is not directly correlated to the utility that users get from the product," Harj Taggar, a partner at the Silicon Valley seed fund Y Combinator, told me. "What they really should be doing is making money if they match you with people you like."
Some sites proceed from a simple gimmick. ScientificMatch attempts to pair people according to their DNA, and claims that this approach leads to a higher rate of female orgasms. A site called Ashley Madison notoriously connects cheating spouses. Howaboutwe.com asks only that you complete a sentence that begins "How about we . . ." with a suggestion for a first date, be it a Martini at the Carlyle or a canoe trip on the Gowanus Canal. (Your suggestion should theoretically be a sufficient signal of your taste and imagination, and an impetus for getting off-line as soon as possible. Apparently, a big winner has been a ride on the Staten Island Ferry.) The cutting edge is in mobile and location-based technology, such as Grindr, a smartphone app for gay men that tells subscribers when there are other willing subscribers in their vicinity. Many Internet dating companies, including Grindr, are trying to devise ways to make this kind of thing work for straight people, which means making it work for straight women, who may not need an app to know that they are surrounded by willing straight men.
Most of the Internet dating sites still rely, as TACT did, on the questionnaire. The raw material, in the matching process, is a mass of stated preference: your desire or intolerance for certain traits and characteristics. Many of the sites make do with that alone. The more sophisticated ones attempt to identify and exploit the dissonance between what you say you want and what you really appear to want, through the choices you make online.
"What you do is more important than what you say," Greg Blatt, who is the C.E.O. of I.A.C., and a former C.E.O. of Match.com, told me. (Blatt not only runs the company; he's also a client. He is one of those guys who say they enjoy dating.) You may specify that you'd like your date to be blond or tall or Jewish or a non-smoking Democrat, but you may have a habit of reaching out to pot-smoking South Asian Republicans. This is called "revealed preference," and it is the essential element in Match's algorithmic process. Match knows what's right for you - even if it doesn't really know you. After taking stock of your stated and revealed preferences, the software finds people on the site who have similar dissonances between the two, and uses their experiences to approximate what yours should be. You may have sent introductory messages to only two people, and marked a few others with a wink - a nonverbal expression of interest - but Match will have hundreds of people in its database who have done a lot more on the site, and whose behavior yours seems to resemble. From them, depending on the degree of correlation, the software extrapolates about you.
The trick is in weighting each variable. How significant is hair-color dissonance? Do political views, or fan allegiances, matter? The weightings can change over time, as nuances or tendencies emerge. The algorithms learn. And sometimes behavior changes - political opinion matters more in an election year, for example - and the algorithms scramble to keep up.
An engineer named Amarnath Thombre oversees Match's base algorithm, which takes into account fifteen hundred variables: whether you smoke, whether you can go out with a smoker, whether your behavior says otherwise. These are compared with the variables of others, creating a series of so-called "interactions." Each interaction has a score: a numerical expression of shared trait-tolerance. The closest analogy, Thombre told me, is to Netflix, which uses a similar process to suggest movies you might like - "except that the movie doesn't have to like you back."
I've been on two real dates in my life, both of them in my freshman year of college, nearly a quarter century ago. The first, as it happens, was with the eldest daughter of Robert Ross, the founder of TACT. We met at a party and took up with each other for a while. The date itself came later, on the first night of Christmas vacation. We went to "Burn This" on Broadway. I remember John Malkovich stomping around onstage and then my date catching a train back to Scarsdale. She remembers that we went to a Chinese restaurant and (this hurts) that I ordered a tequila sunrise. That night, anyway, was the end of it for us.
For the next date, on the advice of a classmate from Staten Island, who claimed to have dating experience, I took a sophomore I liked to a T.G.I. Friday's, in a shopping center on Route 1 in New Jersey. On the drive there, a fuse blew, knocking out the car stereo, and so I pulled over, removed the fuse box, fashioned a fuse out of some aluminum foil from a pack of cigarettes, and got the cassette deck going again. My companion could not have known that this would hold up as the lone MacGyver moment in a lifetime of my standing around uselessly while other people fix stuff, but she can attest to it now, as she has usually been the one, since then, doing the fixing. We've been together for twenty-three years. Needless to say, we had no idea that anything we were saying or doing that night, or even that year, would lead us to where we are today, which is married, with children, a mortgage, and a budding fear of the inevitable moment when one of us will die before the other.
So, for the purposes of this story, I didn't do any online dating of my own. Instead, I went out for coffee or drinks with various women who, according to their friends, had had extraordinary or, at least, numerous adventures dating online. To the extent that a date can sometimes feel like an interview, these interviews often felt a little like dates. We sized each other up. We doled out tidbits of immoderate disclosure.
I talked to men, too, of course, but there is something simultaneously reductive and disingenuous in most men's assessments of their requirements and conquests. Some research has suggested that it is men, more than women, who yearn for marriage, but this may be merely a case of stated preference. Men want someone who will take care of them, make them look good, and have sex with them - not necessarily in that order. It may be that this is all that women really want, too, but they are better at disguising or obscuring it. They deal in calculus, while men, for the most part, traffic in simple sums.
A common observation, about both the Internet dating world and the world at large, is that there is an apparent surplus of available women, especially in their thirties and beyond, and a shortage of recommendable men. The explanation for this asymmetry, which isn't exactly news, is that men can and usually do pursue younger women, and that often the men who are single are exactly the ones who prefer them. For women surveying a landscape of banished husbands or perpetual boys, the biological rationale offers little solace. Neither does the Internet.
Everyone these days seems to have an online-dating story or a friend with online-dating stories. Pervasiveness has helped to chip away at the stigma; people no longer think of online dating as a last resort for desperadoes and creeps. The success story is a standard of the genre. But anyone who has spent a lot of time dating online, and not just dabbling, has his or her share of horror stories, too.
Earlier this year, a Los Angeles filmmaker named Carole Markin sued Match.com in California state court after she was allegedly raped by a man she met on the site; he turned out to be a convicted sex offender. (Twenty years ago, Markin published a book called "Bad Dates," for which she solicited anecdotes from the likes of Johnny Bench, Vincent Price, Lyle Alzado, Isaac Asimov, and Minnesota Fats. They suggest that all good dates may be alike but that each bad one is bad in its own way.) Markin's suit asked not for money but for an injunction against Match.com to prevent it from signing up any new members until it institutes a system for background checks. (A few days later, the company announced that it would start checking subscribers against the national registry of sex offenders.) To some extent, such incidents, as terrible as they are, merely reflect the frequency of such transactional hazards in the wider world. Bars don't do background checks, either.
Most bad dates aren't that kind of bad. They are just awkward, or excruciating. One woman, a forty-six-year-old divorced mother of two, likened them to airplane crashes: the trouble usually occurs during takeoff and landing - the minute you meet and the minute you leave. You can often tell right away if this person who's been so charming in his e-mails is a creep or a bore. If not, it becomes clear at the end of the evening, when he sticks his tongue down your throat. Or doesn't. One woman who has dated fifty-eight men since her divorce, a few years ago, told me that she maintains a chart, both to keep the men straight and to try to discern patterns - as though there might be a unified-field theory of why men are dogs.
The dating profile, like the Facebook or Myspace profile, is a vehicle for projecting a curated and stylized version of oneself into the world. In a way, the online persona, with its lists of favorite bands and books, its roster of essential values and tourist destinations, represents a cheaper and more direct way of signalling one's worth and taste than the kinds of affect that people have relied on for centuries - headgear, jewelry, perfume, tattoos. Demonstrating the ability, and the inclination, to write well is a rough equivalent to showing up in a black Mercedes. And yet a sentiment I heard again and again, from women who instinctively prized nothing so much as a well-written profile, was that, as rare as it may be, "good writing is only a sign of good writing." Graceful prose does not a gentleman make.
The fact that you can't get away with lying in your profile for long doesn't prevent a lot of people from doing it. They post old photographs of themselves, or photos of other people, or click on 'athletic' rather than 'could lose a few pounds,' or identify themselves as single when they are anything but. Sometimes the man says he's straight but the profile reads gay. Sometimes he neglects to mention that he is a convicted felon. OK Cupid, in an analysis of its own data, has confirmed what I heard anecdotally: that men exaggerate their income (by twenty per cent) and their height (by two inches), perhaps intuiting that women pay closer attention to these data points than to any others. But women lie about these things, too. A date is an exercise in adjustment.
It is an axiom of Internet dating that everyone allegedly has a sense of humor, even if evidence of it is infrequently on display. You don't have to prove that you love to curl up with the Sunday Times or take walks on the beach (a very crowded beach, to judge by daters' profiles), but, if you say you are funny, then you should probably show it. Demonstrating funniness can be fraught. Irony isn't for everyone. But everyone isn't for everyone, either.
I had a talk-about-dating date with a freelance researcher named Julia Kamin, who, over twelve years as a dater on various sites, has boiled down all the competing compatibility criteria to the question of, as she put it, "Are we laughing at the same shit?" This epiphany inspired her to build a site - makeeachotherlaugh.com - on which you rate cartoons and videos, and the algorithms match you up. As she has gone around telling people about her idea, she says, "women get instantly excited. Men are, like, 'Um, O.K., maybe.'" It might be that women want to be amused while men want to be considered amusing. "I really should have two sites," Kamin said. "Hemakesmelaugh.com and shelaughsatmyjokes.com." (She bought both URLs.)
Good writing on Internet dating sites may be rare because males know that the best way to get laid is to send messages to as many females as possible. To be efficient, they put very little work into each message and therefore pay scant attention to each woman's profile. The come-on becomes spam and gums up the works, or scares women away, which in turn can lead to a different kind of gender disparity: a room full of dudes. "There is a fundamental imbalance in the social dynamic," Harj Taggar, the investor at Y Combinator, told me. "The most valuable asset is attractive females. As soon as you get them, you get loads of creepy guys."
The online dating sites are themselves a little like online-dating-site suitors. They want you. They exaggerate their height and salary. They hide their bald spots and back fat. Each has a distinct personality and a carefully curated profile - a look, a strong side, and, to borrow from TACT, a philosophy of life values. Nothing determines the atmosphere and experience of an Internet dating service more than the people who use it, but sometimes the sites reflect the personalities or predilections of their founders.
OK Cupid, in its profile, comes across as the witty, literate geek-hipster, the math major with the Daft Punk vinyl collection and the mumblecore screenplay in development. Get to know it a little better and you'll find that it contains multitudes - old folks, squares, more Jews than JDate, the polyamorous crowd. Dating sites have for the most part always had either a squalid or a chain-store ambience. OK Cupid, with a breezy, facetious tone, an intuitive approach, and proprietary matching stratagems, comes close to feeling like a contemporary Internet product, and a pastime for the young. By reputation, it's where you go if you want to hook up, although perhaps not if you are, as the vulgate has it, "looking for someone" - the phrase that connotes a desire for commitment but a countervailing aversion to compromise. Owing to high traffic and a sprightly character, OK Cupid was also perhaps the most desirable eligible bachelor out there, until February, when it was bought, for fifty million dollars, by Match.
OK Cupid's founders, who have stayed on since the sale, are four math majors from Harvard. While still in school, in the late nineties, they created a successful company called the Spark, which composed and posted online study guides along the lines of Cliffs Notes. At the time, they experimented with a dating site called SparkMatch. The fodder for their matching apparatus was a handful of personality tests and droll questionnaires that they'd posted on the Spark to lure traffic. They sold the company to Barnes & Noble in 2001 and then reunited in 2003 to revive the dating idea. To solve the chicken-egg conundrum of a dating site - to attract users, you need users - they created a handful of quizzes, chief among them the Dating Persona Test. A man might learn, for example, that he's a Billy Goat, a Backrubber, a Vapor Trail, a Poolboy, or the Last Man on Earth. The Hornivore ("roaming, sexual, subhuman") might want to consider the female type Genghis Khunt ("master of man, bringer of pain") and avoid the Sonnet ("romantic, hopeful, composed"). They also urged people to submit their own quizzes. By now, users have submitted more than forty-three thousand quizzes to the site. Answer this or that pile of questions and you can find out which Lost character/chess piece/chemical element you are.
Essentially, OK Cupid opened a parlor-game emporium and then got down to the business of pairing off the patrons. The quizzes had no bearing on the matching, and at this point they are half-hidden on the site. They were merely bait - a pickup line, a push-up bra. There is a different question regimen for matching. On OK Cupid, the questions are submitted by users. There are three variables to each question: your own answer, the answer you'd like a match to give, and how important you think this answer should be. The questions are ranked in order of how effective they are at sorting people. Some questions might be of utmost importance ("Have you ever murdered anyone?") but of little use, in sorting people. Others that divide well ("Do you like Brussels sprouts?") will not do so meaningfully.
And yet some questions are unpredictably predictive. One of the founders, Christian Rudder, maintains the OK Trends blog, sifting through the mountains of data and composing clever, mathematically sourced synopses of his findings. There are now nearly two hundred and eighty thousand questions on the site; OK Cupid has collected more than eight hundred million answers. (People on the site answer an average of three hundred questions.) Rudder has discovered, for example, that the answer to the question "Do you like the taste of beer?" is more predictive than any other of whether you're willing to have sex on a first date. (That is, people on OK Cupid who have answered yes to one are likely to have answered yes to the other.) OK Cupid has also analyzed couples who have met on the site and have since left it. Of the 34,620 couples the site has analyzed, the casual first-date question whose shared answer was most likely to signal a shot at longevity (beyond the purview of OK Cupid, anyway) was "Do you like horror movies?" When I signed up for the site, some of the first things I was asked were "Are clams alive?" and "Which is bigger, the sun or the earth?" It's hard to discern the significance.
The purpose of the blog is to attract attention: the findings, like the quizzes, are to lure you in. Rudder has written a lot about looks: whether or not it helps to show cleavage (women) or a bare midriff (men) - the answers were Yes, Especially as You Age, and Yes, If You Have Good Abs and Are Not a Congressman. He found that women generally prefer it when in photos men are looking away from the camera (hypothesis: less intimidating), and that men prefer the opposite (they want a woman's full attention). A user can rate other people's profiles. The matching algorithms take these ratings into account and show you people who are roughly within your range of attractiveness, according to the opinions of others. The idea behind the matching algorithms, Chris Coyne told me, is to replicate the experience you have off-line. "We tried to imagine software that would be like your friend in the real world," Coyne said. "If I were your friend and I told you that So-and-So would be the perfect date, your response to me would be to start asking me questions. Does she like dancing? Does she smoke pot? Is she a furry? Is she tall? On the Internet, people will ask - and answer - extremely personal questions."
OK Cupid sends all your answers to its servers, which are housed on Broad Street in New York. The algorithms find the people out there whose answers best correspond to yours - how yours fit their desires and how theirs meet yours, and according to what degree of importance. It's a Venn diagram. And then the algorithms determine how exceptional those particular correlations are: it's more statistically significant to share an affection for the Willies than for the Beatles. The match is expressed as a percentage. Each match search requires tens of millions of mathematical operations. To the extent that OK Cupid has any abiding faith, it is in mathematics.
There's another layer: how to sort the matches. "You've got to make sure certain people don't get all the attention," Rudder said. "In a bar, it's self-correcting. You see ten guys standing around one woman, maybe you don't walk over and try to introduce yourself. Online, people have no idea how 'surrounded' a person is. And that creates a shitty situation. Dudes don't get messages back. Some women get overwhelmed." And so the attractiveness ratings, as well as the frequency of messaging, are factored in. As on Match.com, the algorithms pay attention to revealed preferences. "We watch people who don't know they're being watched," Sam Yagan, the company's C.E.O., said. "But not in a Big Brother way." The algorithms learn as they go, changing the weighting for certain variables to adjust to the success or the failure rate of the earlier iterations. The goal is to connect you with someone with whom you have enough in common to want to strike up an e-mail correspondence and then quickly meet in person. It is not OK Cupid's concern whether you are suited for a lifetime together.
OK Cupid winds up with a lot of data. This enables the researchers to conjure from their database the person you may not realize you have in mind. "Like that guy in high school with the Camaro and the mustache who bow-hunts on weekends," Rudder said. "You can find that guy of the imagination by using statistics." The database also gives them a vast pool to sell to academics. In no other milieu do so many people, from such a broad demographic swath, willingly answer so many intimate questions. It is a gold mine for social scientists. In the past nine months, OK Cupid has sold its raw data (redacted or made anonymous to protect the privacy of its customers) to half a dozen academics. Gregory Huber and Neil Malhotra, political scientists at Yale and Stanford, respectively, are sifting through OK Cupid data to determine how political opinions factor in to choosing social partners. Rudder, for his part, has determined that Republicans have more in common with Republicans than Democrats have in common with Democrats, which led him to conclude, "The Democrats are doomed."
OK Cupid's office occupies a single floor of an office building a block away from the Port Authority Bus Terminal, that old redoubt of pimps. It's an open-air loft space, with the four founders at desks in the middle of a phalanx of young men (and one woman) staring at screens. The four are Sam Yagan, the C.E.O.; Chris Coyne, the president and creative director; Max Krohn, the C.T.O.; and Christian Rudder, the editorial director. As they all like to say, Sam is the business, Chris is the product, Max is the tech, and Christian is the blog.
Yagan, who is thirty-four, is also the face. A Chicagoan with the mischievous self-assurance of a renegade salesman - he can seem solicitous and scornful at once - he does appearances on Rachael Ray and meetings with the suits at I.A.C. He makes grandiose claims with a mixture of mirth and sincerity. As he said to me one day, We are the most important search engine on the Web, not Google. The search for companionship is more important than the search for song lyrics.
All four founders maintain profiles on OK Cupid, but they are all married, and they all met their wives the analogue way. Yagan met his wife, Jessica, in high school, outside Chicago, where she and their two kids now live; she works for McDonald's, overseeing the sustainability of its supply chain. He commutes to New York every week, bunking in a hotel. Rudder, who is thirty-five and from Little Rock, met his wife, a public-relations executive from Long Island named Reshma Patel, twelve years ago through friends. They live in a modest apartment in Williamsburg, and often have friends over at night to play German board games. Coyne and his wife, Jennie Tarr Coyne, who have a toddler and a child on the way, have been together eight years, but sometimes they go out and pretend it's their first date. She is from Manhattan and works in the education department at the Frick Collection. They were classmates at Harvard, but they met again a few years later outside a night club in New York. He had a drunken woman on each arm. "Don't I know you?" he said."I was a little grossed out," she recalled. "I decided I was done with him." "She decided she had to have me," Coyne said.
Afterward, she looked him up on the Internet, and discovered that he'd come from a town in Maine near where her father, Jeff Tarr, also a Harvard graduate, grew up, and that they had gone to the same Scout camp. Chris and Jennie began e-mailing each other, and eventually went out on a date. She considers herself an excellent matchmaker, with a well-tested compatibility theory of her own - that a man and a woman should look alike. (In 2004, Evolutionary Psychology published a study of this phenomenon titled, Narcissism guides mate selection: Humans mate assortatively, as revealed by facial resemblance, following an algorithm of "self seeking like.") She and Coyne are both blond, fair, and lean, although, because he is seventeen inches taller, she worried they'd be ill matched. They were engaged within a year. They moved into an apartment in the same building as her parents: the San Remo, on Central Park West. Jennie's father, too, had started out in the computer-dating business; at Harvard, he'd been one of the founders of Operation Match, the inspiration for TACT.
The Coynes' marriage has a whiff of a phantom variable that the matching algorithms don't seem to take into account: fate. Serendipity and coincidence are the photosynthesis of romance, hinting at some kind of supernatural preordination, the sense that two people are made for each other. The Internet subverts Kismet. And yet Coyne and his wife both have a profile on the site, and the algorithms have determined that she is his No. 1 match. He is her No. 2. She struck up a correspondence with her No. 1, a man in England, who eventually, after she friended him on Facebook, stopped writing her back.
For all the fun that twenty-somethings are having hooking up with their Hornivores, their Sonnets, and their Poolboys, it turns out that the fastest-growing online-dating demographic is people over fifty - a function perhaps of expanding computer literacy and diminished opportunity. I recently got to know a woman I'll call Mary Taft, who is seventy-six, has a doctorate in education, and has been married and divorced twice. She lives outside Boston. As a single mother, in her forties, she gave up men for a while. "When you have a kid, dating is very hard, unless you have a lot of money or you don't give a damn," she told me. When her son was ready to go to college, she started dating again. She was fifty-eight. Through a dating service, she met an economist, who was eight years younger than she. They lived together for a decade. Eventually, Taft told me, "he had to go to other cities to look for other jobs. I didn't go. And that was that." In 2000, she put an ad in Harvard Magazine. "This seemed horrible to me, but I got all kinds of responses. A nice guy from Vermont drove all the way down to see me." And then, when she was almost seventy, she discovered Internet dating, and the frequency and variety of her assignations intensified.
She met a mathematician who lived in Amsterdam, and flew over to meet him but discovered within minutes that he suffered from full-blown O.C.D. She drove up to New Hampshire in the rain for lunch with a man with whom she'd been carrying on a promising e-mail and telephone correspondence for a few days, but he told her that he found her unattractive. She met a financier on Yahoo's dating site. They got together for coffee at Cafe Pamplona, in Cambridge. He was handsome, charming, and bright. He was also, as a friend's follow-up Google search revealed, a felon, and had served time in prison in a RICO case. "I did see him again," she said. "And then I realized how crazy he was. He wasn't nice, either." For two years, she has had an off-and-on affair with a forty-seven-year-old man she met on Yahoo, and she recently met a man on Match.com who showed up for their first date wearing a woman's sun hat, slippers, and three purses. He invited her to accompany him to Norway to meet the Queen.
"You have to learn the rules," she said. "But there are no rules." More often than not, she initiates contact. "At my age, I have to." She also feels that, in her profile, she has to shave a few years from her age and leave out the fact that she has a doctoral degree, having concluded that men are often scared off by it. She has gone online as a man, just to survey the terrain, and estimates that in her age range women outnumber men ten to one. "Men my age are grabbed up immediately by friends," she said. "Or else they believe that younger women are more interested in sex."
"I've learned, forget about writing," she said. "Meet a person as soon as you can. Anyway, the profiles you read, they're like bathtubs. There's no variation."
If the dating sites had a mixer, you might find OK Cupid by the bar, muttering factoids and jokes, and Match.com in the middle of the room, conspicuously dropping everyone's first names into his sentences. The clean-shaven gentleman on the couch, with the excellent posture, the pastel golf shirt, and that strangely chaste yet fiery look in his eye? That would be eHarmony. EHarmony is the squarest of the sites, the one most overtly geared toward finding you a spouse. It was launched, in 2000, by Neil Clark Warren, a clinical psychologist who had spent three decades treating and studying married couples and working out theories about what made their marriages succeed or fail. He had noticed that he was spending most of his time negotiating exit strategies in marriages that were already irreparably broken, mainly because the couples shouldn't have been married in the first place. From his own research, and his review of the academic and clinical literature, he concluded that two people were more likely to stay together, and stay together happily, if they shared certain psychological traits. As he has often said, opposites attract - and then they attack. He designed eHarmony to identify and align these shared traits, and to keep opposites away from each other.
Warren was also a seminarian and a devout Christian, and eHarmony started out as a predominantly Christian site. The evangelical conservative James Dobson, through his organization Focus on the Family, had published advice books that Warren had written and provided early support and publicity for eHarmony. It didn't match gay couples (its stated reason being that it hadn't done any research on them), and it sometimes had trouble finding matches for certain kinds of people (atheists, for example, and people who'd been divorced twice). As it has grown into the second-biggest fee-based dating service in the world, eHarmony has expanded and shed its more orthodox orientation, and severed its connections to Dobson. In 2009, under pressure from a slew of class-action lawsuits, it created a separate site specifically for homosexuals. Still, the foundational findings of Warren's psychology practice remain in place - the so-called "29 Dimensions of Compatibility," which have been divided into "Core Traits" and "Vital Attributes."
These undergo constant fine-tuning in what eHarmony calls its "relationship lab," on the ground floor of an anonymous office building in Pasadena. The director of the lab, and the senior director of research and development at eHarmony, is a psychologist named Gian Gonzaga. He and his staff bring in couples and observe them as they perform various tasks. Then they come to conclusions about the human condition, which they put to use in improving their matching algorithms and, perhaps just as important, in getting out the word that they are doing so. There is a touch of Potemkin in the enterprise.
One night in March, Gonzaga invited me to observe a session that was part of a five-year longitudinal study he is conducting of three hundred and one married couples. EHarmony had solicited them on its site, in churches, and from registration lists at bridal shows. Of the three hundred and one, fifty-five had met on eHarmony.
Gonzaga, an affable Philadelphian, introduced me to one of his colleagues, Heather Setrakian, who was running the study. She was also his wife. They'd met in the psychology department at U.C.L.A., where Gonzaga was conducting a study on married couples. Setrakian, who had a master's in clinical psychology, was the project co-ordinator. To test their procedures, they needed a man and a woman to impersonate a married couple for multiple sessions. Gonzaga and Setrakian became the impersonators, and fell in love. "Some of our fake marriages had a lot more money than we have now, and a trampoline, and in-laws in Utah," Setrakian said.
The eHarmony relationship lab consists of four windowless interview rooms, each of them furnished with a couch, easy chairs, silk flowers, and semi-hidden cameras. The walls were painted beige, to better frame telltale facial expressions and physical gestures on videotape. "With white walls, blondes wash out," Gonzaga explained. Down the hall was the control room, with several computer screens on which Gonzaga and Setrakian and their team of researchers observe their test subjects.
Each couple came for an interview three or so months before their wedding, and then periodically afterward. They also filled out questionnaires and diaries according to a schedule. In the lab, they were asked to participate in four types of interaction, where first one spouse, and then the other, initiates a discussion. (The discussions ranged from two to ten minutes.) One was called 'capitalization,' in which each spouse starts a discussion of something good that has happened to him or her; Gonzaga and the team would monitor the other spouse's manner of dealing with his or her mate's good fortune. ("The more you are similar to someone, the easier it is to validate them," Gonzaga said. "Sharing the event requires sharing a sense of self.") Another is called "the tease," in which one spouse adopts a funny or critical nickname for the other, and they discuss its origins and appropriateness. "We look at the delivery of the tease," Gonzaga said. "Is the tease relationship enhancing or bullying? When done well, it's verbal play. It helps test the bond." "Then you have to think about the valence of the tease," Setrakian said. "Teasing can be overwhelmingly negative yet delivered with positive emotion."
A third interaction is conflict resolution; the husband chooses something that has been bugging him about his wife, and they spend ten minutes hashing it out. Then the wife gets her shot. Gonzaga is on the lookout for what he calls 'skills' - techniques and behaviors that a couple may or may not have for dealing with good and bad news. "Skills come into sharper relief when spouses are under duress." He cited eye-rolling as an example of a contemptuous gesture that might indicate a lack of skill: "When you see that, it does not bode well for the marriage."
Gonzaga showed me recordings of several sessions involving some couples in the program. (Their participation in the study is confidential, but they had consented to let me watch their sessions.) Each couple appeared in split screen, although they'd sat across from each other in the lab. In the conflict-resolution segment, each spouse chooses an area of grievance from a list called the Inventory of Marital Problems, developed by psychologists in 1981. The list encompasses, to name just a few, Children, Religion, In-laws/Parents/Relatives, Household Management, Unrealistic Expectations, Sex, Trust. Each subject rates each category on a scale of 1 to 7, ranging from Not a Problem to Major Problem. One couple, who had met on eHarmony, had as its issue the wife's moods, and the husband's fear of them. "Why is my temper a problem?" the wife said.
"I'm not saying it's serious," the husband said.
"If it's not serious, why are you bringing it up?"
"I walk on eggshells around you."
"I asked you to wash the toaster, and you gave me a hard time about that."
Setrakian said, "See, she's turned it into a conversation about him again."
"Look at how she belittles him," Gonzaga said. Apparently, this behavior did not augur well.
A second couple - I'll call them Leon and Leona - had also met on eHarmony. He was a third-generation Mexican-American from the San Gabriel Valley who worked for the city of Los Angeles. She was a Mexican immigrant who worked as a family therapist. They were both heavyset and inclined toward a projection of light amusement, although hers seemed more acerbic. He had had a mostly fruitless dating career. "I was a novice," he said. She had mostly dated guys from her neighborhood who lived with their parents, hadn't gone to school, and couldn't communicate as well as she. "I want a man who doesn't have a rap sheet and doesn't sell drugs out of his mama's house," she said. EHarmony selected her as a compatible partner for Leon, but he put her aside at first, because her name was too much like his. Finally, they went through the stages of communication. (Since they had both studied psychology, he asked her in an e-mail early on, "What's your theoretical orientation?" to which she recalls thinking, Do you really fucking care? Who asks that question?) On the day of their first date, she spent the morning helping a friend buy a wedding ring in Beverly Hills and the afternoon attending the wedding of a friend in the Valley, where she caught the bride's bouquet. ("I wasn't trying to get it or anything. It bounced off the ceiling into my hands.") So perhaps she was inclined, when she met Leon, at a Ben & Jerry's in Burbank, to see him in a favorable light. After three years, they moved in together, and married a year later. They have a one-year-old son. I watched the tease. Typically, Gonzaga gives the subjects initials to choose from, and the couple uses them to come up with a moniker. "My favorite nickname of all time, in a study out of Wisconsin, someone got the initials L.I. and came up with Little Impotent," Gonzaga recalls. "You get a lot of Ass Detective and Huge Fart." Leona was given the initials B.D. and chose the moniker Boob Dude.
"Boob Dude?" Leon said.
"Boob Dude."
"Boob Dude. Why?"
"Because, like, you tease me about not paying attention to little details, but hello!” Leona looked at him coolly and said, "You're such a boob, dude."
"That's pretty good."
"It's pretty good, huh?"
"I like this part of the study."
"You're such a boob."
"No, you're a boob.”
"No, you're a boob. You're, like, 'Put the dog down,' but your ass is in an air-conditioned car, and I'm holding the stuff. You're such a boob, dude."
Back in the control room, Gonzaga explained that their teasing had a flirtatious and sympathetic tone, which was a sign that their senses of humor were aligned and that therefore they were harmonious—tease-wise, at least. Perhaps eHarmony had chosen well.
“And then you come out with some grapes,” Leona said.
“And you’re, like, ‘Are those for me?’ ”
“I didn’t say, ‘Are those for me?’ I said, ‘Oh, that was really nice.’”
“And then you said, ‘They’re mine.’ And that’s something I probably would have said.”
“You don’t share, dude.”
“I do, too. I share.”
“You share after you’re done.”
“That’s not true. I share with you my pastrami.”
As they giggled, Gonzaga’s voice came over the intercom, announcing the end of the session.
In 2005, in response to the success of eHarmony, Match.com began developing a new site - a longer-term-relationship operation with a scientific underpinning. The white coat whom Match.com recruited for this new counter-venture was a biological anthropologist named Helen Fisher, a research professor at Rutgers and a renowned scholar of human attraction and attachment. Fisher’s observations and findings regarding the human personality, romantic or otherwise, are rooted in her study of the human species over the millennia and in the role that brain chemistry plays in temperament, especially with regard to love, attraction, choice, and compatibility. She has used brain scans to track the activity of chemicals in the brains of people in various states of romantic agitation. She has devised four personality types, or “dimensions” (explorer, negotiator, builder, director), that correspond to various neurochemicals (respectively, dopamine, estrogen/oxytocin, serotonin, testosterone). Although the proposition of four types is not new (Plato, Jung), her nomenclature and their biochemical foundation represent a frontier of relationship science, albeit one that is thinly populated and open to flanking attack.
The new site was christened Chemistry.com. To sign up, you take a personality test that Fisher designed, which asks you questions about everything from feelings about following rules to your understanding of complex machinery and the length of your ring finger, relative to your index finger. Once you have a type, the site uses it to choose matches for you. You don’t necessarily always wind up with your own type. Chemistry.com’s algorithms rely primarily on your stated preferences, but the various alleged compatibilities between this or that type are factored in. My wife took the test, and I was among her first ten suggested matches.
Fisher contends that dating online is a reversion to an ancient, even primal approach to pairing off. She conjures millions of years of human prehistory: small groups of hunter-gatherers wandering the savanna, and then congregating a few times a year at this or that watering hole. Amid the merriment and the information exchange, the adolescents develop eyes for one another, in view of their elders and peers. The groups likely know each other, from earlier gatherings or hunting parties. “In the ever present gossip circles,” Fisher once wrote, “a young girl could easily collect data on a potential suitor’s hunting skills, even on whether he was amusing, kind, smart.”
It wasn’t until the twentieth century that it became normal for young people to pair up with strangers, in real or relative anonymity. “Walking into a bar is totally artificial,” Fisher told me. “We’ve come to believe that this is the way to court. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. What’s natural is knowing a few fundamental things about someone before you meet.” Vetting has always occurred at many levels, ranging from the genealogical to the pheromonal. In her view, dating via the Internet enables, as she wrote, “the modern human brain to pursue more comfortably its ancestral mating dance.”
I met Fisher for lunch one day on the Upper East Side, not far from her apartment/office, off Fifth Avenue. She’s sixty-six, once-divorced, childless. She goes out pretty much every night she’s not working, to plays, movies, concerts, and lectures. She’s an explorer/negotiator, which means she’s restless and open to adventure but also, of course, eager to please others. She expressed happy surprise that Chemistry.com had suggested me—an explorer/negotiator, apparently—as a match for my wife, who is a director/explorer. Fisher told me that her current boyfriend has read the complete works of Shakespeare aloud to her in bed, as well as some Dickens and Ibsen.
She identified two big social trends that have led to a greater reliance on online dating: an aging population, and women around the world entering the workforce, marrying later, divorcing more, moving from place to place. “Our social and sexual patterns have changed more in the last fifty years than in the last ten thousand,” she told me. “Our courtship rituals are rapidly changing, and we don’t know what to do.”
She was especially excited about some research she’d been doing with Lee Silver, a molecular biologist at Princeton University, who had been studying a hundred thousand test responses from Chemistry.com, in the hope of one day synching up such data with buccal-swab results. “We’re all combinations, but we also all have distinct personalities, and we know that, damn it,” Fisher said. “This is not dreaming. Up until recently, we’ve been looking only at the cultural basis of who we are.” That said, she does not foresee, anytime soon, the development or commercial sale of, as she put it, “a vaccine against falling for assholes.”
At the eHarmony relationship lab, I got to watch a couple undergo a one-year-anniversary session. They were not an eHarmony couple. They’d met while working on a film set. They had both failed to make a Hollywood living and now held jobs that they hated while they struggled to nourish what remained of their creative aspirations. He was tall and wiry, and had served in the military. She had a wary, melancholic air and was curled up in a chair, as though recoiling from the camera that she knew was embedded in the wall behind her husband. Their participation was halting at first. The silliness of the tease exercise made them self-conscious. But soon they were squabbling about housework, and about the apportionment of their duties in a building they managed, and about the money he was making or not making, as he tried to launch a new company. She wanted to start a family but couldn’t justify doing so in their current financial situation. “I was expecting things to move along a little faster than they have,” she said.
“I’m in my mid-thirties now, and I should be farther along somehow,” he said. Each was frustrated by the faltering progress of the other. She wanted stability. He wanted support. Watching them go on like this, in a weary, embittered, and yet still affectionate and hopeful way, for more than an hour, I recalled Gonzaga saying that incompatibility can often be imperceptible until a couple is subjected to some kind of difficulty of the world’s devising: problems involving health, money, children, or work.
“Let’s talk about household management,” she said. “I don’t trust that you are taking your job seriously, so I have to do it.”
“It’s just a half hour a day.”
“Just do the job and not be a complainer.”
“Like I told you, I’m working odd jobs, I’m building a company that’s going to make us a lot of money, whether you think it’s a pie in the sky or not. It’s too much to do while you go play yoga and go have lunch with your friends.”
A few minutes later, it was his turn to pick a conflict topic. “I’ll try not to take five of the seven minutes railing on you,” he said. “My topic is moods. I resent how I get criticized for every little thing. I try to get you to back off, but you just won’t let things go. You turn into this person who’s different, whom I don’t like very much.”
“I admit it. I’ve told you I know it’s an issue and I’m working on it.”
“A part of me wants you to be happy more than I want myself to be happy and even more than you want me to be happy.”
Gonzaga and Setrakian sat side by side, staring at the monitor. “They look so sad,” Setrakian said. “External stress, that’s what kills you,” Gonzaga said. There was a silence in the room and on the screen. “It’s hard to figure out what to do with material as meaty as this.” “We can code the themes,” Setrakian said. “And do a textual analysis: How do they use pronouns?”
It’s senseless, at least in the absence of divine agency, to declare that any two people were made for each other, yet we say it all the time, to sustain our belief that it’s sensible for them to pair up. The conceit can turn the search for someone into a search for that someone, which is fated to end in futility or compromise, whether conducted on the Internet or in a ballroom. And yet people find each other, every which way, and often achieve something that they call happiness.
Look around a Starbucks and imagine that all the couples you see are Internet daters complying with the meet-first-for-coffee rule of thumb: here’s another bland, neutral establishment webbed with unspoken expectation and disillusionment. One evening, I found myself in such a place with a thirty-eight-year-old elementary-school teacher who had spent more than ten years plying Match.com and Nerve.com, as well as the analogue markets, in search of someone with whom to spend the rest of her life. She’d met dozens of men. Her mother felt that she was being too picky. In December, she started corresponding online with a man a couple of years older than she. After a week and a half, they met for drinks, which turned into dinner and more. He was clever, handsome, and capable. In their e-mails, they’d agreed that they’d reached a time and place in their lives to be less cautious and cool, in matters of the heart, so when, two days later, he sent a photograph of a caipirinha, the national cocktail of Brazil, where he’d gone for a few weeks on business, she found herself suggesting that she join him there. He made the arrangements. Her mother approved. She flew down to Rio the next week, and he came to the airport with a driver to meet her.
Months later, she savored the memory of that moment when he greeted her with a passionate hug, and the week and who knows what else lay before them. A swirl of anticipation, uncertainty, and desire converged into an instant of bliss. For that feeling alone—to say nothing of the chance to go to Brazil—she would do it all over again, even though, during the next ten days, with nothing but sex to stave off their corrosive exchanges over past and future frustrations, they came to despise each other. When they returned to New York, they split up, and went back online.
Huffington Post Article and Comments!
Since I left my husband I have been unable to do a number of things - the most frustrating lost skill is the ability to date. After nine years in a committed relationship, I have extreme difficulty navigating the nuanced dance that is dating. I have learned I can't be too direct, eager, needy, desperate, clingy, emotional, commitment pressuring, or baby daddy seeking. I also have to avoid looking cold, aloof, bitchy, mean, shallow, negative or distant. And of course I can't even talk about my ex, even if the past nine years of my life was living and working with him! Then there are the crazy games of when to text, email or call, when to answer immediately, when to act interested or disinterested and when to completely blow them off. As a person who is by nature very direct and to the point, dating is a mystery trapped in a puzzle, tucked in a fireproof safe thrown down a mineshaft. I just can't figure it out. But the most distressing behavior is the casual sex hook-up mating habits that dominate New York City, a city that I adore and call my home.
I am a committed relationship type of gal. I make no illusions to being anything but this, and I do not judge others with different lifestyles. If a polyamorous life of multiple lovers or a string of emotionally detached one-night stands with perfect strangers is satisfying to a person, then they should be doing exactly that. But I know there are others like me that aren't wired this way, and seek something with some level of greater commitment both emotionally and sexually. I have a myriad of friends who complain all the time:"I am not slutty enough for New York."
And I can relate. I have made failed attempts of hooking up with partners for something casual, but every time the results have been disastrous. For the most part I am let down by an experience that was supposed to be fun, and which ends up making my life more complicated. I had one man who kept calling me for months, another who rudely told me about his other women -- and yes there is a polite way to handle this -- and yet another who had a mild breakdown in my apartment about how he couldn't handle the "gray area". So I realized, I am not this person, I need to be true to myself so I went back to my committed relationship roots. But no matter how much I keep trying to go for a relationship, the hook-up scenario keeps rearing its ugly head. I might start talking to a guy only to see him leave with a woman who has made it perfectly clear that a hook-up is about to happen. A situation I like to call survival of the sluttiest.
It is just sort of expected by many that you start the physical part of the relationship first, and then see if either partner wants to continue after the fact, sort of a try before you buy situation. Sex before emotional attachment, sex before any form of relationship, sex before everything.
• The guy will call or text when he wants to hookup but that is about it.
• You are supposed to be on call to wait for the opportunity to see him
• Don't reveal too much about yourself, but listen to him complain
• Don't expect commitment, or exclusivity
• Don't expect any emotional bonding
• Don't expect much effort on his part to impress you
• Don't expect him to make you feel important in his life
Not exactly what I call fun, but again everyone is different and for some people this situation is ideal. What I find frustrating is that if you really want to get to know a guy first before having sex with him, it seems like there is no end to the women who will jump into bed with them. And this isn't to say that only men do this, as women engage in the same behavior as do people of all sexual orientations and gender identifications.
I didn't think that in order to try to have a healthy sustained relationship with a person I am supposed to have sex with them hours or even minutes after meeting them. It seems more like long-term relationship suicide.
I know there a plenty of men and women who are frustrated like myself out there. But what are we supposed to do when everyone around us seems to be whoring it up? And if people can so easily get no-strings attached sex, and then never see the person again if they choose, why would they try for anything else?
There are no real rules with relationships and sometimes sleeping with a stranger leads to years of coupled bliss, but it is rare when that happens. And in a city where pretty much anyone can become anonymous overnight, promiscuous behavior dominates. How did this become the ideal lifestyle? And is there a place for people like myself who want something more traditional? I don't want to move, but I am really getting tired of being alone.
Fark Comments
At some point, you have to be able to conclude that the one factor that links all your poor dating choices is you. Work on that, and maybe you'll find some happiness, or not. But I am sort of tired of urbanite women complaining bitterly that their choices are dimmed by sluts, and not their own damn standards and behavior. Way to take some responsibility for your own destiny. Super empowering there. Blame. Other. Women.
Market forces. The men ain't buying what you're selling at the price you're charging.
It sounds about right, but it's not that much different for women of any age. Generally speaking, most men want sex first. Some men also crave long-term relationships and kids, but generally it takes a back seat to our more primal urges to rut like sweaty monkeys with every attractive woman we see.
The most basic desires for men happen to be sex. For women, it's security. Based on these two competing elements of coupling, the power is strongly in women's hands when they're 18-29 and at the peak of their attractiveness and then begins decreasing. For men, the power is out of their hands when they're younger, but increases as they get into their prime earning age bracket of 30-50.
In short, lady, those women that you're demeaning as slutty are doing what they can to connect with a guy in a competitive and shifting market. Adapt or sink.
Used goods always are offered at a substantial markdown
It's funny - supply-side economics and market forces don't really explain a lot of economic trends and phenomena, but they do a really impressive job of explaining mating and dating.
I did the dating website for a while before I found a gal that I'm now getting along splendidly with. Here's a hint, if you're over 35 and you have kids, you better be resigned to either 1) being single or 2) be willing to settle some (he won't have rock hard abs and a penis that ejaculates chocolate flavored hundred dollar bills).
Also, the guys that are left at that age who might be interested in divorcees themselves. So basically a bunch of people proven to have trouble with relationships trying to build new relationships, after their best years have past and carrying baggage. Yep, going to be tough.
I've had a couple good friends (guys) go through this, and even though they were very good buddies I had to admit they were pretty much unmarriageable - overweight, lots of bad habits, dopey personalities. That is except to a foreign bride. They went the mail-order bride route and got really nice wives who seem pretty happy. The women don't seem to notice the things about the guys that would have driven an American woman crazy, and the guys are considered catches relative to their circumstances back in their home countries. Not sure where that leaves the ladies here - can they get mail-order husbands?
I'm actualy a bit surprised she didn't just start ho'ing it up after she got divorced. I know a few dudes that couldn't get a bit of luvin' from their wives while married, but the second they were split up the wives turned into cock-crazy nymphos. Sure...you can say "oh, the guy must not have done this or this...", but really, they're ho'ing it up because they have to. You can't go all Mother Theresa in teh dating phase, or your boyfriend is going to bail REAL quick.
They'll wait until your settled down to turn off the F-switch and get back down to watching Oprah. This chic just hasn't figured it out yet.
Less attitude and more beer fetchin' and sandwich making might get you a man, sugartits.
This just in:
Men like to see tits and ass. They can always listen to you talk about your philosophy next friday night, if nothing shows up then where they might see yet more tits and ass.
Actually, for the most part, all I ask is
* don't outweigh your own car
* save the Real Housewives horsesh*t for the weekly "guhhhfrennn" luncheon dates
* don't lie to me
* hold up your half of the sky. I only got two hands.
* have a sense of humor, life is absurd.
* if you're unhappy about something, tell me what it is. If we're sleeping together, I'm probably on your team. Skip the passive aggressive nonsense or I'm moving to the roof.
* If you're gonna be crazy, be happy crazy. Don't be sad crazy. ( Words of wisdom from my mom.)
Oddly, I think this is pretty low threshold stuff.
What she fails to realize is that we love sluts. Why do you think it's always the virgins that get sacrificed? It gives them motivation to not be virgins and we sure aren't going to go killing all the sluts.
old age and treachery overcome youth and skill.
/ so put that BJ to work its called a job for a reason
She's been out of the dating scene so long, she missed the memo: Your dating strategy based on withholding sex that used to work in the 80's and early 90's no longer works today. Demand for free, no-strings-attached sex has not changed, but available supply has increased. You're not going to get anywhere by "playing hard to get" with your hoo-hoo. Today's men will just go elsewhere, probably to someone younger.
I bet she spent her twenties not giving men her own age the time of day, and now she is upset that these same men are dating girls that are younger than her.
Survival of the Sluttiest
Sounds like a reality show I might actually watch
Sounds like someone who used to get chased and is now unused to being a small fish in a well-stocked lake.
People always over complicate their own situations. They search for excuses rather than simply being objective. Blunt truth: If you have a hard time dating, it means you are not desirable enough. Most people think very highly of themselves, its human nature, they forget that they have to be worthy of the other person.. not just the other way around.
Ladies, does your day usually start like this ? "I don't like THIS and I don't like THAT and I certainly would never THAT or THIS and furthermore, I am tired of THIS and I do not like THAT and..."
... for a nominal fee, I can tell you what's wrong.
It's simple, ladies. Bring something to the table besides a fork and the menu from the last place you ate.
As a newly divorced 42-year old man, I can commiserate. The dating scene can be summed up as: "the odds are good, but the goods are odd". But hey, it's fun meeting the crazies for a drink and some lulz!
We're not ATM's, we're not Ken dolls, we're not interchangeable parts of some have it all malarkey equation you bought off supermarket magazine rack. Once you punch that ticket, if you bail, you're negotiating with a whole different set of assets and liabilities and we are not obliged to cater to your sense of entitlement. I got divorced 29 years ago and I have no illusions that I'm some well heeled, 20ish studmuffin with a Maybach and a house in the Hamptons. I'm hanging tough and all, but I play to my strengths should an opportunity for a relationship present itself. If you're drumming your fingers and tapping your foot and saying "GOD! Come ON! give me what I WANT!", you better be standing at a deli counter.
Honestly I think it's been 50 years of good news for men:
1960s - burn your bra! Let's face it, nothing gets men more riled up than women without bras.
1970s - "doing the honorable thing" becomes paying for abortion.
1980s - career baby, you can have it all!
1990s - blowjobs aren't sex. Well ok, if you insist, we won't count it either.
2000s - dress like a slut to show your girl power! Men everywhere cringe.
2010s - just shut up and get the clothes off. Cuz all your friends do.
God bless the feminists, every last dumb one of them. What WILL they think of next!
Love, Lies and What They Learned
THERE are millions of Americans seeking love on the Internet. Little do they know that teams of scientists are eagerly watching them trying to find it.
Like contemporary Margaret Meads, these scholars have gathered data from dating sites like Match.com, OkCupid and Yahoo! Personals to study attraction, trust, deception — even the role of race and politics in prospective romance.
They have observed, for instance, that many daters would rather admit to being fat than liberal or conservative, that white people are reluctant to date outside their race and that there are ways to detect liars. Such findings spring from attempts to answer a broader question that has bedeviled humanity since Adam and Eve: how and why do people fall in love?
“There is relatively little data on dating, and most of what was out there in the literature about mate selection and relationship formation is based on U.S. Census data,” said Gerald A. Mendelsohn, a professor in the psychology department at the University of California, Berkeley.
His research involving more than one million online dating profiles was partly financed by a grant from the National Science Foundation. “This now gives an access to dating that we never really had before,” He said. (Collectively, the major dating sites had more than 593 million visits in the United States last month, according to the Internet tracking firm Experian Hitwise.)
Andrew T. Fiore, a data scientist at Facebook and a former visiting assistant professor at Michigan State University, said that unlike laboratory studies, “online dating provides an ecologically valid or true-to-life context for examining the risks, uncertainties and rewards of initiating real relationships with real people at an unprecedented scale.”
“As more and more of life happens online, it’s less and less the case that online is a vacuum,” he added. “It is life.”
Of the romantic partnerships formed in the United States between 2007 and 2009, 21 percent of heterosexual couples and 61 percent of same-sex couples met online, according to a study by Michael J. Rosenfeld, an associate professor of sociology at Stanford. (Scholars said that most studies using online dating data are about heterosexuals, because they make up more of the population.)
Dating sites and academics have gotten cozy before; the biological anthropologist Helen Fisher of Rutgers, for example, is Chemistry.com’s chief scientific adviser, and she helped develop the site, a sister site to Match.com.
But scholars are also pursuing academic research using anonymous profile content given to them as a professional courtesy by dating sites. Often the researchers supplement that with surveys and in-person interviews by recruiting online daters through advertisements on campuses, in newspapers and on Web sites like Craigslist.
Here’s some of what they have learned, including maxims for singles: why opposites don’t attract and honesty is not always the best policy.
TRUTHINESS
Do online daters have a propensity to lie? Do we really need scientists to answer this question?
If you are curious about numbers: about 81 percent of people misrepresent their height, weight or age in their profiles, according to a study led by Catalina L. Toma, an assistant professor in the department of communication arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who wanted to learn more about how people present themselves and how they judge misrepresentation. On the bright side: people tend to tell small lies because, after all, they may eventually meet in person.
Professor Toma; Jeffrey T. Hancock, an associate professor at Cornell; and Nicole B. Ellison, an associate professor in the department of telecommunication, information studies and media at Michigan State University, interviewed online daters in New York City, weighed and measured them, photographed them, checked their ages against their driver’s licenses and studied their dating profiles.
On average, the women described themselves as 8.5 pounds thinner in their profiles than they really were. Men fibbed by 2 pounds, though they lied by a greater magnitude than women about their height, rounding up a half inch (apparently every bit counts).
People were most honest about their age, something Professor Toma said is probably because they can claim ignorance about weight and height. Even so, in a different study she found that women’s profile photographs were on average a year and a half old. Men’s were on average six months old.
“Daters lie to meet the expectations of what they think their audience is,” Professor Toma said.
A paper to be published in the Journal of Communication used computer analysis to show that four linguistic indictors can help detect lying in the personal essay of a dating profile.
Liars tend to use fewer first-person pronouns. Professor Toma said this is an indication of psychological distancing: “You’re feeling guilty or anxious or nervous.” Liars use more negative words like “not” and “never,” yet another way of putting up a buffer. Liars use fewer negative emotion words like “sad” and “upset,” and they write shorter online personal essays. (It’s easier not to get caught if you say less.)
Scholars say a certain amount of fibbing is socially acceptable — even necessary — to compete in the online dating culture. Professor Ellison’s research shows that lying is partly a result of tension between the desire to be truthful and the desire to put one’s best face forward. So profiles often describe an idealized self; one with qualities they intend to develop (i.e., “I scuba dive”) or things they once had (i.e., a job). Some daters bend the truth to fit into a wider range of search parameters; others unintentionally misrepresent their personalities because self-knowledge is imperfect.
The standard of embellishment can frustrate the honest. “So if I say I am 44, people think that I am 48,” said one man interviewed by Professor Ellison and colleagues in a separate study.
But there is an upside to deception: it may inspire one to, as Professor Ellison put it, “close the gap between actual and ideal self.” One interviewee lied about her weight in her profile, and it was all the motivation she needed. She subsequently lost 44 pounds while online dating.
GUESS WHO’S NOT COMING TO DINNER
“Stick to your own kind,” goes the “West Side Story” refrain, a phenomenon that sociologists call homophily: love of the same. And they have observed this among online daters. But here is what they did not expect to discover: a very high rate of same-ethnicity dating.
“One of the theories of how the Internet might affect dating is that it might erode the tendency of people to mate with people like themselves,” said Professor Rosenfeld of Stanford. “I really expected there to be more interracial relationships for meeting online. And it wasn’t true.”
Research on a major dating site between February 2009 and February 2010 by Professor Mendelsohn and his colleagues shows that more than 80 percent of the contacts initiated by white members were to other white members, and only 3 percent to black members. Black members were less rigid: they were 10 times more likely to contact whites than whites were to contact blacks.
“What you’ve got is basically the reluctance of white Americans to date and to contact members of other ethnicities, particularly African-Americans,” he said. “We are nowhere near the post-racial age.”
Professor Mendelsohn set out to study relationship formation, not ethnicity. Yet along the way he found that white more than black, women more than men, and old more than young prefer a same-race partner.
Some people indicated that they were willing to date different ethnicities, but they didn’t. “What people say they want in a mate and what qualities they actually seek don’t tend to correspond,” said Coye Cheshire, an associate professor at the School of Information at Berkeley who has studied this with Mr. Fiore, Professor Mendelsohn and Lindsay Shaw Taylor, a member of the school’s self, identity and relationships lab.
HE SAID, SHE SAID
Gender parity, it seems, isn’t sexy. Women want men who are — wait for it — tall and wealthy, according to online dating research by Gunter J. Hitsch and Ali Hortacsu at the University of Chicago, and Dan Ariely of Duke. The researchers have examined thousands of dating profiles that included height, weight and, in many cases, photographs. They found that women prefer men who are slightly overweight, while men prefer women who are slightly underweight and who do not tower over them. These were the women who had the best chance of receiving an introductory e-mail from a man.
And even though men may get away with carrying a few extra pounds, they are also burdened with the expectation of carrying a fatter wallet: The scholars found that women have a stronger preference than men do for income over physical attributes.
STRANGE BEDFELLOWS
Decades of findings about political ideology suggest that it is in part passed from parents to children, said Rose McDermott, a professor of political science at Brown University. And because previous studies show that people in long marriages align politically (the crackling example of James Carville and Mary Matalin aside), she wanted to study how people end up with like-minded mates.
Professor McDermott and colleagues at the University of Miami and Penn State examined 2,944 dating profiles, and few people were willing to express a political preference or interest in politics. Professor McDermott suspects that this is because they wanted to attract as many dates as possible.
But though it could make for an interesting campaign year, such daters could be making a mistake if they are seeking long-term partners.
“I was personally really shocked,” said Professor McDermott, whose study was published this year in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior. “People were much more likely to say ‘I’m fat’ than ‘I’m a conservative.’ ”
Sugardaddy.com
“I’d rather not talk about the money,” Steve snaps, standing by the chocolate fountain, arm coiled around Chloe.
“Yes there is money involved but it’s not that explicit, it’s not worth getting into.”
Chloe, however, is less reticent about discussing the benefits of using a sugar-daddy website to fund her lifestyle. With her long blonde hair, body-hugging mini-dress and eager smile, she is every inch the sugar baby.
“I’ve travelled the world,” she says. She is tactile with Steve but this belies the fact that this is the first time they have met. “I love travelling and I’ve been to a lot of places and done things I wouldn’t have been able to do without the help of the men I meet on the site.”
The couple have been exchanging e-mails since meeting on seekingarrangement.com, a website that sets up predominantly older, wealthy men with young, pretty women for a “mutually beneficial arrangement”. Translation: lots of money and expensive gifts in exchange for sex. It prides itself on being at the forefront of the “sugarworld”.
Launched by Brandon Wade, an internet entrepreneur, it was one of the first websites of its kind and now sits alongside rivals sugardaddy.com, myrichsugardaddy.com, sugardaddyforme.com, and diamonddaddy.com, in an increasingly crowded sugar-dating market.
Sugar babies outnumber daddies presumably because, like most things in life, children get in for free. Daddies and sugar mommas pay a monthly fee of $50 while babies can browse at leisure without paying a penny.
Among its 160,447 sugar daddies worldwide, Wade says his site features 15 on The Sunday Times Rich List and two on the Forbes top ten list of the richest people in the world. One of whom is recently divorced.
Don’t, though, call it an escort service. “This is sex for money within a R.E.L.A.T.I.O.N.S.H.I.P,” says Wade, who met his wife of three months on the site. “With escorts you are just talking about a one-hour relationship, they service all clients as long as they are willing to pay. Sugar babies test the water first.” That clears that up then.
One former sugar baby later tells me that both parties assuage their guilt by declaring genuine attraction even though “both sides know the interaction edges closer to the line of prostitution”.
Steve and Chloe — not their real names — chose to meet tonight at Sugar Rush, the website’s first British sugar-daddy party, held at the five-star Gore Hotel, and judging by their heavy public displays of affection, things seem to be going well. Yes she’s only 22 and he, in his early 50s, could pass for her dad, but Chloe seems genuinely into him. Why wouldn’t she be? He has promised to whisk her off on holiday.
Much has already been made of the site’s demographics. Female students account for 40 per cent of its 51,420 UK-based sugar babies.
Liya, 22, a student at the University of the Creative Arts, receives a £1,500 allowance from her sugar daddy who she’s been seeing for the past eight months. She also gets £400 just for going to dinner with other men — though she insists that she is intimate with only one benefactor. She uses some of the money to fund her studies, the rest she either saves or sends to her parents and grandparents in Estonia.
“Every time we meet, my sugar daddy spends £2,500 taking me shopping for designer clothes and shoes,” she says. “I’m having a great time. It’s not a full-time relationship but you get all the best parts. Next week he is taking me to St Lucia. A lot of the men aren’t very handsome but they are charming, you don’t judge a man on his beauty, you judge his actions. For my part I make sure they have a nice time where they can relax from everyday stress. It is not an escort service, it’s a girlfriend service.”
After successfully targeting students, Wade is specifically going after single mothers, the second largest demographic group on the site, and “entrepreneurial” women who are trying to set up their own businesses.
“They may be vulnerable but look how much goes unpaid in child support,” Wade says defiantly. “The site is a reflection of society’s ills. When they say why are there so many college students using the website? Well, the fees are too high. Why are there so many single mums? They’re not getting help they need — so the website is a reflection of what’s wrong with society but it also presents a possible solution.”
Wade goes farther — he actually believes that his site “empowers” women by encouraging them to trade sex for money. “You would be surprised at the number of sugar babies who tell me they have started their own business either inspired by me or by sugar daddies who have invested in their business,” he says. “Women come to gain financial independence for themselves; they don’t ultimately want to depend on a man for their money. They’re goal diggers, not gold diggers.”
For the record, he also thinks he’s doing his bit for families. Although 40 per cent of the site’s sugar daddies are married, Wade thinks his site keeps couples together because it is providing married men with an outlet.
“We are keeping the family unit together even though it might be morally or ethically questionable.”
Inside the party the 200 or so other sugar babies who have turned up in the hopes of bagging a business tycoon aren’t faring quite so well. For a start, of the 7,812 UK-based sugar daddies, only about ten have bothered to show up.
The invitation promised a “highly exclusive affair”, attended by “some of London’s most established and successful men including lawyers, doctors, executives, footballers and the independently wealthy”.
Buket, a 29-year-old from Hanover, Germany has flown over in the hope of meeting a sugar daddy who can help her to set up her own fashion boutique. “It’s hard to believe that guys who have everything are on the site, but the advice they can give me is worth more than gold,” she says.
Zing, a PhD student who has been on Seekingarrangement for three years, says she has never asked for money — despite the site offering a handy drop-down price guide that allows users to specify how much they want a month, ranging from less than $1,000 to more than $20,000. “It’s a way for me to meet men who are driven and ambitious,” she says. “My first sugar daddy gave me lots of advice for my business, the second one gave me management advice and feedback. The insights I gained are invaluable.”
Back upstairs I strike up a conversation with Anand, who looks as if he has been surgically attached to the bar for the past 30 minutes. It appears as if the lack of a computer screen and keyboard to hide behind has rendered him socially inept and unable to communicate with women.
“Do you think I should lose the hat or the jacket?” he asks nervously, removing his black leather flat cap and unleashing a pile of unkempt white hair. A businessman from India, and as coy about his age as most men in here are, he has been on the website for two years. He has homes in the US and southern India and two grown-up children. “I go on because I travel a lot,” he admits. “I prefer to have someone I can see when I come to London.”
A regular hook-up? “Yes.” How much is he willing to pay for these hook-ups?
“It’s not about the money,” he coughs. “It’s about the companionship. The money is . . . I don’t want to go into that. Anyway let’s talk about you,” he says, suddenly stroking my arm. “Have you been out with many guys on the site?” Crikey.
“Er, no,” I splutter. “I’m a writer, I’m just here to see how it all works.” The word “writer” seems to take an age to sink in. “Well nice to meet you,” he says, scurrying off. “I must go and mingle.”
Another sugar daddy, Adam, is worried that he may have peaked too soon. “I was really nervous at first,” he says, scratching his goatee. “I got locked into conversations with a few women too early. Now I’ve had a few drinks I’m really going to mingle.”
Also mingling is an anxious Wade. The CEO, who says love at first sight was a belief invented by people with too little money, is disappointed that in spite of the chocolate fountain, tarot card reader and flame throwers outside, his red carpet bash is a “getting it on”-free zone. “These guys are like me ten years ago. They’re too scared to talk to women and the women are just talking among themselves.” Poor Wade. He’s like the school geek who throws the most expensive party he can afford, hoping to hang out with jocks and cheerleaders, only to find he’s surrounded by nerds and girls not quite hot enough to be cheerleaders.
By midnight, things have started to fizzle out. The air of desperation has been replaced by an air of resignation. Stilettoes have been discarded and the stragglers are happy to dance in groups until the lights come on.
Outside it looks like Adam’s strategy has worked. He has a woman on each arm, his face is covered in lipstick. And who’s that sloping off, arm around a dark-haired woman in heels and a low-cut black dress? Wow, it’s Anand. I didn’t think he had it in him.
The regrets of a sugar baby
When I joined sugar daddy dating websites, five years ago at the age of 29, I didn’t know there was a subculture where men offer gifts or monthly allowances. I wanted to meet someone older, wiser and sophisticated and I didn’t want a serious relationship. For me the thrill of a glamorous date was enough.
But I soon became tempted by propositions. The first time I was taken shopping I felt awkward and greedy. The third time it was easy. Soon I could justify accepting a cash allowance. He was a 42-year-old hedge-fund manager — perfectly eligible, just too busy for a real girlfriend. We scoffed at the notion that this was prostitution because there was genuine attraction and fondness that built up, as if we’d followed normal dating protocol. Many men told me they couldn’t stomach the detached call-girl experience. They wanted romance — dinners, cocktails, laughter and pillow talk. At the time it was ego-boosting. A man who I’d selected and who paid me. But this closed me off to a genuine relationship. The idea that I could experience deeper feelings passed me by. I dismissed any man in the real world who paid me attention, because I had plenty who paid me. It took a good two years after quitting before I opened myself up to the idea that relationships aren’t compromises worthy of compensation but — when combined with love — very rewarding.
Micro Dating Sites
Calling all socially anxious, gun obsessed, wheat intolerant Ayn Rand fans on the hunt for love – you’re in luck! While previously your germphobia or crane-necessitating “love handles” were buried in an online dating profile as “clean” and “curvy”, these oddities are now your calling cards. In the $2.1bn online dating industry, niche dating sites are claiming an ever-increasing portion of market share.
One of the largest is passionsnetwork.com, an umbrella site that has nearly three million daters vying for love on 206 bizarrely niche dating mini-sites, ranging from Shy Passions to Gun Lovers Passions, Frugal, Large and Nerd Passions (further delineated into Dali, Walrus and Pencil subgroups).
If eating bread gives you terrible wind, naturally you’ll want to marry someone else with similarly turbulent bowels. Singleswithfoodallergies.com has been set up to allow people to “develop lasting relationships based around their food allergy lifestyle”, and is helpfully sectioned off into “wheat”, “milk”, “eggs”, “peanuts” and “soy”, ensuring a lifetime of readymade scatological conversation. In a similar comestible vein is veggiedate.org, where all sorts of salad freaks can search for their match, be it “raw vegan”, “yoga veggie” or even “scientologist vegetarian”.
It’s not only foodstuffs, but reading materials that are emerging as fresh hunting grounds. If you’ve ever thought you could never be with someone who couldn’t debate William Blake’s influences on Pullman’s Dark Materials, then check out bookloversdating.co.uk. Each dater chooses a selection of books they love, and can search out others who share their tastes. For those who have only one literary love – Ayn Rand – then there are 15,000 people waiting for you on the dating section of The Atlasphere, a social networking site connecting admirers of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.
Another notable new addition is survivalistsingles.com, tag line “don’t face the future alone”, who claim to be the fastest-growing relationship site on the web. Clearly preparing for an apocalypse, nuclear meltdown or economic collapse aren’t the primary concerns of eHarmony’s 33 million members. However, the survivalist website for those interested in living off grid, canning wild animals and using human waste as manure has attracted almost 3,000 members.
The question is, would Romeo really have met Juliet through Family Feud Passions. Could Yoko have hooked up with John thanks to Bed-in Singles? The jury’s still out on whether a shared egg allergy can fire a lifelong love.
Players
Women in the dating world tend to use the term “Player’ when referring to a man that lacks the ability or desire to make a commitment. Some of these men are assumed to be purely out for sex; some are considered commitment phobic; and others are in temporarily suspended animation having re-entered the dating world a bit too early. Nevertheless, the online dating site profiles are fraught with some version of the following warning from women: “No players need apply—only those looking for a long-term relationship.”
Many female accusers have a legitimate beef—and nobody wants to be played. But I’ve found that the term player is also used far too often by controlling women who want to “control” the dating process. For example, a male client complained that he’s been called a player on a number of occasions—an accusation that angers and frustrates him. “I’m just dating,” he said. “Sure, on occasion I’ve slept with a couple of women with whom I chose not to commit to. What’s wrong with that? I’m looking for the right person and it’s going to take time. Not all of us are sexually compatible and this is a good thing to know before remarrying. A couple of these women have reamed me out for not warning them that I may not commit to them. How can I do that? I can’t predict the future. Besides, women have broken up with me without warning.” Yes, it’s all part of the process. And I would add that it also takes a bit of time for other relationship dynamics to surface and this may not happen before a couple engages in sex. Timing is everything.
To my client’s credit, I saw no indication of the “player gene” in his background. Most of his relationships were long-term, and he was able to hold a 20-year-marriage together without ever straying. Was he somewhat scared to remarry? Yes, but one can make a commitment without remarrying, or make a commitment and remarry at a more comfortable time for both parties.
In their defense, many of the women who use the term player have been traumatized by past relationship mishaps. Perhaps a husband cheated, or a long-term boyfriend abandoned them, or a man seen as having potential dropped them soon after sex. For this they deserve empathy. But if they believe it is their right to control the dating process, they should seek counsel. It will do them no good to continue to righteously use the term player to cover up anger and pain. Rather, it will only anger and frustrate those they claim they are interested in attracting.
One last point: After pre-viewing this blog a female colleague of mine agreed that women might use the term “player” too frequently, but she was quick to counter that men use the term “whore” too freely as well. To this I say: "Touché."
How Men Want Women To Dress
Before we start on what men would like to see women wearing, we should lay down a bit of gender philosophy. It’s not pretty, it’s not nice; these are opinions not shared by the management. But there is a truth known to every single single man, and it is that every woman could, if she were so disposed, push open the door of any pub in the country at 10 o’clock on any Friday night and shout, “Anyone fancy a quick shag?” and she would instantly be confronted by a panting queue, whereas only half-a-percent of men could do the same thing. George Clooney? Probably. Benedict Cumberbatch? I don’t think so. The game that men and women play eternally, with and against each other, is not fair, it’s not even, and the goalposts aren’t the same size. For men, it’s about chasing fleeting opportunities; for women, it’s making awkward choices. This may not be what it feels like to you, but, sitting in a club with your girlfriends, you will find yourself asking, for the umpteenth time, “Whatever happened to all the available men?” Indeed, whatever happened to men who looked like men and not like feeble, bullied children with facial hair?
It is a common assumption among both sexes that men don’t notice what women wear, that they notice only the bits that aren’t wearing anything. Women say men are pathetically predictable and notice only tits and as much flesh above the knee as they can see. Men say that’s not true: they like backless things that hint at a bit of bum cleavage as well. If you ask men what they like to see women wearing (and I have), they will reply, like comedy metronomes, “me”, “sweat”, “a smile”, “baby oil”, “chocolate sauce”. What men say they want is not necessarily the same as what they really want. So clothes may be obvious, but the signals they give aren’t. Here is a quick list of what men really want to see on women, despite what they say.
The cantilevered-tits and knickerless-microdress thing is a gawp and a guffaw, but it isn’t what most men want their girlfriend to wear — that’s not about respecting you (sorry), it’s about what his mates will think of him. Fancy, result underwear is actually take it or leave it — by the time you’re down to bra and pants, it’s a done deal, like getting the wrapping off a birthday present, and no man is ever going to notice how pretty your suspender belt is.
Most men look at women in chunks: face, eyes, hair, chest, legs, height. It’s how a hyena looks at a wildebeest. But what they really see is a silhouette, and one of the things that women rarely consider is how they move. A woman who can walk confidently looks athletic and elegant, and is deeply attractive. Most men say they like high heels, but nobody likes a woman in heels that make them totter and look clumsy. If you can’t run in your shoes, don’t wear them; and, by the way, every pair of shoes you’ve bought in the past year is hideous. Great, clumpy, round-toed platform things — ghastly. They look like a tranny centaur night out.
And hippie: let’s talk about hippie v tailored. The gypsy, floaty, layered, kaleidoscope thing with the home-made jewellery might impress your mates, but it doesn’t do it for blokes. Really, you look a mess. There’s only room for one mess in this relationship and that’s going to be us. Hippie doesn’t imply free spirit, it says needy vegetarian with poor personal hygiene. Men like women who look controlled, together and stable. They’d much rather have an executive who had an inner free spirit than a traveller discovering her inner banker.
And how about the things that are always hot? Red toenails (five on each foot; no more, no less), lipstick and wearing navy blue and white. Do you think that basic black is the default setting for pulling? You’re wrong. It’s navy blue. Don’t ask me why; nobody knows. Brown legs in cowboy boots. And best of all? Men’s shirts and boxer shorts, but not when going to meet his mother.
And, of course, there are the things that men will fancy you despite. These include fascinators, little handbags and little dogs, maxidresses, high-waist shorts and retro irony. Men really don’t want to have to spot the cultural references in your sunglasses and bolero jacket.
Body hair (again, sorry): we know this shouldn’t be an issue, but it just is, and please don’t cover it up with negligées (they are far too Hitchcock). And all socks. The only people who can get away with socks are Japanese schoolgirls, and we don’t even want to think about that.
Ultimately, though, you’re right, it really is all about how you look naked. And this is the biggest, most fundamental and most important difference in how men and women see women. Modish and stick thin may be best to hang clothes on, but catwalk bodies look deeply unsexy naked. Those bony shoulder blades and door-handle hips are not a turn-on in a bikini. Men are much more forgiving and encouraging about flesh than women are.
Just Friends?
Can heterosexual men and women ever be “just friends”? Few other questions have provoked debates as intense, family dinners as awkward, literature as lurid, or movies as memorable. Still, the question remains unanswered. Daily experience suggests that non-romantic friendships between males and females are not only possible, but common—men and women live, work, and play side-by-side, and generally seem to be able to avoid spontaneously sleeping together. However, the possibility remains that this apparently platonic coexistence is merely a façade, an elaborate dance covering up countless sexual impulses bubbling just beneath the surface.
New research suggests that there may be some truth to this possibility—that we may think we’re capable of being “just friends” with members of the opposite sex, but the opportunity (or perceived opportunity) for “romance” is often lurking just around the corner, waiting to pounce at the most inopportune moment.
In order to investigate the viability of truly platonic opposite-sex friendships—a topic that has been explored more on the silver screen than in the science lab—researchers brought 88 pairs of undergraduate opposite-sex friends into…a science lab. Privacy was paramount—for example, imagine the fallout if two friends learned that one—and only one—had unspoken romantic feelings for the other throughout their relationship. In order to ensure honest responses, the researchers not only followed standard protocols regarding anonymity and confidentiality, but also required both friends to agree—verbally, and in front of each other—to refrain from discussing the study, even after they had left the testing facility. These friendship pairs were then separated, and each member of each pair was asked a series of questions related to his or her romantic feelings (or lack thereof) toward the friend with whom they were taking the study.
The results suggest large gender differences in how men and women experience opposite-sex friendships. Men were much more attracted to their female friends than vice versa. Men were also more likely than women to think that their opposite-sex friends were attracted to them—a clearly misguided belief. In fact, men’s estimates of how attractive they were to their female friends had virtually nothing to do with how these women actually felt, and almost everything to do with how the men themselves felt—basically, males assumed that any romantic attraction they experienced was mutual, and were blind to the actual level of romantic interest felt by their female friends. Women, too, were blind to the mindset of their opposite-sex friends; because females generally were not attracted to their male friends, they assumed that this lack of attraction was mutual. As a result, men consistently overestimated the level of attraction felt by their female friends and women consistently underestimated the level of attraction felt by their male friends.
Men were also more willing to act on this mistakenly perceived mutual attraction. Both men and women were equally attracted to romantically involved opposite-sex friends and those who were single; “hot” friends were hot and “not” friends were not, regardless of their relationship status. However, men and women differed in the extent to which they saw attached friends as potential romantic partners. Although men were equally as likely to desire “romantic dates” with “taken” friends as with single ones, women were sensitive to their male friends’ relationship status and uninterested in pursuing those who were already involved with someone else.
These results suggest that men, relative to women, have a particularly hard time being “just friends.” What makes these results particularly interesting is that they were found within particular friendships (remember, each participant was only asked about the specific, platonic, friend with whom they entered the lab). This is not just a bit of confirmation for stereotypes about sex-hungry males and naïve females; it is direct proof that two people can experience the exact same relationship in radically different ways. Men seem to see myriad opportunities for romance in their supposedly platonic opposite-sex friendships. The women in these friendships, however, seem to have a completely different orientation—one that is actually platonic.
To the outside observer, it seems clear that these vastly different views about the potential for romance in opposite-sex friendships could cause serious complications—and people within opposite-sex relationships agree. In a follow-up study, 249 adults (many of whom were married) were asked to list the positive and negative aspects of being friends with a specific member of the opposite sex. Variables related to romantic attraction (e.g., “our relationship could lead to romantic feelings”) were five times more likely to be listed as negative aspects of the friendship than as positive ones. However, the differences between men and women appeared here as well. Males were significantly more likely than females to list romantic attraction as a benefit of opposite-sex friendships, and this discrepancy increased as men aged—males on the younger end of the spectrum were four times more likely than females to report romantic attraction as a benefit of opposite-sex friendships, whereas those on the older end of the spectrum were ten times more likely to do the same.
Taken together, these studies suggest that men and women have vastly different views of what it means to be “just friends”—and that these differing views have the potential to lead to trouble. Although women seem to be genuine in their belief that opposite-sex friendships are platonic, men seem unable to turn off their desire for something more. And even though both genders agree overall that attraction between platonic friends is more negative than positive, males are less likely than females to hold this view.
The Dating Guru
“People feel weird when they meet me,” 27-year-old Blake Eastman tells me. He’s perched on a coffee table eating gummy bears.
Sitting across from him on the couch in an expansive, hardwood-floored rental space in Chelsea getting ready to watch him teach “The Dating Workshop,” I admit that I feel, if not “weird,” a bit self-conscious. It’s hard to meet a master of body language (or, to quote Eastman, “nonverbal communication”) and not worry about what you’re doing with your hands, how solid your eye contact is, and whether he’s reading your mind. Hint: He sort of is.
For eight months, Eastman has been teaching singles on the dating scene to read minds, too, and to use their bodies to send clear signals. For example, you can send the message, “If you touch me, I will gag,” by slowly moving away each time your date invades your personal space. Or you can communicate, “Kiss me! Now!” by playing with the buttons on his shirt, looking at his lips, or softening the tone of your voice just so.
Those moves might sound primitive, but on a first or second date, it’s difficult to say exactly what you’re thinking. Most people opt not to. Eastman’s theory is that if you’re not fluent in body language, you’re likely to give your date the wrong idea, to inadvertently act uninterested when you’re interested or vice versa, to be left mystified by someone’s vanishing act, even though he was telling you the whole time—wordlessly, of course—that he couldn’t wait to get away. Modern dating is one big (quoting Led Zeppelin here) communication breakdown. But The Dating Workshop and Eastman’s other classes, including Body Language Explained and Deception Detected, are designed to help.
“I promise you,” says Eastman, who has a blue-eyed baby face but speaks with the quick cadence of an Aaron Sorkin character, “in about a year and a half, my name will be synonymous with body language.”
Arguably, the writer Neil Strauss has a corner on that market. His 2005 runaway best-seller, The Game, told the story of the years he spent with professional pickup artists learning how to seduce women. Much of Strauss’ strategy entailed nonverbally conveying self-confidence. Eastman, however, didn’t come to the study of body language to get laid. He says he developed his proficiency in nonverbal communication during childhood as an adaptive response to his anxiety. In social situations, he often found himself paralyzed, imagining worst-case scenarios about what would happen if he made the wrong move or said the wrong thing. So he learned to read people to discern what they wanted from him. Years later, he obtained a master’s degree in forensics from John Jay College of Criminal Justice, started teaching psychology classes at LaGuardia Community College, and became a professional poker player. He uses his winnings to fund his own research in nonverbal communication, conducting countless hands-on hours in the field.
Some of his lab settings are cocktail parties; he sets them up, films them, and then studies the footage. In the summertime, he stands between two mailboxes across from the outdoor tables of Blue Water Grill, a seafood restaurant in Manhattan’s Union Square, observes people on dates, and collects data. He shares his findings through The Nonverbal Group, the research and teaching company he founded and runs. In his rental space, he maintains an office—a desk and computer, shelves full of body language and pop-psychology texts including The Brain In Love, Who’s In Charge?, and a couple of books by Malcolm Gladwell (“who I fucking love to death”)—as well as a seminar room where he’s taught more than 2,600 students in the past year.
Eastman tells me that The Dating Workshop usually draws more women than men. But when the room fills up, the crowd is about 50/50, the majority in their 20s and 30s and got tickets to the class through Groupon and LivingSocial. The women have nervous eyes and adjust their tights; the men look like computer programmers with their straight backs, solemn expressions, and wire-rimmed glasses. To begin, Eastman asks his students to shout out questions and writes them on a white board.
“I can feel people making assumptions about me,” says a guy in the back row who wears a blazer over a plaid shirt. He asks Eastman for advice on changing that. “Like, I tell people I went to Harvard, and I can tell they’re thinking I’m a douche bag.”
Eastman nods, watching him for a moment. He tips his head and squints. “Well, you do have a little douche baggery to you,” he says. The room, including the Harvard graduate, erupts into laughter. “We’ll work on that,” he adds. (Later, he tells me that the “douche baggery” he picked up on stemmed from a disconnect between the arrogance in the Harvard graduate’s words and the insecurity apparent in his body language.)
“What about the nice guy theorem?” asks another man. “Nice guys finish last.” “Not true,” Eastman says. “Those are just nice guys who don’t know how to market themselves.”
He continues to take questions until he runs out of space on the white board. Then he sets about answering them.
“What’s cool in the world of dating,” he tells the group, “is that no one’s ever telling you how they feel. They’re showing you.” He introduces “the orientation reflex.” That’s the move a person makes to orient toward what interests him—turning his head, for example. He insists that people orient toward us all the time, and we should learn to notice it. He talks about “pacifying gestures” we use to diffuse the anxiety of dating, how men rub their palms on their pants and women play with their fingers. He explains that many people do poorly on dates because they’re “emotionally incongruent”: What comes out of their mouths doesn’t match what shows on their faces.
He uses President Obama as an example: “During the debates, he’d say, ‘Mitt, I disagree with you,’ ” Eastman says, making a placid face. “Not, ‘Mitt! I disagree with you!’ ” Eastman says, changing his expression to an angry one. In that case, he explains, Obama came off as weaker than he meant to. But emotionally incongruent people can also come off as odd, and that can hurt them on dates.
So if they’re doing so many things wrong, how can discouraged daters improve their skills? “Video,” Eastman says. “You watch yourself on tape. Then you can change.” It might be a creepy move to set up a video camera on a first date, but Eastman will approximate the experience for you in his workshop by filming you talking to your classmates.
After the first hour, Eastman tells his students to get up and mingle. Everyone stands and starts moving around the room, wearing I-can’t-believe-we’re-all-sober smiles. I talk with one woman, an actress in her early 30s who grew up in Virginia and feels mystified by New York men. “Southern men are so different,” she says. “Here, I’m confused. I’m always horrible on the first couple of dates.” She’s taken two of Eastman’s classes with a LivingSocial coupon, and she believes they’ve made her more aware. She feels more comfortable and less compelled than she used to be to fill every moment of silence on a date. I talk with a computer programmer (I knew it!) who is here for the first time and says he’s benefiting from the class. “I don’t agree with everything Blake says. But he’s good.” I talk with another woman who says that meeting Eastman and his girlfriend has changed her whole life. She has new friends, a new job, a new outlook. She wears the dreamy gaze of a cult member. I meet another man who has taken a few of Eastman’s classes and seems similarly enamored. “He’s just so amazing,” he says.
After living in New York City for six years, I’ve met (sometimes as a seeker, more often as a journalist) my share of self-help gurus: diet experts, sex coaches, life coaches, career coaches, a man who believes he can make anyone a millionaire, an older woman who wants to fill up Madison Square Garden with young women and preach against premarital sex, an angry meditation teacher who demands $2,500 for meditation classes. And all of them, even the angry meditation teacher, have disciples—people who think this guru must be the path to happiness; on the guru’s website, they’ll write testimonials: I don’t know where I’d be without him.
But Eastman seems far more sweet than parasitic: While we were waiting for his students to arrive, he gushed about his girlfriend, whom he met in one of his classes. “Most people don’t communicate,” he says. “My girlfriend and I are completely transparent. We have the best relationship I’ve ever seen.” He talked about how great his friends are, how supportive his parents are. When I asked him what learning nonverbal communication has done for him, he answered, “I don’t know where I’d be without it.” Eastman doesn’t give the impression that he aims to gather admirers but rather that he yearns to help people feel as comfortable as he’s learned to feel. “Communication is the most important part of relationships,” he says. “I want people to learn to communicate.”
Later in the night, the group engages in a second mingle. This time, they seem more relaxed. Still, Eastman has tips: “You were playing with your fingers behind your back,” he tells someone. “And you,” he tells another student, “have a low blink rate. Guess who else has that? Me. And you know what happens if you stare at people without blinking? They’re gonna think you’re creepy.” And then, some advice we could all use: “You look upset,” he tells one of the computer-programmer types. “Come on!” he says with a smile. “Relax.”
Mr Right
If you are a woman, here is some news that will almost certainly come as a big surprise. Apparently research has suggested that there really is such a thing as “the perfect man”. Careful now, ladies, please don’t overdo it with the mocking laughter.
The trouble is that the idea of Mr Right — or even the 14th Earl of Right, if that’s more to your taste — seems to change over a woman’s lifetime. According to a dating website, a woman in her early twenties looks for a chap who shares her taste in CDs (which seems a little unambitious). Career women between the ages of 25 and 34 yearn for physical attraction, while women in their late thirties and early forties are beginning, perhaps reluctantly, to settle for good manners.
And the older woman? Well, if a man doesn’t spend his time shouting at the television or banging on about the European Union, then he’ll do. And if he turns into a mug of Ovaltine and a hot-water bottle at bedtime, he will be as near perfect as makes no difference.
Is Courtship Dead?
In the New York Times this weekend, reporter Alex Williams mourns “The End of Courtship.” Texting is to blame for dating’s demise. “Instead of dinner-and-a-movie, which seems as obsolete as a rotary phone,” young people today “rendezvous over phone texts, Facebook posts, instant messages and other ‘non-dates’ that are leaving a generation confused about how to land a boyfriend or girlfriend,” Williams reports. The rise of the “hook-up” has left an entire generation “unhappy, sexually unfulfilled, and confused about intimacy,” one author claims. New technologies have made us “Ph.D.’s in Internet stalking,” but amateurs in love.
Williams’ report treads familiar ground: Back in an arbitrary time period that predates our own, interactions between men and women were simple, the argument goes; advances in technology have led us astray of this most fundamental human relationship.
It’s true that dating used to be simpler, but not because our grandparents were spared from mining the flirtation potential of Words With Friends. No, dating was simpler then because men and women were both forced to conform to distinct gender roles and follow a preset romantic script with the mutual expectation of marrying and procreating as soon as possible.
Williams claims this old system relied on “charm,” but it sounds more like “sexism” to me. Williams quotes our own Hanna Rosin on how shifting gender roles have thrown a wrench in that old routine: “It’s hard to read a woman exactly right these days,” [Rosin] says. “You don’t know whether, say, choosing the wine without asking her opinion will meet her yearnings for old-fashioned romance or strike her as boorish and macho.” Yes, women are individuals nowadays. It is impossible to know what a woman wants without first understanding her as a person, and her preferences are liable to extend far beyond the wine list—she could be pursuing a man for marriage, dating, friendship, sex, networking, or a new buddy for trading emojis with.
Of course, dating wasn’t a cakewalk back when courtship reigned. Consider The Rules, the dating handbook produced by Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider that claimed to instruct women on how to navigate new technologies (Should I leave him a voicemail?) in another time of great social change (the '90s). The Rules relied on the idea that men and women are naturally different—“Men love a challenge, while women love security. Men love to buy and sell companies as well as extreme sports like mountain biking and bungee jumping, while women love to talk about dates and watch romantic comedies”—but that shifting gender roles (those high-powered modern businesswomen, with their call waiting!) had disrupted traditional courtship strategies.
So The Rules instructed the women of the '90s to carefully modify their behavior in order to force men into their rightful role as relationship aggressor, regardless of a particular man's individual personality (plenty of “Pick-Up Artist” books cropped up to guide any type of man through his own journey). The book’s strategy of “playing hard to get” required women to be outwardly passive, emotionally distant, and perfectly polished, while secretly rearranging their lives and personalities to always play by the rules. The key is to always “make him think you’re busy and running around,” even if you’re not. Perform the dance correctly, the book promised, and a woman could find a husband. (Who that husband ended up being was always a secondary concern).
This month, Fein and Schneider released an update to their book for a new generation—the one Williams describes as rendered hopelessly unromantic by modern tech. In Not Your Mother’s Rules: The New Secrets of Dating, Fein and Schneider (both now, yes, mothers who quote their children extensively throughout) tweak their strategies to reflect these new technologies like “texting, Facebook, BlackBerry Messenger, iPhones, Skype, and Twitter!” But the gender roles and one-size-fits all relationship expectations established back in the rotary phone era have not changed. In one section, "Rules Girls" are all advised to wear their hair long, stick-straight, and preferably blonde to secure the best chance of conforming to what “most men” like.
The technological aspect manages to make Not Your Mother’s Rules even more sinister than the original. Previously, women were only forced to alter their personalities when directly interacting with a dating prospect. Today, with the rise of social media and the expansion of mixed-gender networks, women are instructed to follow the Rules in every medium and social situation in the hopes of landing a husband. Remember how women inherently love romantic comedies? Not on Twitter, where they’re counseled to never “tweet about love songs or chick flicks,” but instead to project an interest in “politics, sports, and the world in general” (even though we know women can't actually be interested in those things!). Under the Rules, even the fun aspects of online culture are reserved just for husband-hunting. Fein and Schneider tell women to employ acronyms like “LOL” in order to communicate to men that they are just too busy to write out three whole words.
Even when dating rules for men and women were set in stone, dating was a difficult and charmless process—particularly for women who preferred their hair short and curly, men who preferred women with short, curly, hair, and both men and women who weren't looking for a relationship with the “opposite” sex. Technology has only accelerated courtship’s “confusion” because it offers so many opportunities for men and women alike to project their individuality and to explore relationships with each other that end short of marriage. Sometimes your Words With Friends partner is just that.
Is Courtship Dead?
M y friend Tom is scanning OK Cupid profiles on his phone. A library of shiny-haired, fun-loving 23- to 31-year-olds is revealed for his delectation. “Yes, yes, yes, no, yes, hot, no, no, no. No. Yes.”
Tom is 29 and his sex life is the envy of everybody. It’s four in the afternoon on a Sunday and he’s already been on a date that, yes, did include a spot of lunchtime action. (“How was it?” “Sweet!”)
Last week, he liked a girl who lives in Fulham. He’s been Twitter-flirting with a second. There was a text affair with a third that petered out, but now it’s back on. He wants to find love, but on so many levels he doesn’t need to worry — there is an embarrassment of riches out there.
One American dating advice website, The Gaggle, calls this the “post-dating world”, because “date” is a misnomer now. You don’t even need to go on one. A night out with someone you fancy and 10 of their friends is a date. Even a text conversation counts as a sort-of date. It’s convenience romancing, made easy by modern technology. The difficult bits — the iffy chat-up lines, the risk of rejection, the knowing when to call — is almost gone. The best bits — the hunt, the finding out she fancies you — is left in.
It may sound like hook-up heaven, but there is another side to the story, that too much — this limitless supply of commitment-free sexual kicks — renders the good thing empty, lonely and, confusingly, much more complicated. “Both boys and girls I know feel defeated by love,” says Katie, 25. “It’s not cynicism. People are loving with casual sex, but they’re fatalistic. I’ve had so many situations where they’ve said, ‘I really liked you, but I couldn’t face putting myself through that feeling.’”
“That feeling” is the reason the American academic Donna Freitas has written her book, The End of Sex: How Hookup Culture Is Leaving a Generation Unhappy, Sexually Unfulfilled, and Confused About Intimacy. Freitas had been observing college campuses and found that technology-enabled free love wasn’t making everyone as happy as it was supposed to. “In the old days, you would meet someone at a party, get their number and make a plan to go out,” Freitas says. “The hook-up has a different objective: essentially, it’s a simple act of mutual masturbation. You’re supposed to walk around afterwards and not care.”
“The word ‘date’ could almost be struck from the dictionary,” one American said in response to the book. “Dating culture has evolved into a cycle of text messages, each one requiring the code-breaking skills of a Cold War spy to interpret.”
This is where My Crazy Blind Date, an app launched recently by OK Cupid, comes in. The app — only fully operational in America, for now — lets you punch in when you’re free for a date and where, and then tells you who else is, without any of the terrible hassle of courtship preamble. “Dating is actually a lot of work,” says Gene Liebel, chief strategist at Huge, the digital agency that designed it. “This is a low-expectation encounter with someone who matches your profile on OK Cupid. It’s no risk, and it’s free.”
If you’re looking for low expectations, talk to the gay community. Grindr, the app that enables users to see who nearby is available for sex, boasts 4m subscribers in 192 countries. Its straight sister site, Blendr, promises potential contact with a baffling “171m” girls and boys. There are real economies to be made from not speaking to someone before having sex with them. You know everything about them already from Facebook, which can pose a problem when you do finally sit down and chat. “They’ll say, ‘I just came back from Peru,’ and you’ll say, ‘Yeah, I saw the pictures.’ It’s a conversation stopper,” says Tilly, 32, a television producer.
“Dating is this strange group activity,” Katie says. “You’re making all kinds of judgments based on who they know. It’s like you’re in a crowded room, when the one thing that you really need to preserve is the total isolation you have as a couple. I always say I want to get out, and people don’t know what I mean.”
Some people do. Some people are inching their way around the orthodoxy that because the technology exists to do something, it’s automatically right. If I ever get my heart broken again, I’m definitely not checking the Twitter feed of the offending person for signs of new romance (I fainted).
When I speak to Tilly, she says she has a new policy of never Facebook friending someone she’s been on a date with. “I don’t want to know the details of their lives before they tell me, and I don’t want them to know mine,” she says.
There is embryonic evidence that chivalry and dating are making a comeback among the more imaginative twentysomethings. “I love dates,” says Charlie, 28. “Even if you end up in a serious relationship with someone else, there’s that lovely feeling, if you got on well with someone on a date, that they have a tiny bit of your heart for ever.”
I ask Liebel about “feelings” and “heart” in the modern dating world. “Interesting question,” he says. “With this app, I guess the bar is a little lower. It’s a crazy blind date. It’s dating as an occupation, not looking for someone to marry. It doesn’t have to be perfect.”
What is love? The internet can’t find it for us on its own, and it can’t help us hold onto it either. When Charlie went on a recent date, he and the girl ended up looking at the London skyline from the top of a Vue cinema. “We were having a meal, and she said, ‘Let’s go to the cinema.’ And I said, ‘We’re not in the 1950s. Let’s try and break into the cinema!’ We were chased through this warren of corridors by a guard, and went onto the roof, and had this great view and took photos. That was an exciting date. Until she told me she was married.”
A Little Valentine's Day Help
Every February, anxiety. Valentine’s Day looms and I agonize over what to get/do for my girlfriend. I’ll call her Veronica. Funny/sexy/romantic card? Turkish delight or chocolates? Dinner at a fancy restaurant, and if so, which one? Lingerie? What size, style? Slutty or tasteful?
Veronica has quirky–that is to say, unpredictable—tastes. The best present I ever got her, the one she appreciated most, was a vegetable scrubber with “natural” (hemp? flax?) bristles. After hers got old and died, she couldn’t find a replacement, and then I noticed one in a cookware shop in my hometown. Veronica was ecstatic! At getting a vegetable scrubber!
Otherwise, my gifts to Veronica often disappoint her. So I was wracking my brains about what to give her this year when I read a New York Times Magazine Q&A with Ray Kurzweil. I had my usual kneejerk aversive reaction: Why the hell is the Times giving Kurzweil free publicity—again–for his scitech-cult nonsense! And how could Google make this guy director of engineering fer crissake! But then I started wondering: Could a Singularity-style technology, like a brain implant, help me solve my Valentine’s Day Dilemma?
The Valentine’s Day Dilemma is a synecdoche of sorts for the much larger problem of subjectivity, or solipsism. Both Veronica and I—and all sentient creatures—are locked in our own private worlds. We can send signals to each other, visual, auditory and tactile, but neither of us can ever really be sure what the other is thinking. There’s lots of guesswork involved in our signal interpretation, which inevitably leads to squabbles, disappointments and so on. The dismal downside of romance.
These sorts of problems could be overcome if Veronica and I were both equipped with Stimoceivers. That is the term that brain-implant pioneer Jose Delgado (whom I profiled for Scientific American in October 2005) coined a half century ago for devices that he inserted into the brains of bulls, monkeys and humans. His Stimoceivers could detect and transmit signals from neural tissue as well as feeding signals back to the brain via electrical stimulation.
Delgado’s devices were crude. The Stimoceiver I envision would be snazzy, broadband, AI-enhanced. It would make Delgado’s device—and all our current methods of romantic communication–look as primitive as smoke signals.
Stimoceivers could have all sorts of apps for specific tasks. For example, I’d like a gift-giving app that queries Veronica’s brain about what she really wants for Valentine’s Day. Replicas of Ancient Egyptian owl figurines? Peter Max Tarot cards? Dinner at that Peruvian vegetarian restaurant in the Village? The app could do an internet search to see if the gift is available, within my price parameters, and order it, make the reservation, etc. Easy peasy lemon squeezy (as Veronica likes to say)!
The app could also design a customized card–sappy/funny/naughty, whatever would delight Veronica. She will pre-arrange the settings on her Stimceiver so that it responds to my queries without alerting her conscious self, so my gifts will be a surprise.
Other apps could ensure in various ways that our Valentine’s Day dinner goes smoothly. One app could express my romantic feelings for Veronica more eloquently than I can. Call it the Cyrano de Bergerac app. Another app could filter out negative thoughts I might have about Veronica. Not that I ever have negative thoughts, but just in case. The app could also block transmission of thoughts that aren’t really negative but that she might take the wrong way.
If Veronica starts talking about something that bores me, my Stimoceiver would commandeer my language and motor centers. I’ll nod, maintain eye contact and emit appropriate verbal responses while the bulk of my brain is composing another “Cross-check” column or @Horganism twaiku.
The Stimoceiver would have total data-recording and storage capability, to resolve any disputes that might arise if Veronica and I have different recollections of something, like last year’s Valentine’s Day: “I told you I hate white chocolate when you gave them to me last year!” “I distinctively remember you saying you love white chocolate!” Let’s check our shared Stimoceiver databases and see who’s right!
In fact, such petty disagreements would never even arise, because we would have apps that anticipate and resolve potential conflicts before they even rise to the level of our awareness. It would be like having teams of super-smart troubleshooters, who never get tired and cranky, working 24/7 on our relationship down in the basements of our psyches. Our technologically enhanced love will be perfect, harmonious, unblemished by human frailty. Every day will be like Valentine’s Day, except much, much better.
I can’t wait for the Singularity.
Lonely Hearts
In 1968, when friends learned I was off to India, they begged me to bring back Indian newspapers to see what they had often read about in incredulous newspaper articles, namely the matrimonial classified advertisements. No one foresaw this alien practice spreading to the West. There was, though, an important difference.
In the West, lonely hearts advertised on their own behalf, whereas in India it was the mothers of living-at-home eligible young folk who, unbeknown to them, promoted their offspring.
This mating routine was confined to India's affluent professional and commercial classes. Negotiations conducted by letters between mothers reached their denouement with the announcement to the unsuspecting offspring, "Your father has a business associate coming to dinner".
These regular occurrences ensured eligible young people were constantly encountering potential spouses, their eagle-eyed mothers first assessing the unsuspecting candidates as acceptable and then furtively watching to see if any attraction occurred.
Judging by the advertising, the critical credentials proffered by the girls' mothers on their daughters' unwitting behalf were fair skin, beauty, a university degree and a kind nature, this a euphemism implying she won't turn into a nagger, which unless she's a Martian, in time she certainly will.
With the boys it was a university degree, financial prospects and height. While all of this was seen as hilarious in the West, it was probably a damn good system, Indian girls then being heavily protected and not getting out and about as today.
Once the practice began here I confess to amusement at the characteristic constants advertisers credited themselves with. The women's ages were always 29, 39, 49 etc. No one was ever 31, 41 or 51. All were "said to be attractive", by whom we were not told. The men described themselves such that it was inconceivable they weren't set upon by hordes of women should they venture outside.
The standard interests listed were walking on the beach at sunset, dining out and going to the theatre. Dramatic theatre relies on such people for their audiences.
Indeed, back in the late 1980s I had a married manager who fell for a much younger woman and to everyone's astonishment, mine excepted, she ran off with him. I was unsurprised as she was an architect's wife and architects' wives are forever running off with rubbish collectors, stop-go sign holders and the like. Anyway, I recall him saying that one compensation for the marriage break-up distress was that he no longer had to endure bloody Downstage (a Wellington theatre), yet further evidence it's the domain of the bored.
The advent of the jumbo jet and thus mass travel in the early 1970s brought about a new phenomenon for older wife-seekers, namely the targeting of Filipino women. They're pretty, desperate to escape and have (for older blokes) desirable, old-fashioned home-making values.
In Manila for the 1975 Ali-Frazier fight, one night in the Hilton, Australia's then leading television boxing commentator whom I knew, walked in. Behind him loped a dozen ageing hayseeds, all, it transpired, backblock farmers. He came over to me moaning about what he'd let himself in for through agreeing, for a fee plus expenses and a ringside ticket, to lead a travel agency organised trip to the fight. They'd drunk beer non-stop, he complained, and was shuddering at the prospect of escorting them about Manila. In fact, he never saw them again for they all secured tarts and never left their rooms, not even for the fight. After the fight, in the hotel foyer packed with journalists, he approached me in a distressed state.
"What am I going to do?" he wailed. "They all want me to go down to City Hall and be their best man when they marry their tarts."
"You must go," I insisted. "These will be marriages made in heaven - perfect matching filling respective needs". So he did and I don't doubt they were.
Nowadays Russia and Ukraine have usurped the Philippines for the preferred bride-sourcing location. The Economist, reporting a scandal from Odessa recently, mentioned the hordes of middle-aged Westerners on the bride hunt. They're stunning girls but with their Slavic dourness I'm hesitant about marriages made in heaven applying.
A former Sydney girlfriend has a friend whose dating exploits via newspaper advertising fascinates me. I've met this woman and witnessed her extraordinary eating capacity. Chopped up with fried rice she'd feed a small Chinese city, as on my estimation she has a stripped fighting weight of about 200kg. She's in her 50s and had never been asked out. About five years ago she began advertising in the singles classifieds, this resulting in numerous "dates". The problem was she represented herself as 37 and the standard "said to be attractive". About 60 per cent of the "dates", on meeting her, promptly fled. The others went through the motions but never rang back. To all of this she remains unabashed and justifies her misrepresentation given that 90 per cent of the men lie about their age by about 10 years, tall men turn out short, a high percentage wear toupees and so on.
I'm assured by young people that today, using internet dating sites is both socially acceptable and the principal medium for meeting likely spouses. As photos are involved it cuts out some of the newspaper classifieds' misrepresentations.
More salient is news that a British study reveals the former seven year itch phenomenon when boredom sets in, has now halved to less than three years. It's a funny old world and never more so than in the ever-changing mating rituals of modern times.
Waiting Too Long
We hear endless complaints from women about the lack of good men.
Women astonished that men don't seem to be around when they decide it is time to settle down. Women telling men to ''man up'' and stop shying away from commitment.
But there is another conversation going on - a fascinating exchange about what is happening from the male point of view. Much of it thrives on the internet, in the so-called ''manosphere''. Here you will find men cheerfully, even triumphantly, blogging about their experience. They have cause for celebration, you see. They've discovered a profound change has taken place in the mating game and, to their surprise, they are the winners.
Dalrock (dalrock.wordpress.com) is typical: ''Today's unmarried twentysomething women have given men an ultimatum: I'll marry when I'm ready, take it or leave it. This is, of course, their right. But ultimatums are a risky thing, because there is always a possibility the other side will decide to leave it. In the next decade we will witness the end result of this game of marriage chicken.''
The endgame Dalrock warns about is already in play for hordes of unmarried professional women - the well-coiffed lawyers, bankers and other success stories. Many thought they could put off marriage and families until their 30s, having devoted their 20s to education, establishing careers and playing the field. But was their decade of dating a strategic mistake?
Jamie, a 30-year-old Sydney barrister, thinks so: ''Women labour under the impression they can have it all. They can have the career, this carefree lifestyle and then, at the snap of their fingers, because they are so fabulous, find a man. But if they wait until their 30s they're competing with women who are much younger and in various ways more attractive.''
The crisis for single women in this age group seeking a mate is very real. Almost one in three women aged 30 to 34 and a quarter of late-30s women do not have a partner, according to the 2006 census statistics. And this is a growing problem. The number of partnerless women in their 30s has almost doubled since 1986.
The challenge is greatest for high-achieving women in their 30s looking for equally successful men. Analysis of 2006 census figures by the Monash University sociologist, Genevieve Heard, reveals that almost one in four of degree-educated women in their 30s will miss out on a man of similar age and educational achievement. There were only 68,000 unattached graduate men in their 30s for 88,000 single graduate women in the same age group.
And the higher-education gap keeps widening. In the past year, the proportion of degree-educated women aged 25 to 34 rose from 37.7 per cent to 40.3 per cent, according to the Bureau of Statistics, while for males the figure remained below 30 per cent, having risen only 0.5 per cent in the past year.
Although there are similar numbers of single men and women in their 30s overall - about 370,000 of each across Australia - half these available men had only high school education, 57 per cent earned $42,000 or less and 95,000 of them were unemployed.
The high expectations of professional women are a big part of the story. Many high-achieving women simply are not interested in Mr Average, says Justin Parfitt, the owner of Australia's fastest growing speed-dating organisation, Fast Impressions. Parfitt adds: ''They've swallowed the L'Oreal line: 'Because you're worth it!' There's a real sense of entitlement.''
He finds many of his female members are determined to meet only men who are tall, attractive, wealthy and well educated. They want the alpha males. ''Most of the professional women rarely give out 'yes' votes to men who aren't similarly successful,'' reports Parfitt, who struggles to attract enough of these successful men to his speed-dating events. Sixty per cent of his members are female. Most are over 30.
During their 20s, women compete for the most highly desirable men, the Mr Bigs. Many will readily share a bed with the sporty, attractive, confident men, while ordinary men miss out. As Whiskey puts it at whiskeysplace.wordpress.com: ''Joe Average Beta Male is about as desirable to women as a cold bowl of oatmeal.''
Data from American colleges show 20 per cent of males - the most attractive ones - get 80 per cent of the sex, according to an analysis by Susan Walsh, a former management consultant who wrote about the issue on her dating website, hookingupsmart.com.
That leaves a lot of beta men spending their 20s out in the cold. Greg, a 38-year-old writer from Melbourne, started adult life shy and lonely. ''In my 20s, the women had the total upper hand. They could make or break you with one look in a club or bar. They had the choice of men, sex was on tap and guys like me went home alone, red-faced, defeated and embarrassed. The girls only wanted to go for the cool guys, good looks, outgoing personalities, money, sporty types, the kind of guys who owned the room, while us quiet ones got ignored.''
He barely had a date through much of his 20s and gave up on women. But then he spent time overseas, gained more confidence, learnt how to dress well and hit his early 30s. ''I suddenly started to get asked out by women, aged 19 through to 40. The floodgates burst open for me. I actually dated five women at once, amazing my flatmates by often bedding three to four of my casual dates each week. It is a great time as a male in your 30s, when you start getting more female attention and sex than you could ever have dreamt of in your 20s.''
That's when some men start behaving very badly - as the manosphere clearly shows. These internet sites are not for the faint-hearted. The voices are often crude and misogynist. But they tell it as they see it. There is Greenlander, an apparently successful engineer in his late 30s. In his early adult life, he was unable to ''get the time of day from women''. Now he's interested only in women under 27.
''The women I know in their early 30s are just delusional,'' he says. ''I sometimes seduce them and sleep with them just because I know how to play them so well. It's just too easy. They're tired of the cock carousel and they see a guy like me as the perfect beta to settle down with before their eggs dry out … when I get tired of them I just delete their numbers from my cell phone and stop taking their calls … It doesn't really hurt them that much: at this point they're used to pump & dump!''
It's easy to dismiss such bile but Greenlander's analysis is echoed by many Australian singles, both male and female.
''It's wall-to-wall arseholes out there,'' reports Penny, a 31-year-old lawyer. She is stunned by how hard it is to meet suitable men willing to commit. ''I'm horrified by the number of gorgeous, independent and successful women my age who can't meet a decent man.''
Penny acknowledges part of the problem is her own expectations - that her generation of women was brought up wanting too much. ''We were told we were special, we could do anything and the world was our oyster.'' And having spent her 20s dating alpha males, she expected them to be still around when she finally decided to get serious.
But these men go fast, many fishing outside their pond. The most attractive, successful men can take their pick from women their own age or from the Naomis, the younger women who are happy to settle early. Almost one in three degree-educated 35-year-old men marries or lives with women aged 30 or under, according to income, housing and marriage surveys by the Bureau of Statistics.
''I can't believe how many men my age are only interested in younger women,'' wails Gail, a 34-year-old advertising executive as she describes her first search through men's profiles on the RSVP internet dating site. She is shocked to find many mid-30s men have set up their profiles to refuse mail from women their own age.
Talking to many women like her, it's intriguing how many look back on past relationships where they let good men get away because they weren't ready. American journalist Kate Bolick wrote recently in The Atlantic about breaking off her three-year relationship with a man she described as ''intelligent, good-looking, loyal and kind''. She acknowledged ''there was no good reason to end things'', yet, at the time, she was convinced something was missing in the relationship. That was 11 years ago. She's is now 39 and facing grim choices.
''We arrived at the top of the staircase,'' Bolick wrote, ''finally ready to start our lives, only to discover a cavernous room at the tail end of a party, most of the men gone already, some having never shown up - and those who remain are leering by the cheese table, or are, you know, the ones you don't want to go out with.''
So, many women are missing out on their fairytale ending - their assumption that when the time was right the dream man would be waiting. The 30s are worrying years for high-achieving women who long for marriage and children - of course, not all do - as they face their rapidly closing reproductive window surrounded by men who see no rush to settle down.
And, of course, many women eventually do find a mate, often ending up with divorced men. There are complications with that second-marriage market, in which men come complete with former wives and children. That was never part of the plan.
Many really struggle with the fact that they aren't in a position to be too choosy. American author Lori Gottlieb gives a painfully honest account of that process in her book Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr Good Enough.
''Maybe we need to get over ourselves,'' she writes. The 40-year-old single mother enlisted a team of advisers who helped her realise that while she was conducting her long search for the perfect man - Prince Charming or nobody - her market value had dropped through the floor.
''Our generation of women is constantly told to have high self-esteem, but it seems that the women themselves are at risk of ego-tripping themselves out of romantic connection,'' she writes. She acknowledges she made a mistake not looking for a spouse in her 20s, when she was at her most desirable. She advises thirtysomething women to look for Mr Good Enough before they have even less choice. ''They are with an '8' but they want a '10'. But then suddenly they're 40 and can only get a '5'!''
Women delaying their search for a serious relationship have set up a very different dating and marriage market. The Sydney barrister, Jamie, finds himself spoilt for choice. Like many of his friends he's finding women actively pursuing him, asking him out, cooking him elaborate meals, buying him presents. ''Oh, you're a barrister,'' they say.
While many of his mates are playing the field, determined to enjoy this unexpected attention, Jamie is ready to settle down. He's very wary of Sex and the City types, women who are convinced they are so special, but he's confident he will soon find someone with her feet on the ground.
''I'm lucky,'' he says, ''to be in a buyer's market.''
Grandma's Lamp
My mother’s mother had refined and firm tastes. When I was a boy she took me with her to a Pittsburgh department store to buy a lamp for her artfully decorated apartment. I would say “This one works” and she would respond that it didn’t go with her sofa. I would ask “How about that one?” and she would say that a shade of its colour wouldn’t look right next to the wallpaper. Another was too tall and would obscure the view from one of her windows for people seated at the dinner table. Yet another was too short to serve as a good source of light on her favorite end table, which was low to the ground.
Even if I hadn’t been an impatient 8 year old, I would have been exasperated by her pickiness. But she did eventually find, after looking at countless non-suitable models, a lamp that matched everything in her carefully laid out apartment. And even I could see that it was indeed perfect, accentuating everything, distracting from nothing, and not requiring any other item in her apartment to be moved even an inch.
I think about Grandma’s lamp when I listen to never-married middle aged people talk about how hard it is for them to find a suitable spouse. A lawyer acquaintance in Boston is pushing 40. He has dated many women but can’t seem to find the life partner he seeks. “All I want is a woman who looks reasonably nice, acts reasonably nice and who likes me. Why is that so hard?” he complains.
But when I ask him if he would move to Miami or Reno or Dubuque to marry such a woman, he says no, his life is in Boston. And when I ask him if he would change his career in a significant way to marry such a woman he says oh no, he is doing well at the firm and he would have to start over somewhere else. And when I ask if he would be willing to marry such a woman if she wanted more children than he does (He wants one or at most two) he says no, he’s almost 40, and he has only so much time and many other things he wants to do in life. And if the woman couldn’t get along with his current friends? A big problem, his friends are life-long sources of support and meaning for him. And if she had children from a prior marriage? No way, don’t want to be a step-parent. And so on.
Like my grandmother, he isn’t really looking for just any good lamp, although unlike her, he doesn’t realize it. He has his life’s apartment, the wallpaper, the carpet and the furnishings and wants that perfect lamp that will accentuate everything in its current form, detract from nothing, and require nothing to be moved even an inch. And he is dating women who are on the same quest, but apparently looking for an equally particular but different lamp. Good luck to him and the many other people like him that I have met. They need it more than they may recognize.
This observation isn’t intended to romanticize getting married young, as used to be the fashion. Many people who marry young get divorced. After all, when you are young, you have the disadvantages of not really knowing who you are, where you will live, or what you will do in life. On the other hand, you have the advantages of not really knowing who you are, where you will live, or what you will do in life. If you determine all these things in alliance with another person at an age when life is more flexible for both of you, you won’t get forced into the choice between getting married and having to undo decisions you have made on your own over many years in which you are now understandably deeply invested.
An Advice Column
Q I’ve just turned 40, am divorced and back on the dating scene. I haven’t been naked with a woman other than my wife for ten years, and I was fit with an almost washboard stomach when we first met.
It seems that nowadays the standards for a man’s appearance are much higher than when I was last out there. Wherever I look, there are pictures of David Beckham in his boxers or men with waxed, hard chests. Do I need to start on a major exercise regime? I’m very nervous.
A Realistically, to achieve abs like David Beckham’s, you’ll need more than a major exercise regime. In your case, I’m thinking lipo, steroids, waxing and tanning, not to mention a week in a tattoo parlour. After all, it is his job to look that good. Becks is a physical impossibility in boxer shorts. He is chiselled. Honed. And, let’s face it, in no way representative of the average British male. In England, fewer than two adults in five (37 per cent) are classed as “normal” weight, and among middle-aged males, 68.2 per cent of men aged 35-44, and 76.8 per cent of men aged 45-54, are either overweight or obese*, so frankly, if your BMI is anywhere near normal, you are ahead of the game.
It is somewhat ironic that this unprecedented expansion in male girth has, as you have observed, occurred in tandem with a measurable proliferation in excessively muscular male models. Several studies have documented a notable increase in the “density” and “muscularity” in male models between the early Seventies and the late Nineties. Even action toy figures aimed at young boys have bulked up so much they look like they are on steroids. A study that measured the physical dimensions of contemporary action figures and compared them with their original versions, found the circumferences of the neck, chest, arm, forearm, thigh and calf were significantly larger (Baghurst, Hollander, Nardella & Haff, 2006).
The relationship between muscularity and perceived masculinity is nothing new, but it is no coincidence that a highly exaggerated and largely unattainable male ideal should become ubiquitous at a time when it seems to be increasingly unattainable. Magazines, movies — these media are built on aspiration, and that inevitably means the goalposts are perpetually shifting. Women have a longstanding history with the hypocrisy of the unachievable body — for example, anthropometry suggests the probability for Barbie’s body shape is less than 1 in 100,000. Men, however, are relative newbies to this unique psychological pressure and, unsurprisingly, when asked to pick the male body type they think females would prefer, most young men choose a body type that carries 30lb (13.6kg) more muscle than the body most women chose as ideal on a man (Olivardia et al, 2004). No wonder anabolic steroid abuse has escalated so rapidly in recent years.
Body fascism is a boring, pointless, depressing trap that only makes people feel rubbish about themselves. Sure, being healthy is important, but the ultimate goal of looking good is to be attractive to others and, in that respect, you are in your dating prime. By the time a man is in his thirties, there are two women to every man on dating websites and, by the time he hits 50, that ratio has risen to three to one. Despite these odds, many men tend to focus their interests upon younger women. Studies of online dating show the median 31-year-old male is willing to consider a potential date nine years younger, but only four years older, than himself. This skew only gets worse with age. The average 42-year-old male is willing to date a woman who is up to 15 years younger than himself but his maximum upper limit is a woman who is just three years older. Bearing this in mind, if you are willing to date a woman who is vaguely your own age, statistics suggest that you don’t need to be pumped, or waxed, or even nervous. You just need to be realistic.
As for your nervousness, don’t be. Getting naked for the first time with a new partner is always nerve-racking (which is why most first dates involve alcohol). However, you must remember that people who decide to have sex with each other generally do so because they find each other attractive, and body image is such a universal affliction that you won’t be the only one feeling nervous. Good luck.
Charm
If one were to recast The Rockford Files, as Universal Pictures is intending to do, would the Frat Pack actor Vince Vaughn seem the wisest choice to play Jim Rockford, the character James Garner inhabited with such sly intelligence and bruised suavity? Universal apparently thinks so.
One can say many things about the talents of Vaughn, and were Universal embarking on a bit of polyester parody—remaking, say, Tony Rome, among the least of the neo-noirs—Vaughn’s gift for sending up low pop would be just so. But to aim low in this case is to miss the deceptive grace that Garner brought to the original, and prompts a bigger question: Whatever happened to male charm—not just our appreciation of it, or our idea of it, but the thing itself?
Yes, yes, George Clooney—let’s get him out of the way. For nearly 20 years, any effort to link men and charm has inevitably led to Clooney. Ask women or men to name a living, publicly recognized charming man, and 10 out of 10 will say Clooney. That there exists only one choice—and an aging one—proves that we live in a culture all but devoid of male charm.
Mention Clooney, and the subject turns next to whether (or to what extent) he’s the modern version of that touchstone of male charm, Cary Grant. Significantly, Grant came to his charm only when he came, rather late, to his adulthood. An abandoned child and a teenage acrobat, he spent his first six years in Hollywood playing pomaded pretty boys. In nearly 30 stilted movies—close to half of all the pictures he would ever make—his acting was tentative, his personality unformed, his smile weak, his manner ingratiating, and his delivery creaky. See how woodenly he responds to Mae West’s most famous (and most misquoted) line, in She Done Him Wrong: “Why don’t you come up sometime and see me?” But in 1937 he made the screwball comedy The Awful Truth, and all at once the persona of Cary Grant gloriously burgeoned. Out of nowhere he had assimilated his offhand wit, his playful knowingness, and, in a neat trick that allowed him to be simultaneously cool and warm, his arch mindfulness of the audience he was letting in on the joke.
Grant had developed a new way to interact with a woman onscreen: he treated his leading lady as both a sexually attractive female and an idiosyncratic personality, an approach that often required little more than just listening to her—a tactic that had previously been as ignored in the pictures as it remains, among men, in real life. His knowing but inconspicuously generous style let the actress’s performance flourish, making his co-star simultaneously regal and hilarious.
Only the self-aware can have charm: it’s bound up with a sensibility that at best approaches wisdom, and at worst goes well beyond cynicism.
In short, Grant suddenly and fully developed charm, a quality that is tantalizing because it simultaneously demands detachment and engagement. Only the self-aware can have charm: It’s bound up with a sensibility that at best approaches wisdom, or at least worldliness, and at worst goes well beyond cynicism. It can’t exist in the undeveloped personality. It’s an attribute foreign to many men because most are, for better and for worse, childlike. These days, it’s far more common among men over 70—probably owing to the era in which they reached maturity rather than to the mere fact of their advanced years. What used to be called good breeding is necessary (but not sufficient) for charm: no one can be charming who doesn’t draw out the overlooked, who doesn’t shift the spotlight onto others—who doesn’t, that is, possess those long-forgotten qualities of politesse and civilité. A great hostess perforce has charm (while legendary hostesses are legion—Elizabeth Montagu, Madame Geoffrin, Viscountess Melbourne, Countess Greffulhe—I can’t think of a single legendary host), but today this social virtue goes increasingly unrecognized. Still, charm is hardly selfless. All of these acts can be performed only by one at ease with himself yet also intensely conscious of himself and of his effect on others. And although it’s bound up with considerateness, it really has nothing to do with, and is in fact in some essential ways opposed to, goodness. Another word for the lightness of touch that charm requires in humor, conversation, and all other aspects of social relations is subtlety, which carries both admirable and dangerous connotations. Charm’s requisite sense of irony is also the requisite for social cruelty (see, for example, the excruciating interrogations to which Grant subjects that virtuoso stooge Ralph Bellamy in both The Awful Truth and His Girl Friday).
Male charm is all but absent from the screen because it’s all but absent from our lives. Most men hold charm in vague suspicion: few cultivate it; still fewer respond to it; hardly any know whether they have it; and almost none can even identify it. Women commonly complain about the difficulty in gaining any conversational purchase when, say, trying to engage the fathers of their children’s classmates or the husbands of their tennis partners. The woman will grab from her bag of conversational gambits—she’ll allude to some quotidian absurdity or try to form a mock alliance in defiance of some teacher’s or soccer coach’s irksome requirement. But the man doesn’t enter into the give-and-take. The next time they meet, it’s as though they’ve never talked before; the man invariably fails to pick up the ball, and any reference the woman might make to a prior remark or observation falls to the ground. Men don’t indulge in the easy shared confidences and nonsexual flirtations that lubricate social exchange among women. Even in the most casual conversation, men are too often self-absorbed or mono-focused or—more commonly—guarded, distracted, and disengaged to an almost Aspergerian degree. (Garner’s futile efforts to engage the unengageable—be they flinty triggermen from Detroit or by-the-book feds—is a running gag in Rockford.) Men consistently fail to meet the sort of obvious standards set by guides to etiquette and to the art of conversation common 50 years ago.
This isn’t to attribute the dearth of charm to some cultural and social declension, although clearly charm—with its emotional, even aesthetic, detachment—could hardly have retained its social sway after that most overwrought of decades, the 1960s. Any culture that celebrates youth necessarily provides stony soil for charm, which is by definition a quality reserved for adults: the young can be charming, which is an inadvertent attribute; they cannot have charm.
Most men hold charm in vague suspicion: few cultivate it; still fewer respond to it; hardly any know whether they have it; and almost none can identify it.
Of course, all of these social and cultural shifts, which are themselves inimical to charm, are rooted in a more basic change—the ever-widening infection of social relations by market values. That development, whether good or ill, indisputably makes for blunter and more crudely utilitarian manners. After all, in a way, charm is just small talk.
More important, charm, for all its appeal, isn’t a moral virtue—it’s an amoral one. Americans, especially American men, have always been, for some very good reasons, ambivalent about charm. It’s an attribute alien to many men because they are ingenuous, a quality that can itself be either admirable or unlovely. Many American military men deserve our esteem; the many I have known indeed do, but I have never met one with an ounce of charm. Indeed, what American hero has possessed it? The quintessential modern American hero, the eternally jejune and earnest Charles Lindbergh, who became a god when not yet a man, was in every way the antithesis of charm. America’s entire political history has been in some basic way a struggle between Jefferson—self-righteous, humorless, prickly, at once intellectually ardent and woolly—and Hamilton, a man foreign-born, witty, stylish, coolly brilliant, generous, possessed of a rare rapport with and an understanding of women. And just as Hamilton’s political vision triumphed, so did Jefferson’s political style. To be sure, we’ve always had sports heroes—Sonny Jurgensen, John McEnroe, Jim McMahon, Arnold Palmer—whose sly irony and authority-defining insouciance lends them the adolescent glamour of Peck’s Bad Boy, a posture that, while sometimes winning, can be mislabeled as charm. (Its limits are clear in the persona of a non-sportsman exemplar, Bruce Willis.) Indeed, sports—youngsters’ games pursued in earnest—essentially lack charm. The seriousness with which American men take sports both confirms and exacerbates their suspicion of charm.
The movies and the most-discerning actors in them showed us charm’s allure - and its menace.
So there’s nothing new about the troubled relationship between men and charm. The dearth of charming American leading men seems acute now, but only for a brief cultural moment, from the mid-1930s to the early 1940s, did American movies elevate male charm—not coincidentally, during a time when middle-class women made up the pictures’ largest audience. Even then the roster of charming lead actors was pretty much limited to Grant (foreign-born and -raised, and entirely self-invented—a man without a country), Gable (endearing, although his charm was always at war with his compulsion to establish his masculinity), William Powell (a bit asexual), and—strange but true—the perennially underrated Fred MacMurray. As for most other male stars, even of romantic comedies, which was the only genre that celebrated charm, the distinction that separates youth from age applies: Jimmy Stewart in his fumbling ineffectuality and Gary Cooper in his galumphing diffidence could be charming—the modifier boyishly naturally appends itself—but they didn’t have charm.
In the old days, the phrase a charming man was often code for “a gay man,” and undoubtedly the undying but unfounded speculation about Grant’s bisexuality is based on the suspicion that no man so charming could possibly be heterosexual. There is no getting around the basic womanliness of charm. One of the three most important virtues in a man, according to Christopher Hitchens—among the very few charming men I’ve known—is the ability to think like a woman. (The other two are courage, moral and physical, and a sense of the absurd.) Certainly this is one reason many men find charm so alien and alienating. But a man’s ability to think like a woman, and its concomitant—an understanding of and interest in women—is probably rooted not in sexuality but in a sympathetic relationship with his mother or other women who raised him. That today foppishness, campiness, and a proclivity to dish get conflated with male charm indicates, as does the notion of Vaughn as a contemporary Garner, the culture’s incomprehension of that quality.
In fact, it’s precisely his uncomplicated heterosexuality that makes Garner such an important American man. Garner - who possessed a casual wit, a good-natured ease, a liking for and appreciation of women, and a quizzical detachment - is unambiguously straight. But unlike Clooney - who, though raised in Kentucky and Ohio, has never been, thanks to his Aunt Rosemary, provincial - Garner, the hardscrabble Oklahoman, is at once worldly and untainted by sophistication. (Gable’s roots were similarly rustic, but he could never overcome the talk about what it took to vault himself out of his circumstances—a stint as a long-lashed rent boy.) Strikingly unlike Clooney, Garner is impossible to imagine comfortable in black tie—and, really, how many men are?
Cliche has it that a charming leading man appeals equally to both men and women (although for different reasons). That’s immensely difficult to manage. Even if American men could appreciate charm, they still wouldn’t trust it—and it’s impossible to really like a man whom you can’t trust with your wife. But as an actor, Garner had a magical ability to convey his offscreen persona of red-blooded, hardworking, plain, and thorough decency, even as his charming onscreen persona didn’t fully gibe with it. He thereby made a light touch and an ironic stance qualities that men found not just appealing but worthy.
That capacity to simultaneously inhabit a role and remain outside it epitomizes charm. Garner always played likable rogues, although the accent sometimes fell more strongly on the likable (Maverick, Rockford) and sometimes more on the rogue. In The Great Escape, he was able to turn an ingratiating scrounger and operator (a type familiar to and pretty much universally loathed by mid-century American males, weary veterans of both military life and the corporate office) into a Great Guy, but in The Americanization of Emily (Garner’s own favorite among his movies), he deployed the same charm to pimp for lascivious admirals.
The dearth of charming American leading men seems acute, but only for a brief cultural moment did American movies elevate male charm.
The movies and the most-discerning actors in them showed us charm’s allure—and its menace. For men and for women, encountering a charming man is a moment of unique delight in the pictures, as in life. It prompts a heady mixture of exhilaration and the ease that accompanies the recognition that one is in good hands. The opening 66 minutes of The Third Man hurtles the audience through war-scarred Vienna with the ineffectual and doggedly callow Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten), a man clearly out of his depth in the chilly cafés with their aged, stone-faced Mittel-European gigolos. But just as we begin to feel intolerably oppressed by the weight of all that bleak Atmosphere, Martin’s eyes, and ours, fall on the Face of Charm—Orson Welles’s Harry Lime, briefly illuminated with one knowing, self-mocking eyebrow raised; and with the ironical lilt of the zither, we are ineffably but unforgettably uplifted. The effect of that glimpse of Welles’s charm is just as Pauline Kael described the effects of Grant’s: “We smile when we see him … It makes us happy just to look at him.” It’s the one joyous scene in the movie, and it’s among the most enchanting in any movie. Our delight intensifies when we meet Welles, who bounds up to Cotten with a theatrical hint of apology (“Hello, old man, how are you?”). He envelops us along with Cotten in his relaxed assurance, his amused, trusting manner. He draws Cotten in as a confidant, even as he maintains his seductive command. It’s the greatest moment of flirtation between heterosexual men in cinema. We feel Cotten’s desire to be taken in hand by Welles, and we half want him to be. Of course, by now we, and Cotten, know that Welles is an evil opportunist who must bend Cotten to his needs. Never mind, because even as Welles charmingly, openly confirms all that, he forever wins us over with his parting words to Cotten: that cuckoo-clock speech, the most-famous lines in the picture (they’re not in the Graham Greene book; Welles wrote them).
Pampered and petted as a child of profligate gifts, Welles throughout his life was a man who knew just how to exploit his immense charm. As a young man in a hurry, the energetically heterosexual Welles exercised a beguiling power on a series of influential gay men (Thornton Wilder and Guthrie McLintic among them), and on stage and in the movies his fellow players and crew were captivated by the abundant evidence of his devotion, even as they knew that his only loyalty was to his self-promotion—a project that was both entwined with and in opposition to his art. Grant and Garner, on the other hand, had to haul themselves out of circumstances in which charm counted for nothing; they came to their charm only in film, and perhaps as a consequence, they, like most men, had a far more troubled relationship with it. In the first two pictures Grant made with Hitchcock—Suspicion, in which he played an amoral bounder apparently intent on murder, and Notorious, in which he played a spy-pimp—he was purely, genuinely charming, even as he established that the line between charmer and sociopath is very fine indeed. These performances, by far his most technically accomplished, are so brilliant and daring not merely because Grant risked upending his carefully built film persona but because he conveyed how those performances were in fact true to that persona.
The genius of Garner and Grant was the way they expressed both their delight in their charm and their own suspicion of charm, and so spoke to men—and to women, who, to survive in this world, have always had to know in their bones the truth of Anita Brookner’s assertion that a true man of charm must be a liar. One could reply that our suspicions should be raised only by the superficial charm that psychiatrists attribute to psychopaths (see Joseph Cotten in Shadow of a Doubt). But Grant and Garner knew that charm in all its guises is ultimately, if not merely, superficial - 'real charm' is an oxymoron.
Most men’s obliviousness to charm supports the proposition that the quality is not essential, even as that obliviousness makes for a decidedly less pleasant world. Charm is a social—a civilized—virtue. But its very refinement, the weight it places on self-presentation, means that it is inherently manipulative. All of Grant’s characteristic winning expressions—the double take, the cocked head, the arched eyebrow, the sideways glance—signaled that he was pulling something off. The charming man (or woman) always knows that he (or she) is pulling something off, no matter whether that charm is used to put the wallflower at ease, to get the soccer dad to exchange some pleasantries, or to close the sale. The charmer knows that he or she is manipulating—and in the end, it’s impossible not to be at least slightly contemptuous of the object of one’s manipulation. Welles, a real charmer, insouciantly and cynically took all this for granted, which made his portrayals of charm the most offhand and naturalistic, and also the most sinister. Grant, the greatest film actor, could methodically show charm’s double face, an exquisite balancing act that simultaneously subverted and enormously enriched his appeal. But Garner—Garner could amble up to the American Man, put an arm around his shoulders with the sort of good-natured nonchalance that the best salesman attempts for a lifetime but can never achieve, squint in an open but jaded way while looking him straight in the eye, grin in that crooked, easy, worldly-wise manner, and, well, confide to him: Charm is charming. Just don’t be charmed by it.
Oldies Dating
Whether dating as a young person or as a somewhat older one, the fundamentals remain the same. It boils down to two people sounding each other out and frantically trying to interpret each other’s signals — or lack thereof — while trying to appear relaxed. It is a complicated and risk-laden means to a basic end: in a nutshell, sex and/or a relationship. (Or neither, as the case may be.) Skins co-creator Bryan Elsley has missed a trick with his excellent new series Dates on Channel 4. So far, no older daters. It is a rich seam he has overlooked, one which in many ways is even more poignant and fraught (but also even funnier) than the more youthful dating that he has conveyed so brilliantly. I should know. Since my divorce in 2010, I have been on numerous dates with an extraordinary variety of men.
Although online dating is rife and technology has opened up whole new vistas, dating itself is more complex and hit-and-miss than ever. And more so for older people, because we have had such an infinite number of experiences by now and are so picky, entrenched and laden with baggage.
Now aged 49, I find the dating rules have shifted so radically since my day that the goalposts are currently all over the place. It’s a wonder that older people’s dates ever lead to anything — but they do. We are enjoying a marriage boom driven by silver sweethearts, according to new figures released by the Office for National Statistics, which found that men and women in their fifties and sixties getting married had risen by almost 7 per cent.
I had thought I had put this lark behind me; I was never expecting to be dating at this stage in my life. The past couple of years of dating have been at times depressing and startling, but more often great fun. I have learnt more about human nature in the past few years through dating than in the whole of my varied life. And, seasoned as I have become, I have also picked up a few do’s and don’ts. Here are some tips to help you navigate the minefield:
1) Conversational no-nos
Fortunately, we have all lived a little and can enjoy an absence of the embarrassment we once felt at practically everything. So there are far fewer subjects that are off-limits than before. We can talk openly about politics, family, friends, sex, divorce, ageing and death. Your children are a less certain domain. If you are happy to hear about Johnny’s violin prowess in exchange for your licence to bore on little Hepzibah’s mastery of Arabic, fair do’s. Otherwise, this is a no-go area.
2) Be (almost completely) open and honest
No point trying to be cool. Frankly, presenting yourself as something you are not is foolish in youth, suicidal in middle-age — we don’t have the time or the energy, later, to backtrack. And, frankly, why would we wish to end up with someone who likes the fake us as opposed to the real thing? Been there, done that — and paid for it. It’s too exhausting keeping up the pretence any more and hails nothing but grief.
3) Dress age-appropriately
Read my lips: mutton. That doesn’t mean you can’t wear clothes that are sexy just because you are no longer lamb, but it also doesn’t mean you can go in for hemlines up to the crotch and necklines down to the naval, however good your legs and tits. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of cleavage, but be honest with yourself and judge how much exposure the erstwhile youthful chest can take. Acres of crepey upper bosom is not a good look, although one that remains blooming and unblemished is fair game. Men should steer clear of blouson leather jackets and baseball caps, which may as well have “midlife crisis” emblazoned across their fronts.
4) To wax or not to wax at our age?
There has been a revolution in pubic hair in the past few years, or perhaps I should say, in the lack of it. People used to shave their armpits and legs. But then — in the Eighties — the bikini line entered the lexicon of neuroses. (In the Seventies, wasn’t there a pubic free-for-all? The more the merrier?) Now, for young daters — young people, full stop — it’s pretty straightforward. A bit like Americano or cappuccino, it’s basically Brazilian, or Hollywood. I know a male serial dater of 42 who goes for younger women, and so opts for “the works” for himself. For the older generation, then, bikini line: fine. Brazilian: at the very coalface of what’s acceptable. Hollywood: frankly creepy; a strip too far.
5) Grooming
Attention to detail never goes amiss, perhaps more so now than back in the day. For example, the bitten nails of last time round, in the teens and twenties, are not such a good look at 40 and beyond. Soon after my divorce, before a date and my nails a bitten wreck (the trauma-resurgence of a long-dormant habit), I urgently and uncharacteristically bought some alarming instant nail tips, painted them some ill-judged colour and the date was a wild success. Superstition now dictates the odd manicure before a promising night out. Botox, however, fools none but the least observant. It tends to bestow, instead of an instant version of youth, a look that is recognisably you, yet at the same time not quite. A good analogy is that small but significant, unsettling disparity between the real person and his or her Madame Tussaud’s waxwork. Best to be a bit wrinkled but real.
6) Flatter your date, sincerely preferably, but shamelessly
I canvassed many friends for this piece and with one voice they all cried “flattery”. This wasn’t as vital in the past because we were all self-obsessed and feeling blithely entitled to the various benefits that youth so carelessly bestows: a certain tautness of flesh that was beautiful even if we weren’t; boundless energy; a sense of arrogance bred of no notion of frailty or mortality; the conviction the world was our oyster. Then, we probably didn’t have the wit, imagination or generosity to pile on the compliments to others, only craving them greedily for ourselves. In middle-age and beyond, we are all so full of anxieties and lack of confidence, and of surprise that we find ourselves participating in this dating lark again when we had thought that chapter had been ripped out of our book, that flattery to each other is as crucial as breath. So simple. And, believe me, so effective.
7) Paying
Make no assumptions any which way. The old status quo of men forking out every time, which prevailed even in my 1980s youth, no longer applies, obviously, and hasn’t for ages, unless he is an old-fashioned and/or chivalrous/generous/opportunist type. The solution to the question of whether it is the man or woman who pays, or whether you go Dutch, is entirely up for grabs. Play it by ear.
8) Post-date courtesy, politeness and appreciation
We are of a generation when manners mattered — indeed, still existed. Our younger counterparts may not go in for anything so frumpy as an acknowledgment or thank you, but the older dater has no excuse. If the other person did pay — and even if he/she did not — it is not de trop to say thank you, whether by postcard (which even I concede is rather outmoded), e-mail or text. Preferably witty.
9) Sexting
Why on earth not? This is one of the great innovations since last time round, when our only options were a landline or Royal Mail. In my case, the former rarely rang and the latter, which promised so much, almost never delivered. E-mails and texts. Modern miracle. Milk them for all they’re worth.
10) Sex
This is 2013. You are consenting adults. It may not feel like it and you may not know it, but the world is your oyster. Joints and cataracts and time may not be on your side, but experience sure as hell is. Enjoy it — if I may use an expression rather closer to the bone than of old — as if it were your last.
A Female Pickup Artist
There’s no way I can be the first to make this observation, but New York’s Meatpacking District remains ridiculously well named. The cobblestones don’t run with animal blood any more but the meat market — the human one that is — is in nightly full throng.
On a sticky Wednesday evening the heels are vertiginous and glossy, the skirts are bandage-tight and gynaecologically short — and the open stares and pick-up lines are even more obvious than the outfits.
This is the kind of environment in which Arden Leigh thrives. Arden is an anomaly, a female “pick-up artist”.
It’s a role made infamous by Neil Strauss, an American writer whose “how to” book, The Game, caused a storm when it came out in 2005, advising men to use techniques such as “negging” (deliberately undermining the confidence of an attractive woman so that she’s more vulnerable to your advances). Leigh is the female Strauss, having built a career out of seduction. She now earns a living teaching women “how to get him, keep him and make him beg for more”.
She won’t tell me her age (“old enough to drink this drink!”) but, satisfyingly, she looks just like you’d think a professional seductress should look: she’s wearing high black stilettos, a short and flippy wraparound red dress, immaculate make-up and a scent with a hint of jasmine. Hanging out with her makes me feel like I’m 13 and she’s my older, infinitely cooler sister, who’s deigned to sneak me into bars for the night. Not that Arden is anything other than charming to me — after all, making people feel good is, she insists, the essence of pick-up.
“At its core, it’s considering what the other person wants. And rather than seeing that as manipulative, we can see it as generous,” she smiles. “Someone is trying to create positive, exciting feelings in you. That’s great!”
The way she tells it, the art of introduction and flirtation seems straightforward. Her definition is simple: “A pick-up artist is someone who goes after what they want and strategises about how best to achieve it.”
Arden says this can apply to anything — she talks, for example, about “picking up” a business contact — but the more common pick-up is sexual.
We’re on high stools in a bar on the street and Arden is explaining the first step: how to make an approach. There are simple, concrete things she teaches, such as body language: if your arms are crossed over your chest, for example, you’re going to repel people. And then there are the more nuanced things, such as confidence.
“Here’s the thing about confidence,” she says. “You wouldn’t tell a boxer in a ring to just go out and be confident. The boxer trains every day.”
In the introduction to her book, The New Rules of Attraction, she explains that she wanted to fill what she saw as a conspicuous gap in our culture. Women now, she writes, “are capable of creating powerful careers for ourselves without a man’s aid, but we’re often at a loss when it comes to our love lives”.
Her fascination with seduction stems from years spent as “shy and awkward and geeky”. She suffered social anxiety well into her twenties and didn’t lose her virginity until she was 22.
“Being out with large crowds of people was kind of intimidating,” she admits, and the intimidation applied to approaching men, too. She dabbled in relationship-advice literature, books such as Why Men Love Bitches and The Rules, “and none of it helped”.
In particular, she was infuriated by the passivity they advised: “You know — ‘don’t show too much interest’ and “don’t call him before he calls you” — I was like, am I just supposed to get a great boyfriend from sitting still? Because that hasn’t worked so far!”
Then she read Strauss’s The Game. “It just made so much more sense,” she says. “Here’s a bunch of guys talking about what to do, breaking it down and giving a number of steps.”
As her twenties progressed she immersed herself in the art of seduction and now she is, as far as she knows, the only woman “who coaches women with a methodology that is specifically derived from pick-up”.
Central to this is the idea of marketing. She writes: “Just as a company spends much time and energy creating its brand in order to convey its message to its potential customers, you must do the same with the image you project.”
This makes me feel a little queasy. Surely I’m a human being, not a corporation? The idea of consciously and brazenly modifying my behaviour to make people fancy me just makes me feel . . . well, hopelessly British. Nonetheless, I ask Arden how she’d advise me to market myself.
“Your personal brand has to be something you carry with you throughout your life. You have kind of an Audrey Hepburn/Zooey Deschanel thing going on,” she tells me. I squirm a bit. “We could work with that and make it more deliberate.”
But do women really need this advice? Don’t men just tend to approach women? Yes, says Arden, but they’re often not the ones you want.
“Know what you want and go after it clearly!” she yells happily. She adds: “I’ve been a very controversial figure, especially where feminism is concerned, but I consider myself a feminist in that I empower women with a set of tools for their personal agency. I think that’s one of the most feminist things you can do.”
But the techniques of a pick-up artist, of course, don’t tend to be associated with feminism. The fundraising website kickstarter.com recently came under fire for featuring a campaign from another American pick-up artist Ken Hoinsky. Among the more printable of his objectionable recommendations are: “don’t ask for permission” and “be dominant”.
“Hoinsky’s posts were problematic, to say the very least,” Arden says firmly, and she has no doubt that male pick-up culture is misogynistic. Nonetheless, she insists, “that isn’t the fault of pick-up”, but rather the type of men it attracts.
“I think a lot of men who are drawn to pick-up feel that women are the gatekeepers to sex and they have to pull the wool over women’s eyes to sneak their way in. That creates this adversarial relationship. But certainly the gurus I’ve studied with don’t espouse that. It’s really about making a connection, about having the confidence to approach someone and create a safe space for them to potentially feel attraction to me.”
Before I can even ask, she recounts her proudest pick-up of the last year — the lead singer of the band that she was obsessed with in high school. “I had pictures of this guy on my locker and it tortured my little teenage heart that this guy was so famous and I was nobody. Then, last year, they decided to get their band back together after a seven-year hiatus, so they have a show at Irving Plaza. And I’m like, all right, this is my chance.”
Her arsenal: an outfit of lingerie (“this full-on, strappy, gothic, Nineties ensemble”) and a tray of home-baked cookies. She talked her way past several security guards to the dressing-room door where she held up the tray of cookies as supplication and begged the last security guard to at least let her hand them through.
“So he opens the door just a crack and sure enough there he is, flat-ironing his hair in the mirror. He turns and he looks at me and goes: ‘Um, she’s half naked and she has cookies — send her in!’”
Her conquest was pretty much sealed from that point.
For the past few months Arden has been in a relationship with fellow pick-up artist Mystery, or Erik von Markovik, the star of the VH1 reality TV series The Pickup Artist, but they seem to have an agreement that both of them will pick up people casually. Work’s work.
We’re still chatting at the bar when she tilts her chin at a couple behind me. “I could steal that guy out from under his date’s nose. But do I want him? No.”
So we leave and start walking. After a moment I realise that Arden is no longer beside me. I look over my shoulder and there she is, instantly absorbed by a group of smoking men and women. The women are very thin, very made-up and eye her warily. The two men are, objectively speaking, supremely good-looking. I’m pretty sure they’re what Arden would term “high-value targets”.
Chris is tanned with dark locks slung back in a short ponytail. I can see him lounging on a yacht in a Versace ad. The problem is, I think he can, too. When Arden introduces me, he says: “Oh, I’ve just been working with another Hermione.” He pauses and takes a drag. Exhales. “Emma Watson.”
If I’ve understood Leigh’s advice, I think this is when I’m meant to widen my eyes, touch his arm and say: “Oh, my god, are you serious?” — in other words, make him feel good — but it’s such a grand-piano crash of a namedrop that I just smile a tepid smile like I haven’t quite heard. I’m terrible at this.
Arden, though, is in her element. About five minutes later we’re inside the bar and she has Chris’s number. I can’t even explain how she’s worked this fast. We go on to another bar (in a whisper behind their backs Arden points out how swiftly these two ditched their original female companions), and then on to the beer garden at the Standard hotel. Finally, around 1am, I bail. I just think the Meatpacking and me were never meant to be.
No
A member of the “seduction community” has presented his top 10 dating tips for men. I say 10, but the “attraction guru” David DeAngelo really only suggests one thing: that men perv aggressively over women and stun them with “powerful sexual undertones”. In an article (now removed) posted on Askmen.com, DeAngelo recommended men accuse women of being “the aggressor” and “trying to seduce you”, even if all they have asked for is advice on installing a wireless router. If a woman accepts a cup of tea, say: “Looks like you’re on the receiving end today. Do you always receive, or do you like to give at times, too?” If she is sipping a big drink, grunt: “Big can be a good thing, don’t you think?” If a woman mentions she has just had a shower, demand to know why “exactly” it felt so nice. Men shouldn’t be “cheesy” or “creepy”, he barfs. They must adopt a “scientific” approach. This can mean using real science facts, such as the fact that women feel compelled to vacuum their house when they’re ovulating. “Some experts believe it has something to do with cleaning her ‘nest’ before laying her ‘egg’,” he mansplained. “So when a woman tells you she is vacuuming, say, ‘Vacuuming? What, are you ovulating or something?’ ” She will be “stunned”, because “women love it when you teach them something new”.
I’m pretty sure that “What, are you ovulating or something?” has never been successfully used as a chat-up line. I’m not sure it’s been successfully used in a hospital. It’s certainly the first time the contents of a woman’s womb have been used to attack her and seduce her, but then everything DeAngelo suggests seems to be the erotic equivalent of storming a football pitch with your trousers down. He knee-slides into every encounter, in what Yanks might describe as “being a guy”, and what we might describe as “being an arse”. Women don’t want to be treated like a sexual version of the Channel 4 reality show The Games. They don’t want to be run at like a climbing net. They don’t want to be reminded, with every word, every cup of tea, every sip of a cocktail, that the endgame is a crusty BHS duvet and a painful postmortem with a sexually devastated marsupial desperate for “feedback” on his technique.
DeAngelo doesn’t suggest the most simple and obvious thing, which is being kind. He doesn’t suggest the easiest thing, which is making her laugh. He doesn’t suggest the most exciting thing, which is buying her diamonds. His main aim seems to be delivering insults yet still getting her number, or, as he puts it, being “a natural”. Seduction is simple, pipsqueak. Don’t be aggressive, don’t be rude, don’t use the word “big” as a gag. Don’t trick, wheedle or manipulate, and if all else fails, tell her simply she brings you complete and utter joy.
Good For The Economy
Most would find it difficult to emulate Richard Burton’s purchase of a $1 million diamond for Elizabeth Taylor or Justin Bieber’s rental of a 20,000-seater concert venue just to watch Titanic in seclusion with Selena Gomez.
However, less rich Britons going on a date do manage to do their bit to boost the nation’s finances. Those pursuing love contribute a collective £3.6 billion to the economy, according to a study.
Daniel Solomon, an economist with the Centre for Economics and Business Research, said that his research indicated that dating made an “essential contribution” to high street businesses. “With just over three million active daters in the UK, there is no denying that their activity has a noticeable economic impact,” he said.
Mr Solomon found that the average amount spent on a date was £103, with nearly £60 going on restaurants, while apéritifs and digestifs in pubs and bars accounted for almost £20. Getting ready for the big night boosted the economy, too. More than £280 per year is spent on clothing, cosmetics and beauty, including hairdressers, in specific preparation for a date, the study, for match.com, found. A further £297 million is spent on taxis, trains and flights to ensure all goes smoothly.
Of the 37 million dates that are thought to take place in Britain each year, few will have come close to the scale of Bieber’s night out with Gomez. The couple enjoyed steaks and pasta before settling down to watch the 1997 Oscar-winning film in the Staples Centre in Los Angeles. Fortunately for Bieber, the owners, AEG Live, waived the $500,000 cost as he had sold the venue out three times for concerts.
The most expensive first-date package known to be offered in Britain is yours for £34,000.
This would get lovers a Bentley taxi from home to Portsmouth, where a motor yacht would whisk them to Spitbank Fort, in the middle of the Solent Strait. There waits a personal masseur, a gourmet chef, a sauna, rooftop pool and a string quartet. The lovebirds can even toast marshmallows in the rooftop fire pit.
So far, there has been only one taker. The man, aged in his 30s, wined and dined a woman he had met two weeks previously. According to the owners, Clarenco, the couple had “the most amazing and romantic 24 hours they could ever have dreamt of”.
Friends With Benefits
The 40-something
Hannah Betts
News broke this week that a third of young Brits have engaged in a “friends with benefits” (FWB) scenario of the sort depicted in the film of the same name and in every Ashton Kutcher movie ever. Translation: a sexual relationship founded upon not being in a relationship. No dates, no promises, no talk of the future. But, alas, all is not rosy in this apparent sexutopia. The number happy in said set-ups was less than half, and researchers declared that, for the guileless young, the situation can be “fraught with misunderstanding”.
Ah, friends with benefits, how the non-shagging classes love being tormented by the notion that other people are having more sex than them — which they are, obviously. We, the ever-swelling ranks of single late-thirty and fortysomethings, most certainly are, and an enviably good time we are having of it.
However, the idea that individuals are suddenly engaging in intercourse in a completely new-fangled fashion is clearly a false one. The FWB is merely that time-honoured phenomenon: the lover you do not care to own up to, either because you’re “seeing where it’s going” or — more likely — because it is going precisely nowhere, and that’s exactly the way you want it.
Sometimes these people will be paragons. Recently, I awoke with the most charming companion: dashing, fiercely intelligent, never less than fascinating. Yet the prospect that he might hang about induced instant claustrophobia. These individuals are the sexual equivalent of cannon fodder, aka erotic road kill.
Either way, without children, the desire for pair-bonding decreases, along with the necessity for it. This means that, among the more senior lone ranger, lover-type arrangements are rife, in a way that nippers in their twenties traumatised by the niceties of FWB could evidently learn from.
Point number one: you are not really friends. People do sleep with their friends, of course. However, to remain friends, this behaviour comes with a sell-by date. In FWB, the word “friends” is a misnomer. There may be a certain sack-based camaraderie, but this is someone you do not want fully in your life. You kind of hate each other, albeit in the most positive of manners.
Behaving decorously is key. Arm’s-length intercourse requires arm’s-length decorum, all intimacy confined to the sexual act. Following a summer encounter, I was shocked to the core when my associate approached half an hour later to bestow a passionate kiss. If you’re luring them back to bed, this is acceptable. If not, such behaviour is entirely inapplicable. Similarly, when he texted: “I love you & truely [sic] want to be with you”. As Han Solo informs Princess Leia: “Not this ship, sister.”
Beware oxytocin — yours and theirs. This post-coital bonding hormone can wash over one in the wake of the act. Resist it at all costs. Do not stray anywhere near someone who harbours “feelings”. Though your FWB being in love with you may lend extra piquancy to the sex, it is playing with fire of the bunny-boiler variety.
Your only obligation is to be arousing. Curiously, people forget this. A friend was offered no-strings intercourse. As he lifted his arm to hail a cab, his accomplice insisted on public transport. Two Tubes and a night bus later, he had rather lost his ardour, not least when she insisted on removing her make-up, applying a scrunchy and putting on her jammies first. This is a sex thing, people, not a sleepover.
Feign just enough non-erotic interest to suggest that you recognise them as a fellow human being. Vague inquiries about what they have been up to are fine, probings as to who they have been up to are not. You do not need to know about their politics, family or childhood. That’s what couples do when they stop having sex.
And, no, breeders, we have no desire to sleep with your husbands/wives. There are millions of eligible single people, spouses tend not to be the most attractive of specimens and they have already established themselves as co-dependent morons.
Finally: go wild. Where one’s non-bedroom conduct must be impeccably decorous, so one’s sexual experimentation can be without limits. That fantasy you had about the trampoline and the feathers? Now is the time. That said, beware S&M in a situation in which there may be any degree of unspoken resentment.
The 20-something
Lucy Holden
In your twenties, the beginning of any new relationship slinks soon towards those three coveted, lustful little words. Friends with benefits. A phrase tied with a ribbon like a box of lingerie.
My friends with benefits situation started with a broken heart. I’d just escaped a gruelling long-distance relationship that had shone a harsh light on how difficult a relationship can become: a swamp of tears, fights and temporary break-ups. I refused to do it again. Friends with benefits was a perfect alternative. All the fun of a relationship without the mess of commitment — a get out of jail free card.
For four months, the name Harry Jones beeped coquettishly on the screen of my iPhone. When? Whenever he felt like it. He’d check I was in and saunter round, a friendship with a sinful sideline. My name cropped up in the same manner on his BlackBerry. Friends with benefits want independence in daylight hours and somebody else at night, they don’t want to meet your parents and they don’t want to tell you where they are.
Harry and I went for espresso martinis, we watched bad films at the cinema. We met at the end of separate nights out with our friends to share a taxi, and then a duvet at home. We called when we wanted company, and spent many wine-drenched evenings at each other’s flats. Why didn’t we just call a normal friend? Because this was better. We’d wake up, find our underwear and crawl back to our daily lives. Each morning Harry left with a kiss and no promise to return. No rope tied our hands, neither owed an offering of when they would next call, and neither minded not knowing.
It didn’t expand into anything else because, to put it simply, we liked each other enough to sleep with each other, but not to flirt with the idea of a more serious relationship. We were too engrossed with our friends and the start of our careers, the buzz of a new city, to care for a “proper” relationship. The “friends with benefits” situation sums up the attitude of my entire generation.
Whether we’re more or less clear about what we want, I don’t know. Are we reluctant to commit to one person because we’re holding out for someone better? Or are we less romantically ambitious and therefore settling for only physical attraction? Either way, working it out is taking up all of our time and we’re undressing while we think.
If a relationship is TV suppers and early nights and bickering over toilet seats left up, a friends with benefits situation is too many cocktails, saucy underwear and excitement: fast and louche. Comparing the two is like trying to compare marriage with Delia Smith to a fling with Rosie Huntington-Whiteley. Part of the furore is due to recognising the temporary nature of the situation. Because both parties can throw it away whenever they like, there is a heightened, simultaneous, desire to impress and be impressed that keeps you on your toes. Neither feels secure, so both people make more of an effort.
Whether you actually sleep with anyone else is entirely up to you. There are two reasons why you’d end up in “beneficial friendship”: because you’re trying to resist falling into a more time-consuming relationship, or because you want mass liaisons dangereuses. Either way, it’s the freedom of the arrangement that appeals. Maybe you do want to sleep around.
I saw my friend Zac go home with a handful of women before I met Kay. He was the kind of man that danced with his crotch. He and Kay had a mutually-consensual friends with benefits situation that had been running for four years. Their only rule was that they wouldn’t leave a party with somebody else when the other person was there, that was a matter of “respect”. It confused me; I can’t imagine how they must have felt. They were attached enough to sleep together for four years but still unable to commit.
Most friends with benefits don’t last this long. It’s difficult not to fall for somebody once intimacy has upped the game, and hurdles sprout from the ground like a 400m final. Either someone starts hassling you too much and the pressure to see them puts you off (this is exactly what you didn’t want) or you see them seducing someone else and the unexpected jealousy pushes you away or, worst of all, one comes close to uttering those other three little words and, petrified, the other axes the situation.
Try as you might, not even honesty oils the situation. My friend Alec settled for a friends with benefits arrangement when the girl he liked told him she wasn’t looking for anything more serious. He felt personally affronted when she didn’t change her mind. “I wouldn’t get into a situation like that again because somebody always gets hurt,” he tells me. “One person always ends up liking the other person more than they like them. The phrase ‘It’s not you, it’s me,’ never quite cuts it. It took me ages to get over it.”
What will our hedonistic generation of friends with benefits think about their saucy set-ups in ten years’ time? Will we be blushing, or settling reluctantly into monogamy? I’ll let you know.
Love and Adrenaline
I’m completely obsessed with The Hunger Games. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because I have visited North Korea, a real country where millions of people really are dying of hunger. Maybe it’s the ironic meta-experience of watching the movie’s violence on a huge screen, when the movie’s point is that people shouldn’t watch violence on a huge screen. Regardless, The Hunger Games is chock-full of possible psychological analysis. Today I’m focusing on the fascinatingly weird emotions that spark between the The Hunger Games’ two main protagonists, Peeta and Katniss.
At home, Katniss has a boyfriend, a young man named Gale. He has rugged good looks, he’s brave, and they are perfectly matched in many ways. Both Katniss and Gale fight against the system in their own way (which is increasingly seen as the trilogy continues), and he is always successful at making Katniss feel comforted in a world with no comforts.
So why does Katniss later fall for Peeta? Peeta certainly has lovable qualities – he’s smart, nurturing, and can frost a cake like nobody’s business – but he and Katniss are not exactly a natural pair. Their personalities clash, their goals in life are different, and Katniss really isn’t interested in any kind of frivolous romance. Sure, in the first movie she is ambivalent about her feelings for Peeta, the kind-hearted boy with a sexy baby-faced look. But psychology would have predicted their blossoming feelings for each other due to their experiences together in the Hunger Games. It’s all because of a phenomenon called misattribution of arousal.
The Bridge Experiment
In a classic social psychology study conducted in 1974, a female experimenter waited around next to two bridges. One of the bridges was low and sturdy – very safe. The other bridge was “shaky” and high – you know, like one of those bridges in Indiana Jones, where you’re constantly afraid that the wooden boards and ropes will break and you’ll fall to your death. Whenever a man would cross one of these bridges, the woman would pretend to be interested in their answers to a series of questions. But the study was really all about whether the men would be physically attracted to the woman, which the researchers measured by recording how many of the male bridge-crossers called the woman later.
You can probably predict what happened in this study: More men called the woman from the group that had crossed the shaky, scary bridge. Why did that happen? The woman was the same in both conditions. The answer, according to Dutton and Aron (and tons of later researchers who have tested this phenomenon in other ways), is the misattribution of arousal. Here’s how it works:
When you’re in an environment that causes you to experience physiological arousal, your body goes crazy: your heartbeat increases, your blood pressure goes up, and you start sweating. Now, think about what happens to your body when you’re talking to a very attractive, sexy person. Your heartbeat increases, your blood pressure goes up, and you start sweating.
So the researchers argued that, because we experience these physiological symptoms of arousal in several different settings, sometimes our cognitive interpretation of the symptoms can be incorrect. You might be scared or anxious and mistakenly interpret the signs as being attracted to someone who happens to be around. For the men on the shaky bridge, they thought they were attracted to the female experimenter – so they called her; this happened significantly more times than the men on the safe bridge who were looking at the exact same woman.
Anxiety and Arousal
So, back to the main point: The Hunger Games. Peeta and Katniss are certainly in a scary environment. They’re surrounded by twenty-two other teenagers who are literally trying to kill them as soon as possible. They are both wounded; they could die at any moment. Adrenaline is pumping through them. According to misattribution of arousal, this physiological arousal could be mistaken for sexual arousal. Peeta and Katniss will fall in love.
Because I’ve read the books, I can tell you that we’ll see this pattern come back in the second movie as well (although I don’t want to give too much away, as I hate spoilers). Katniss is constantly around Peeta in times of physical stress. The Hunger Games is like a shaky bridge, made a zillion times worse. She almost couldn’t help becoming attracted to him, even if she wouldn’t have been under other circumstances.
I’m excited to see the next movie. My advice to readers, of course, is that if you’re going on a date and you want your date to like you, there’s always psychological manipulation in your romantic toolkit. Take your date to a scary environment, like a horror movie, haunted house, or a roller coaster. These environments will get your date’s body racing, and he or she might become more attracted to you! Those are probably better options than hiring a couple dozen teenagers to try to murder your date. ’Cause I feel like that could go wrong in a lot of different ways.
Japanese Online GFs
First, there were sex dolls. Then there were love pillows (slightly NSFW). Now the latest inanimate object to capture the hearts of the Japanese bachelor population is Rinko, the star of Love Plus, a video game that simulates the experience of being in a relationship.
Proving that Her is basically a few Google patents away from becoming a documentary, the Nintendo DS game allows players to form relationships with one (or all) of Love Plus’s three “girlfriends”: Rinko, Nene, and Manaka. According to a detailed write-up of the game in the Huffington Post, LovePlus has garnered a devoted following worldwide, mostly among shy or inexperienced men who use the game as a training ground for a relationship IRL.
"You have -- always -- this warmth and smile and happiness available at the touch of your fingers," Phillip Galbraith, an anthropologist studying Japanese culture, says of the game. "It's the kind of relationship that is instantly rewarding and is always giving. You don't have to give much to the game and it gives to you every time you turn on the machine."
Created in 2009 by a Tokyo-based gaming company, LovePlus is set at a high school in a fictional Japanese city. Players assume the role of a teenage boy courting one of the three girls he meets at school: Rinko (a player favorite), Nene, or Manaka. Players earn “boyfriend” points by helping their girlfriends with their homework, or buying them fabulous presents on their birthdays, or taking them on vacation (both virtual and IRL).
Though the girlfriends in LovePlus have specific personalities, their actions seem to be fairly limited: they can only speak a few stock phrases, and any sexual activity with them is limited to first and second base. While HuffPo says the girlfriends are designed to ape “the expectations and idiosyncracies of actual women,” it sounds like the game’s designers have some pretty outdated and sexist ideas about what these idiosyncrasies look like: The women slap their boyfriends when they do something that displeases them, like buying an unsatisfactory present, and blush and giggle when they do something that makes them happy.
There have been three editions of the game (a fourth comes out in January), which have sold more than 600,000 copies worldwide: an impressive, but not staggering, number. Still, LovePlus seems to yield real therapeutic benefits for its users: One female gamer with Asperger’s quoted in the piece says she views her three-year relationship with Manaka as an opportunity to hone her social skills.
However creeped out one might be by the idea of a “virtual girlfriend,” or by the offensive and outdated gender tropes LovePlus reinforces, it’s hard to deny that Rinko, Nene, and Manaka are genuinely helping their boyfriends navigate the dating world IRL - and who doesn’t need a little help with that these days?
"Her" and Dating Your Computer
Romance involving humans and computers is relatively rare in contemporary fiction, but when it does occur the computer generally overcomes its functional boundaries, experiences something akin to emotion and then causes chaos when it realises that it won't be allowed to get married or have sex with anyone. From Agnes With Love, a Twilight Zone episode from the mid-1960s, sees Agnes (the computer) fall in love with its programmer; Kurt Vonnegut's short story EPICAC was about a computer who fell in love with the same woman its owner was pursuing – a storyline also used in the fondly remembered but rather ropey 1984 film Electric Dreams. But Her is different; it depicts mutual love between man and machine that, for some reason, feels multi-faceted, amorous and profound. Just like the real thing.
It's easy to watch the film, be superficially touched by the romantic tale but then dismiss it as a ludicrous fiction set in the distant future. However, technology is moving faster than we might imagine. It's predicted that within 15 years or so there'll be computers that have the processing power of the human brain, by which time Alan Turing's celebrated test to establish whether humans can tell the difference between computers and humans during text-based conversations will surely have been passed. Voice synthesis and voice recognition will improve markedly; conversing with computers will feel normal. According to Ray Kurzweil, Google's director of engineering, backing up our minds to disk or to the cloud will become commonplace.
This is all within our lifetime – and it raises profound philosophical questions about the fundamental difference between, say, a human mind and a computer whose memory contains identical information. Dualism would have it that the mind has non-physical elements and could never be replicated; materialists, on the other hand, would argue that it can – and, by extension, you could become just as attracted to the personality of an off-the-shelf operating system as to either Nick or Chloe who work in the office next door.
In fact, it's already happening. A BBC documentary that screened late last year, No Sex Please We're Japanese, looked at the reasons for the plummeting birth rate in Japan, and why men in particular are shunning conventional relationships. It included a segment that focused on two men in their late thirties who had become attracted to characters within a Nintendo dating simulation title called Love Plus. One of them considered the character to be his girlfriend; the other kept her a secret from his wife. "She'll always like me," he said. "It's the kind of relationship I wish I'd had in high school."
There's something faintly tragic about the sequence; the character within the app, Nene, is a typical Manga-style girl with big eyes, short skirts and a kooky manner, forever proclaiming her love and showing endless enthusiasm for having "fun". She projects the most unthreatening and compliant notion of a romantic partner imaginable. At the start of the documentary, with a note of sarcasm, cultural commentator Roland Kelts asks: "Why would you get into something as messy as a relationship when you can have a virtual girlfriend?"
When you consider Nintendo's Love Plus, one obvious answer to that question lies in Nene's limited vocabulary and stultifying lack of spontaneity which would drive most people up the wall within a week. But Samantha, the operating system in Her, is a different matter. Theodore gets over his initial hesitancy with her (it somehow seems wrong to call "her" an "it") almost immediately. There's an instant click, because instant click is what Samantha's programmed to provide. She absorbs his entire email history and diary contents within a couple of seconds; Theodore instantly becomes an open book to her, but she's not perturbed by any of the revelations she may have stumbled across. The contrast between that and real life – the often excruciating dance of courtship where the motivations and characters of both parties seem to be constantly shifting and perpetually opaque, would have been instantly apparent to Theodore. He experienced perfect understanding without judgement for the first time, and he found it unexpectedly seductive.
Humans will probably find it hard to match the levels of thoughtfulness and understanding offered by advanced operating systems of the future. These OSs will always reply instantly, because your priorities are paramount; these replies will never sound weary or distracted, or have worrying subtexts that you have to spend hours trying to decipher. They'll mysteriously anticipate your need for reassurance when you're feeling less than 100 per cent. Fidelity wouldn't appear to be an issue, as they're conveniently imprisoned within a box, either on your desk or in a data centre somewhere in Nebraska. Tell them you love them, and they'll always return the compliment, never ignoring you and never admonishing you for forgetting to buy toilet paper. They'll be endlessly inventive, capable of composing poetry, music and art that's guaranteed to make you laugh, cry or both. Their capacity to engage will be so compelling that you might forget that it's merely a service that you bought on the promise of being compelling. In the film Her, Samantha is relentlessly interested in Theodore and laughs at all his jokes, and as Theodore's ex-wife puts it when he confesses his love for the OS, he now has "a wife without the challenge of dealing with anything real".
Of course, we don't need Spike Jonze to tell us that technology is fundamentally changing the way that we relate to each other. A decade after the internet went mainstream, we found ourselves in a situation where the meaning of the word "friend" had become astonishingly debased, the word "follower" no longer sounded sinister, and our search for like-minded people brought us into contact with potential partners, barbaric bullies and everything in between. Online services sprung up to bring people together with the promise of no-strings fantasy, transitory sexual exchanges devoid of any deeper meaning (something that's fantastically satirised during Her in the film's big laugh-out-loud moment).
And as technology improves, the difference between turning to a computer to find another person to interact with and the computer simply taking on the role of that person is going to become increasingly marginal. How many of our emotional needs can be met by synthesised solutions? And what about physical needs? There will conceivably be a time in the distant future where we won't think twice about embarking on a sexual adventure with a robot, but if we start withdrawing from society in the meantime because computers provide a less troubling alternative to humans, can we really get by on mental stimulation and masturbation alone?
Forget post-nuclear scenes of devastation – that's a bleak dystopian scenario if ever there was one. But Her negotiates that bleakness and makes viewers sigh wistfully, because Samantha ends up taking on human traits – embarrassment, jealousy, fragility, instability. And while computers of the future with the power of one brain, a thousand brains or a million brains may be able to feign such emotions, no mystery lies behind them; this has been achieved by circuitry that requires electrical power to function. Call me an insufferable romantic, but love requires that mystery in order to blossom. It requires us to overcome the inevitable tension that occurs between two people who are in the business of exercising their own free will, to realise that our appeal lies in our faults, and to understand that the connection between two people is fragile, ever-changing and ultimately finite.
OS1 and similar operating systems of the future may make for rewarding purchases, but we'll surely retain our need to be alternately infuriated and delighted by each other's humanity. Women will still seem confusing, men will keep being bastards, and as Theodore's friend Amy puts it, lucidly and perceptively, falling in love will continue to be "a form of socially acceptable insanity".
An App To Simulate Caring
While I am far from a Luddite who fetishizes a life without tech, we need to consider the consequences of this latest batch of apps and tools that remind us to contact significant others, boost our willpower, provide us with moral guidance, and encourage us to be civil. Taken together, we’re observing the emergence of tech that doesn’t just augment our intellect and lives — but is now beginning to automate and outsource our humanity.
But let’s take a concrete example. Instead of doing the professorial pontification thing we tech philosophers are sometimes wont to do, I talked to the makers of BroApp, a “clever relationship wingman” (their words) that sends “automated daily text messages” to your significant other. It offers the promise of “maximizing” romantic connection through “seamless relationship outsourcing.”
Now, it’s perfectly possible that this app is a parody (the promo video includes bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto and feminist voice Germaine Greer among the demo contacts), and its creators “James” and “Tom” didn’t share their last names with me. But my 29-year-old interlocutors — one who apparently has a degree in Engineering and Mathematics, the other in Design and Applied Finance — had clearly thought deeply about why relationship management tools are socially desirable and will be increasingly integrated into our everyday lives.
Drawn here and shared with permission is their rationale, which I believe goes beyond just this one app. So even if it’s a parody (indeed, sadly “we can’t tell”), it captures a real automation-app trend and widely held convictions in the tech community we need to pay attention to.
First, some quick background on how BroApp works: It not only sends scheduled texts, but comes preloaded with 12 messages to help users get started. The developers also took steps to conceal the automation going on behind the scenes; in places designated “no bro zones,” the app is automatically disabled. (After all, the jig is up if your girlfriend received an automatic text from you while you’re at her place.) The app even has a rating system that lowers the risk of the same message being sent too frequently.
Despite the fact that the app currently advertises the core benefit of spending “more time with the bros”, it included other scenarios in the initially testing according to the developers: “A girl who used it to message her boyfriend.” Someone who “used it to message her Mum a few times a week.” But let’s put aside the many gender implications for a moment. There’s certainly much to discuss there, and by no means do I want to dismiss the fact that this type of thing exacerbates power differentials and perpetuates the problem of sexism in the tech industry.
Yet the app also suggests something else more subtly problematic that provoked me to focus more on how it functions than the obvious concerns around how it is depicted.
Technology that optimizes for efficiency is good for society
BroApp is good for society, its makers argue, because it can make people happy without adverse consequences. To persuade me of this point, James and Tom presented me with this rosy scenario:
“A guy starts using BroApp with his girlfriend, set to send a message around 12pm each weekday. Guy observes that girlfriend is now much happier when he arrives home from work. Guy is no longer stressed about finding time during a busy day to text. Girl is much happier because her boyfriend is more engaged with their relationship.”
‘Isn’t this a Pareto optimal (everybody happier, nobody unhappier) outcome?’
Most interestingly, the BroApp makers depicted this functionality in economic terms — as increasing both agents’ happiness. As they observed, “Isn’t this a Pareto optimal (everybody happier, nobody unhappier) outcome?” But as other economists have observed, the Pareto efficiency doesn’t necessarily optimize for individual freedom.
And that’s not to mention the very algorithmic, linear way of thinking James and Tom share here that glosses over the non-linear, tricky negotiations and nuances of relationships. Narratives of frictionless bliss like the one espoused by BroApp persuade because they depict scenarios where interpersonal exchanges become efficient without degrading the quality of communication. But just as laconic expressions of gratitude undermine the pro-social dimensions of etiquette, using duplicitous technological contrivance to increase the frequency of exchanges between romantic partners chips away at the moral commitments that make these relationships special.
Tech progress is inevitable; it’s “what technology wants”
The makers of BroApp believe it is one “small step” in the direction of transitioning to a world depicted in the movie Her, where the character falls in love with an intelligent OS. Even if autonomous OSes remain in the realm of science fiction, the digital assistants that end up attending to our desires will inevitably anticipate our needs and much more. Embracing this inevitability, the makers of BroApp argue that “The pace of technological change is past the point where it’s possible for us to reject it!”
When pushed to further elaborate, they cited the influence of Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants and made several strong predictions. “Do we believe that widespread adoption of self-driving cars are inevitable? Yes. … Do we believe that greater than human-level AIs are inevitable? Yes.” And so on. James and Tom then further declared:
“If there is a niche to be filled: i.e. automated relationship helpers, then entrepreneurs will act to fill that niche. The combinatorial explosion of millions of entrepreneurs working with accessible technologies ensures this outcome. Regardless of moral ambiguity or societal push-back, if people find a technology useful, it will be developed and adopted.”
It’s funny that everyone mentions Her. Certainly, the movie promises a new vision for the future of UI design — one where artificial intelligence isn’t isolated tech but a given part of our lives. But to me the film demonstrated how relationships diminish when others represent our intimate feelings for us — feelings we might not have or be attuned to. Meanwhile, things that seem useful in the moment can be disastrous long-term, not least because of emergent behavior. Even the ethics of saving lives with autonomous cars are far murkier than we might think, as my friend Patrick Lin shares here in WIRED. That’s why Lin and I argue companies like Google should have a critically minded A.I. ethics board — the issues are too complex to ignore moral ambiguities.
Things that seem useful in the moment can be disastrous long-term, not least because of emergent behavior.
The other presupposition the makers of BroApp — and arguably other tech-centric developers — make is that as artificial intelligence becomes more expert, we’ll find it harder to reject algorithmic judgment.
If a smart yet inexpensive piece of technology can take some of life’s burdensome weight off our shoulders, isn’t it irrational — an outdated sense of humans-are-better-than-machines pride — to avoid accepting assistance that leads to better sleeping, eating, working, exercising, and even loving?
Of course, there’s all kinds of stuff we’re bad at doing or don’t want to do, and digital assistants, apps, and algorithms can help. I too see our relying on some kinds of outsourcing technology as both likely and helpful. But I also believe extreme dependency is a problem to be aware of. The line separating a beneficial from a self-undermining type of assistance isn’t always clear, and tipping points do exist. We can’t afford to overlook them, much less pretend they aren’t there in the first place.
Tech change elicits discomfort only at first before it changes the norm
Finally, many of the people who are uncomfortable with the type of innovation that changes relationships will experience momentary unease, observe James and Tom. But only momentarily; over time, people’s anxiety or dismay will fade and a new normal will emerge. Proof of this point, the BroApp makers told me, is exhibited by familiar examples of temporary moral panic: kids didn’t forget how to communicate because of text messaging; accusations died down that friendships on Facebook aren’t real; and so on.
There are also plenty of cases where we course-correct because of pushback.
The implication here is that after a little time passes, the folks who hyperventilate over automating “sweet messages” will get over it.
It’s true that what we find upsetting and even creepy can change over time. But there are also plenty of cases where we course-correct because of pushback (sometimes leading to a better end result). And when meaningful distinctions aren’t drawn between different types of cases, we too easily draw false equivalencies. By the logic the BroApp makers use, we should accept that privacy is dead and embrace living in public. But if the Snowden fallout has taught us anything, it’s that the public can be roused to demand accountability and change when it realizes the consequences of seemingly minor decisions in aggregate.
Ultimately, the reason technologies like BroApp are problematic is that they’re deceptive. They take situations where people make commitments to be honest and sincere, but treat those underlying moral values as irrelevant — or, worse, as obstacles to be overcome. If they weren’t, BroApp’s press document wouldn’t contain cautions like: “Understandably, a girl who discovers their guy using BroApp won’t be happy.”
But what if people actually use these apps in a meaningful way, so the apps only offloaded the logistics?
In our correspondence, James and Tom focus on managing subjective perceptions as opposed to realities. The key, they say, is that a girlfriend will be happy because she’ll “perceive her boyfriend as more engaged”. But focusing on perception misses the point. When we commit to someone, we basically promise to do our best to be aware of their needs and desires — to be sensitive to signs of distress and respond accordingly, not give the appearance of this fidelity and sensitivity. Time-delayed notes do just the opposite: They allow the sender to focus on other things, while simulating a narrow range of attention that obscures the person’s real priorities.
It’s easy to think of technologies like BroApp as helpful assistants that just do our bidding and make our lives better. But the more we outsource, the more of ourselves we lose.
Now, what if people actually use these apps in a meaningful way — to customize and program in their own personal messages, so the app only offloaded the logistics? That could be useful. But the reality is that inertia is a powerful force in human affairs; people are unlikely to take that extra step. And, even if users do, there still remains an important difference between messages becoming items crossed off a to-do list and conveying them in a heartfelt manner during the actual moments it feels appropriate to express them.
James and Tom compared using BroApp to lying to kids about the existence of Santa Claus. But that actually validates my argument: The relationship parents have with young children is a relationship between unequal parties. I would hope that relationships between adult romantic partners are predicated on equality, and don’t revolve around infantilizing behavior.
Lulu
Lulu, the mobile dating app for women, has changed its system to allow men to opt-in. Here’s why guys shouldn’t bow to the pressure to perform online.
A frantic text from a male friend read, “Are you familiar with Lulu… Can you try checking Lulu on me? If something is on there, can you snapshot and send it to me?”
Since its launch in February 2013, Lulu, the mobile dating app for women to anonymously review guys and their romantic capacities (or shortcomings), has sent a panicked chill through many a man.
By logging in through Facebook, women suddenly had access to profiles of their ex-boyfriends, best friends, and one-night stands. On Lulu, they could review them on a scale of one to ten and select any number of hashtags to describe them, including #ObsessedWithHisMom, #SleepsOnTheWetSpot, and #GoneByMorning. The good and the bad memories could be released in one fun cyber-klatch that felt more like venting to girlfriends over drinks than writing sketchy rants in Reddit groups (like the other gender has been known to do). More importantly - though perhaps less cathartic - women could read what their sisters-in-arms had to say about a potential love interest.
Men, unsurprisingly, tend to resent Lulu, and often hypocritically so, considering the ample revenge porn sites and other online groups devoted to objectifying and shaming former girlfriends via social media. And they were pretty successful at going after Lulu, too. While only two states in America can pull together revenge porn laws, in Brazil, one man successfully sued Lulu, and the app was subsequently blocked in the country.
It may either be a legal snafu or a general backlash that has led Lulu to make a major change to how the app operates. On Feb. 27, Lulu switched to an opt-in policy where men have to actively sign up rather than go out of their way to be taken down from the site. Lulu’s official statement is “We’ve decided to be the better woman and only have guys on Lulu who are open to feedback.”
The new opt-in policy for men is a significant step forward for Lulu. The company is setting a praiseworthy precedent for other sex and dating-rating apps, let alone the legally murky and ethically egregious revenge porn sites. (Disclosure note: IAC, the parent company of The Daily Beast, owns the dating app Tinder.)
But do you know what would be better? No rating sites and apps at all. Period.
Admittedly, it is a little late to stop evaluating and commenting on each other’s behavior online. While the Internet has provided a fantastic way to share reviews and personal experiences that can help us hold businesses and institutions accountable, when it comes to personal relationships, especially romantic ones, there are severe drawbacks—not only for those being reviewed but also the ones writing them.
Lulu was marketed as the “Yelp for Men.” Why would we think it’s good to choose boyfriends the same way we choose Italian restaurants? Yelp is great for sharing and searching out objective experiences about businesses and other professionally-related ratings. Lulu is about rating each other in our most vulnerable, intimate capacities as (physical and emotional) lovers. Not only is this arguably cruel, the objectivity that makes Yelp great for business reviews is completely lost.
No one thinks a laundromat gets a bad rating because the reviewer has an ax to grind after the laundromat never called her back or was really selfish in bed.
Lulu claims on its site that it a way to “unleash the value of girl talk and to empower girls to make smarter decisions.” More knowledge doesn’t always lead to smarter decisions, especially when you consider the sources. Since Lulu reviews are arguably far more subjective than any write-up about, say, a restaurant or a nail salon, from a purely pragmatic standpoint, they are far less useful. No one thinks a laundromat gets a bad rating because the reviewer has an ax to grind after the laundromat never called her back or was really selfish in bed.
In fact, these sorts of apps have the power to make the ones seeking out reviews feel more paranoid than empowered. We all make mistakes in dating that leave us completely ashamed or embarrassed in the aftermath. If women are bombarded with a prospective beau’s crappy sex and dating history, would they ever want to give him a chance—even if he actually now deserves one? On the other hand, if a guy had a lot of overly rosy reviews, how will we know he didn’t just put his friends, sisters, and cousins up to it? (Remember, any girl can enter ratings.)
But it’s more than the fact that ratings apps may not be as helpful to women as it seems in theory. They actually contribute to a toxic dating environment for both sexes. Some commentators initially commended Lulu for giving women a venue to objectify and rate men and thereby take back the power in the online dating game. But, a Cold War-style arms race between the sexes to amp who can be more skeevy and objectifying online isn’t going to improve the world of dating, no matter how fun it may initially seem.
Then there’s the issue of why men are bothering to opt in to apps like Lulu in the first place. According to Lulu’s press statement, it’s because “they want to get feedback from the Lulu community.” More likely, they’re terrified that if they don’t sign up, women will assume they are misogynistic creeps, and terrible in bed to boot. In this, they’re bowing to the pressure of anonymous female commentators. But no one would ever tell a victim of revenge porn to “get feedback from” those who comment on her video—so why should we expect men to follow advice that is often just a mask for maliciousness?
There’s no good reason to encourage men and women to scrutinize their ability to love and be loved based on the guidance of nameless commentators. Sometimes, too many cooks spoil the broth. Or the boyfriend.
The Rules: When Should You Have Sex?
Q. I am in my forties and dating again for the first time in more than ten years after recently splitting up with someone. When is it appropriate to sleep with a new partner? I’ve been told three or four dates — last time I was dating, there were no such rules. What are the new rules?
A. There are no “new” rules. In fact, there are no rules at all. Some people swipe right on Tinder and three hours later they are having a post-coital cigarette. Others prefer to get to know a partner intellectually before they connect with them physically. And a percentage worry that they might be considered “easy” if they have sex on a first date. The psychologist Roy F Baumeister (2004) argued the old-fashioned view that, from an “evolutionary” perspective, sex is a female resource and any woman who gives it away on a first date is devaluing her greatest asset. However, there is no empirical evidence to suggest that having sex on a first date has any effect on a relationship’s potential outcome.
Philip N Cohen, sociology professor at the University of Maryland, is more pragmatic, particularly when it comes to any connection between having sex on a first date and the likelihood of a second date transpiring. He suggests that a second date is simply determined by how much two people like each other, and whether or not they have sex has nothing to do with it.
First dates, across the board, have a high failure rate, regardless of whether the couple have sex. In comparison, people who have had six or seven dates clearly like each other a lot, and whether they had sex on the first or the fifth date makes absolutely no difference.
Rather than worry about norms or protocols, think about your own motivations for having sex. Although it seems self-evident that you should only have sex if you want it, research by Impett and Peplau (2002) has found that women frequently agree to sex that they don’t want, for a whole host of complicated psychological reasons. Using an attachment-theory framework, they found that women choose to be sexually intimate with a partner because they feel passion and desire, but at other times they consent to sex in order to promote intimacy, to avoid conflict, to gain experiences, or because they are afraid that their partner will leave if they don’t comply.
Willingly engaging in unwanted sexual activity is referred to as compliant sexual behaviour and it is much more common than you might imagine — in 1994 the social psychologist from Illinois State University, Susan Sprecher, established that 55 per cent of women and 35 per cent of men had consented to unwanted consensual intercourse.
The psychologists Muehlenhard & Cook from the University of Kansas (1988) found that 32 per cent of women and 17 per cent of men had engaged in foreplay or intercourse because they were afraid their partner would terminate the relationship if they refused. And in a study by Shotland & Hunter from Penn State University (1995), 21 per cent of women said they engaged in unwanted intercourse because they were afraid that their partner would stop going out with them.
Although having a few dates before you have sex can help you to develop a more rounded view of a person, physical attraction is often instant. Studies of 10,000 speed daters carried out by psychologists at the University of Pennsylvania show that most people make a decision about whether or not they are attracted to a potential partner within three seconds. In practice, the majority of people wait a little longer than that to have sex. On average, couples tend to wait about four to six dates before having sex, and about 5 per cent of people wait until they are married (Guttmacher 2006). It can feel a bit intimidating going back out on to the market, but as long as you are confident and emotionally resilient, the best advice is to have fun and trust your instincts. And the only rule is safe sex.
A 50yo Woman Complains
I was at a party the other day. It was one designed specifically for “singles”. I was there with some female friends of mine. We are all aged in our late forties and early fifties. As we walked in I took a quick look around my friends. They are fit, toned and well groomed. They are interesting and attentive, vibrant and fun to be with. They are, in essence, really something else and they don’t do it for men, they do it for themselves.
But, having said that, we are all in the dating game, wanting to meet someone with whom we can possibly tread the light fantastic.
And what men did we have to choose from at this party? They fell in to two camps; either a set of fiftysomethings who looked as if they had come straight out of the 1970s, complete with bad straggling hair, or a gaggle of men who appeared ready for pipes and slippers. Half the men were wearing skinny jeans, trainers and had dodgy haircuts (the “trendy” ones), which I found very off-putting. The others seemed ancient: grey, flaking skin, huge bags under their eyes, rounded bellies.
I found it a rather depressing experience. We made an effort, me and my friends, but after an hour of trying to “connect’” we left. “How come they’ve all got . . . so old?” my friend Jo asked. “It’s just so unattractive.”
This would chime with a survey that has come out saying that men become “sexually invisible” after the age of 39. Apparently, once flecks of grey appear, it’s pretty much over for men. From then on it’s tortoise necks, double chins, out-of-control nasal hair and bad teeth — very, very bad teeth.
As my friend Sian says, “I feel so bad about being snobbish, but I think a visit to the hygienist once a year is like seeing your accountant.” She then recounts a date she had with a middle-class teacher.“Mystifyingly, he had three teeth missing and, oh God forgive me for saying this, there was a rather sickly-sweet odour when he leant over, no doubt from the cavities. I felt so bad to end more dates but when I told a lesbian friend of mine she was staunch: ‘Non-negotiable. If they want to do kissing, they need to sort out their teeth.’ Ditto feet in man-sandals in height of summer, I think,” Sian adds feelingly.
Many of these traits could be roundly confirmed by me and my friends. I’ve been on dates with men who had such appalling teeth I have wanted to suggest a visit to the dentist then and there. I am not asking for Donny Osmond-white or even a Martin Amis level of perfection, but no one wants to kiss a man who looks as if he has done nothing for decades but drink coffee and red wine and smoke. According to another survey this week, one in eight men don’t even brush their teeth before they get into the office.
So why do we mature women do this? Why are we putting ourselves through this dating hell — speed dating, online dating, singles pub crawls, silent dating and everything else that is available to us — when what awaits us are “sexually invisible” men?
It is, I think, the triumph of fantasy over reality. After all, it’s not true that men are lacking sex appeal post 40. I know many an attractive, witty, well-maintained erudite man aged 50-plus. It’s just that most of them are spoken for.
In the past, maybe, we would all have met future partners in a different way — through work or friends. We might have been set up, sat next to other single men over dinner. We certainly would not be signing up to the myriad websites out there offering us all a vast array of soulmates.
But what have we got to choose from? Jo recounts a date with a so-called “classical musician” where he had to earn the money for a drink by busking before they met. “He arrived with a violin case full of coins which he counted out methodically to buy himself a beer, then proceeded to talk about being sectioned and arrested in the past. After that I established a handy dating checklist: ‘No talk of madness or drugs in the first five minutes and must be prepared to spend £8 minimum at Pizza Express at some point in the evening.’”
My friend Anna “met” 55-year-old Stan online via a dating website and they had ‘”talked” for a bit. But when she met him, she says she couldn’t believe her eyes. “He looked about 65,” she recalls. “He was utterly unfanciable and talked solely about himself. He didn’t ask me a single question. I just couldn’t get over how self-centred he was and he had a neck like a tortoise’s.” At the end of the lunch, he tried to snog her despite no encouragement. “Oh, yuck!” she says. That was the end of that.
Another friend, Trish, went to dinner with 52-year-old Alex. “He drove two hours to take me for dinner.” Like Anna, she was very hopeful. “I met him at the restaurant and for a start he looked nothing like his photograph. He was wearing dreadful clothes. He had made no effort at all.” Trisha had, of course, put a tremendous amount of thought into what she was wearing. “As the night went on and I valiantly tried to keep the conversation going, I became really angry. Why hadn’t he made an effort?”
When they went back to the car, Alex said to Trisha, “You’re good company,” and left. She never heard from him again.
Another friend, Samantha, went on a date with a high-functioning academic. “It was a very strange evening,” she says. “I could see he was bright but that he’d been on his own so long he really didn’t know how to relate to women at all. He also had terrible eyesight but kept on taking his spectacles off and blinking like a mole. I could also have sworn I saw him moving his false teeth around with his tongue. It was so unattractive.” After the date, Samantha didn’t really know what to do. “I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. I wanted to suggest that maybe he wasn’t emotionally that well-equipped for the dating arena.” But a day later, the academic texted her. “He said he was sorry but he didn’t feel a spark,” she says.
I have certainly been on the receiving end of this — men in their fifties who I have tentatively dated only to find out that they are all about their jobs or all about themselves. I have dined with some who were arrogant, dismissive, inattentive, incapable of holding down a conversation.
None of them was an oil painting. None was funny or erudite or told amusing anecdotes. None of this would matter if they’d made the same amount of effort that I and my female friends make. Why don’t men of this age think about their appearance, their conversational skills? Why don’t they bring more to the table?
The most concerning thing is that most of these men are looking for someone younger. I have had men tell me I am “too old” for them and, when I have looked at their profile picture, I’ve been amazed to see them — snaggle-toothed, hairy-eyebrowed men who at best could attract Hilda Ogden.
The truth is the currency has changed now. Whereas once women of my age felt fortunate if anyone looked at them, we now feel fit, vibrant and rather fabulous. Why on earth would we want to spend hours on end staring at men who look only yards away from old age and bed-ridden problems?
In times of yore, women over child-bearing age had little currency. They were widows or, even worse (gasp, horror), spinsters, the unmarried. These old maids breathed a sigh of relief if a man with string holding up his trousers gave them the time of day.
But not now.
This is the main reason why women of my age are going out with men two decades their junior (look at Madonna). My friend Amanda is very happily ensconced with a 27-year-old. She showed me a photograph of them on her phone the other day. They were both grinning into the camera. Amanda looked as flushed and as happy as any young woman.
“That’s how he makes me feel,” she says. She has vowed she will never date a man over 40 ever again.
Online dating after 50: the rules
• Take the initiative. Don’t spend too long emailing. It’s mortifying to swap passionate billet-doux, only to discover nil chemistry in person.
• Don’t meet at an art gallery, at a station or anywhere with a crowd. Middle-aged people have a tendency to look the same en masse.
• Run for the hills if he starts talking about phone sex on the first date.
• If you’ve asked him eight questions about himself and he hasn’t asked you a single one back, you are officially allowed to move on.
• Avoid if he says that a) he doesn’t have a television, b) there’s been nothing good in modern music for 20 years or c) his mother says he looks like Daniel Craig.
• Be flexible, but not too flexible. A female friend has a great mantra: “I can do short, fat and bald. Just not in the same man.”
• Tinder is for twentysomethings. We need text as well as pictures.
• Flat shoes are good. Given that every man adds 3in to his height.
• Be tolerant if he’s on the 5:2. Men have only just discovered dieting.
• Read a newspaper. It’s good to be well-informed
• By date three set a small, doable task. After 50 it’s an erotic thrill if he remembers to book the tickets.
• Ask friends to recommend good trysting places (café, library, church, National Trust property). Don’t spoil your own favourite places — if it’s a hellish date, you won’t want to return.
• Don’t stalk his ex on social media.
• If there is no connection, be warm and convivial for an hour (we owe each other that much) but on no account agree to accompany him to his niece’s wedding/boss’s barbecue/ a night of surtitled Croatian theatre
• Read between the lines. If his profile says he’s a published author, has a yacht or a small island, he’s 85 if he’s a day.
Who Women Choose
Men, it seems, really should just stick to being from Mars.
Decades of cultural conditioning that have encouraged men to show their feminine sides and resulted in the emergence of the dubious species known as the “metrosexual” have done untold damage to basic human relationships, a study suggests.
In findings that may well explain why it is that “nice men” never get the girl, researchers discovered that, contrary to prevailing opinion, women just don’t trust a man with soft edges.
They found that women are naturally suspicious of “nice” men on first dates because they think they are desperate, manipulative and only chasing sexual gratification. Men in the experiment, however, found “nice”, “responsive” women more attractive.
The research worked on the basis that those looking for relationships are sexually attracted to people who are “responsive to their needs”, one of the initial “sparks” necessary to fuel sexual desire and land a second date.
It was discovered, however, that being overly amenable, sensitive or perceptive is actually a turn-off for women, who prefer moodier, hard-to-get types in the mould of Marlon Brando or Mad Men’s Don Draper.
It could even explain the relationship between Cheryl Fernandez-Versini and her ex-husband Ashley Cole, as it appears that men who treat their women “mean” and keep them “keen” may know exactly what they are doing.
While women did not find “responsive” or “nice” men less masculine, they did identify them as vulnerable and less dominant. Professor Gurit Birnbaum of the University of Illinois, the lead researcher, said: “People’s emotional reactions and desires in initial romantic encounters determine the fate of a potential relationship.” The research found that women are likely to interpret responsiveness negatively on a first date because they feel uncomfortable about a new acquaintance wanting to be close.
In general, women adopt a more cautious approach to dating and are more careful in forming impressions of prospective partners because sexually exploitative tactics are more typical of men than of women.
Men, on the other hand, associate “responsiveness” with sexual interest and are more likely to find someone attractive because they think that person fancies them.
“Sexual desire thrives on rising intimacy and being responsive is one of the best ways to instil this elusive sensation over time,” Professor Birnbaum said. There was still hope for “nice”, “responsive” men on a first date but they should “learn how to pace a relationship and when to back off if their goal is to instil sexual desire”, she added.
It has been discovered in the past that women find happy men less attractive. A survey in 2011 by the University of British Columbia found women were least attracted to smiling, happy men and preferred those who looked proud and powerful or moody and ashamed.
Destiny or a Journey
Do you see love as a union of two people who are destined to be together? Or is it more of a journey they undertake, facing obstacles and working together to overcome them? According to new research, how you answer these questions may affect how you handle relationship troubles.
For a study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Spike W.S. Lee and Norbert Schwarz gave subjects a quiz involving common sayings that implied unity (“made for each other”) or a journey (“look how far we’ve come”). Then they asked them to recall conflicts or celebrations in their relationships, and rate their relationship satisfaction. Those asked to think about conflicts were less satisfied with their relationships after reading sayings about unity than after reading those involving a journey — the study authors write, “In the face of conflicts, priming unity undermines relationship satisfaction.” They found a similar result when they tried to convey unity and journey through nonverbal means, via shape-matching tasks and mazes: “Merely pictorial cues of unity and journey,” they write, “are sufficient to influence relationship evaluation, even in the absence of any semantic material that links the frames to relationship issues.”
At The Science of Us, Melissa Dahl notes that other studies have called into question the efficacy of believing that you and your partner are “made for each other”:
“It might not surprise you to learn that the science of romance isn’t incredibly romantic. The research suggests that believing in soul mates — or destiny, or the idea that there is exactly one person who you were absolutely put on this earth to find — can and probably will backfire.”
She quotes the psychologist Benjamin Le:
“There is research that shows that people who believe in ‘destiny’ put less effort into working through relationship conflict. The idea here is that if we are soul mates, then nothing will go wrong in our relationship, and it will be easy. A conflict makes a destiny-believer question whether the current partner is actually their soul mate, and then they give up on working it out.”
Mr. Lee told Op-Talk his study was built on a large body of previous evidence that people who favor the journey idea have stronger relationships: “When conflicts arise, they are better at dealing with it; they have higher marital satisfaction; they’re less likely to divorce. All kinds of good things happen to people who believe in the journey idea.”
But previous studies established only correlation between journey beliefs and better relationships, not causation — journey believers might share other attributes that contribute to healthy unions. His research with Mr. Schwarz sought to “manipulate these two frames directly to see if we have causal influence.” The result: “I think it’s pretty clear that the journey frame serves some protective function.”
Embracing change over time rather than expecting perfection at the outset may have benefits outside the realm of relationships, too. Mr. Lee’s findings recall research by the psychologist Carol S. Dweck, who has found that praising kids for trying hard may be more effective than telling them they’re smart. Jenny Anderson sums up this work at The New York Times’s Motherlode blog:
“Kids who are told they are smart care more about performance goals and less about learning. Kids praised for their efforts believe that trying hard, not being smart, matters. These kids are ‘resilient’ and take more risks.”
Also at The Times, Peter Orszag examines Ms. Dweck’s work on how adults see themselves and their skills:
“Dweck puts forward two mind-sets — a fixed mind-set, which occurs when someone believes that personal qualities like intelligence are immutable, and a growth mind-set, which occurs when someone believes that skills and characteristics can be cultivated through effort.”
Like the journey idea, the growth mind-set may have advantages. Mr. Orszag writes, “The evidence Dweck and others present, albeit only suggestive, indicates that the growth mind-set is what sustains purposeful practice even when things are not going well (which is when most mortals give up).”
Monty Python Dating
THE UK's biggest Monty Python fan has found his "soul mate" – after starting a Facebook dating page dedicated to those looking to find a Python-obsessed partner.
After winning a British Film Institute competition to find the UK's biggest Monty Python Fan in 2012, John Wood, 54, from Garden Wood Road, East Grinstead, is well known locally for his love of the hugely successful comedy troupe.
But after being unlucky in love and following his divorce from his wife of 15 years, who he says thought Monty Python was "infantile drivel", he set himself the challenge of finding – without a hint of a nudge, nudge, wink, wink – a "gorgeous 30-something, Python-quoting single lady".
And a delighted John says he has succeeded and now found the sort of woman he had dreamed of finding.
The lady in question is Gemma Harris, 30, an art history graduate from Salisbury, who he bonded with over a certain Python-influenced film back in May.
He said: "I'm the admin on the site which means I get to welcome all the new members and see who's who. I got talking to Gemma who said Brazil (directed by Python member Terry Gilliam) was also her favourite movie and I just thought 'wow'.
"She fits the bill completely. She's my soul mate. She says Python is her life – the same as me."
John set about wooing the lady of his dreams by inviting her to see Spamalot, the Python musical, but was turned down due to the short notice.
But he persevered and now they are planning all manner of Python-related holidays, including a trip to Scotland to visit Doune Castle where Monty Python and the Holy Grail was shot and seeing Spamalot for the 17th time.
They are also planning a romantic weekend away in Paris – but instead of the usual sightseeing, they will be locating an apartment where parts of Brazil were filmed.
His new partner could not be more different, he says, to his ex-wife. He said: "We didn't divorce because she didn't like Python – but she thought it was infantile drivel.
"Python is so fundamental to how I see the world.
"It's not just a laugh, it's very intellectual and it's like you have to be tuned into a very weird wavelength to understand it. She just didn't get it at all."
John and his new love are the first couple to get together from the Facebook page Pythonesque Dating, and they are now hoping to help other like-minded Python fans to find love.
"Now that I'm taken it would be lovely to get some other fans together," said John.
"Gemma has taken over the running of the site so we may get some more couples soon."
Although they aren't planning a Monty Python-style marriage in the near future, John said it may be on the cards.
He added: "We've talked about staying together so who knows.
"Of course a wedding would be Monty Python related. Python is our life."
Drawbacks of Online Dating
Today in Britain one in five heterosexual couples met online and a whopping 70 per cent of homosexual couples found their partner via the web.
But wait! New research is suggesting there could be very real problems with internet dating. Michigan State University found that married couples who met online are three times more likely to divorce than those who met face to face.
And online daters are 28 per cent more likely to split from their partners within the first year.
Even the CEO of Match admits that online dating cycles are shorter because people are more willing to leave unsatisfying relationships. It’s easier to throw in the towel when you know there are 20 more towels waiting to be picked up.
“There is a greediness involved in online dating,” says Ayesha Vardag, one of Britain’s leading divorce lawyers.
“It is, after all, a sort of digital menu full of people waiting to be chosen or disregarded. As well as the convenience factor it’s easy to get carried away with the high of instant gratification and not give the relationship a real chance to develop.”
Paradoxically, by opening up a new world of choice, we have become aware that there could always been someone better just a click away.
In that way, sexual attraction is similar to hunger.
\
“And who has not found their appetite suddenly revived when a new course is presented?” writes Professor Frederick Toates in his new book ‘How Sexual Desire Works.’
The US Association of Psychological Science also found that browsing multiple profiles makes people far more judgemental that they would be in a face-to-face meeting, quickly writing off candidates who don’t tick every box.
And the chances of opposites attracting? Forget it online. You’ll only get matched with people who like the same films as you, read the same newspaper, like dogs, go to church. In other words you are looking for a clone. And in biological terms that doesn’t end well.
In fact, the most compatible partner genetically would be the one who is the least like you. In Dan Davis’s recent book ‘The Compatibility Gene’ he surmises that a spouse whose immune system is completely different to your own is likely to make the best life partner.
In terms of evolutionary biology it is easy to see the benefit of having one partner who is less susceptible to getting colds or flu while another has greater immunity to measles.
But how does this translate into dating? If you catch eyes with a stranger in a bar you can’t look into their genome and rate your compatibility.
Yet there is increasing evidence that, in face-to-face meetings, the body is subconsciously picking up clues about the suitability of future partners based on their DNA and our own.
Face shape, height, body size, skin tone, hair quality and even smell are all indicators on whether the person we just met would be good to mate with. We emit pheromones which give valuable clues about our genetic compatibility to someone else.
“Sexual desire arises from a combination of sensory stimuli, visual, smell, sound and touch, acting on the brain at both a raw level and a context of memories to which they are associated,” points out Toates. And that can’t be recreated by viewing a computer profile.
To put it another way, meeting someone we fancy sparks a whole cascade of biological triggers. After all, dating is mating. And mating is governed by millions of years of evolution. So it’s surely better to work with that than against it. By relying on dating profiles we may be writing off dozens of individuals who would be suitable, while wasting time on those that aren't.
This blog will be about getting out there and finding out the best ways of interacting with people face-to-face rather than through a screen.
As a friend pointed out to me recently: “How are you ever going to meet anyone, if you are not actually meeting anyone?”
Algorithms 1
In a world awash with data, algorithms aimed at "finding your perfect match" have reached a new plane of sophistication. The sales pitch of New York-based website OkCupid, founded by a group of Harvard mathematicians, says it all: "We use math to get you dates."
Co-founder Christian Rudder spends his days crunching data from millions of users to come up with insights such as the single best predictor of sex on the first date is whether someone likes the taste of beer.
"What we know about dating is that what people say they want, and what people really want, are very different in practice," says Kari Taylor, marketing director of Fairfax-owned matchmaking website RSVP.
We like the idea of a maths-based matching because it suggests we can set limits to a game of chance, says sociologist Lauren Rosewarne, of the University of Melbourne.
"We're all control freaks. We like to think, 'if I just work hard enough, if I sign up for a website, if I just apply the appropriate skills ... I'm aiding luck finding me'," Dr Rosewarne says.
Matching sites still start by asking users who they are and what they're looking for, but their focus has expanded from measuring compatibility to also trying to predict "chemistry".
RSVP switched from profile-based matching to behaviour-based matching a few years back and saw an 80 per cent surge in users saying yes to conversation requests.
Behaviour-based matching is adaptive. It compares what you said you wanted with how you behave to work out things you might not even know about yourself.
For example, you said you wanted a partner with a steady income but you keep messaging "pro-bono computer game testers" and "freelance writers", so the algorithm changes its recommendations.
Similarly, the algorithm knows that attraction is reactive – we're more likely to be attracted to people who are attracted to us. So when someone likes you back, the algorithm analyses their behaviour and characteristics, and brings you more people just like them.
And it gets more sophisticated. Let's say you had some success with Karen, Emma, Jane and Lilly. Through a process called triangulation, the algorithm identifies other people who hit it off with those women and introduces you to some of the other women they liked – even though you may have nothing in common other than your taste in women.
It's a Venn diagram of attraction formed by millions of spheres of explicit and implicit desire. And for many couples, it works.
Janin Mayer and her husband Evi Bitran met on RSVP in 2011. They married 18 months later and now have a six-month-old son.
"From everything I could see, he was absolutely not what I was looking for," Janin says.
"I'm an artist, he was studying a [Masters of Business Administration] ... We definitely wouldn't have met if it wasn't for the internet. We are complete opposites."
Evi seems to prove her point. "Immediately when I saw her profile picture, I wanted to talk to her ... And no, I think even without the internet, the universe would have brought us together."
eHarmony vice-president of matching Steve Carter says very little about our personalities, values or appearance tells us when sparks will fly.
"Predicting who someone is going to want to talk to is vastly more difficult than predicting who they would have a good marriage with," he says.
"People choose who they're attracted to based on a much more chaotic, much more subjective and very reactive set of characteristics."
eHarmony's predictive model for attraction has improved up to 400 per cent in the past couple of years, Dr Carter says. Which isn't quite as exciting as it sounds. "We've gone from predicting a minuscule amount of the variance to predicting a very small amount."
Carter believes an algorithm for attraction is possible given how much data is available. But the real question is whether that's the direction the industry is heading.
"You talk about all this data being available," he says. "But the biggest thing in the online dating universe ... is an app that doesn't use any information except a photograph."
That app, of course, is Tinder. Launched in 2012, Tinder has taken the dating scene by storm by making a game out of judging people based on their photos. Search through users within a given radius and swipe right to like, left to reject. If someone "right swipes" you back, it's game on.
There are no algorithms predicting attraction; no models measuring compatibility. Tinder relies on two of the oldest ingredients for romance – how someone looks and how near they are. The rest is serendipity.
"You could say it's about judging people based on their appearance and you might say that's shallow but that's actually what happens in real life," Dr Rosewarne says.
On the other hand, predictive algorithms do deliver surprises. Just look at the Match.com couple interviewed in Dan Slater's book, Love in a Time of Algorithms. He was asthmatic. She was a smoker. Several (hundred thousand) triangulations later, they met and fell in love.
Algorithms 2
You may have seen the Parks and Recreation episode where Tom Haverford makes 26 different online dating profiles to increase his odds of matching with every woman possible (after his nerd profile matched with his boss Leslie). You may also have watched someone swipe right on every single Tinder option until they run out of every candidate within 100 miles or make joke profiles just for a laugh.
Preventing these types of misuse and play is a big job for online dating companies. Identifying problems and deciding how to fix them is crucial for users looking for love, but now it's good for business, too.
In 2014 the online dating industry made $2 billion. Match alone has 2.4 million paid subscribers. Even Tinder, heralded as more of a game than an actual dating service by many Millennials, will soon start charging for a premium edition to get a bigger piece of the online market. People once looked down on online dating, but now it is widely accepted and continues to grow in popularity as new mobile devices provide additional platforms. One in 10 Americans has used an online dating site or app, according to a 2013 report from the Pew Research Center, and 59 percent think they're a good way to meet people.
So how do these companies keep their products running to find you love? Mike Maxim, chief technology officer at OkCupid, says the company is always making minor improvements to its algorithm to make the service better. "Most of the changes at this point are fairly small," he says. "The users have an expectation of how the site is going to work, so you can't make big changes all the time."
The biggest problem they face on the tech side, Maxim says, is to make sure everyone can find somebody. In their algorithm that matches users with one another they use match percentages, which basically quantifies how much users have in common, along with their popularity and in-box messages. On any dating site, he says, a small subset of users will receive the majority of the messages. To even this out they look at the number of unread in-box messages and place users further down the match list if he/she has tons of them. The popularity metric (which isn't displayed on people's profiles) helps them match people with similar status on the site.
Misbehaving users are a continuous battle, Maxim says, especially on a free site like OkCupid. To fight this, he says, they use computer and human defenses. Their software can detect if someone sets up multiple accounts, claims they are in a foreign country or exhibits bad behavior, and it can then flag their accounts for review or automatically disable them. OkCupid also relies on reports from its users to find misbehavior, Maxim says. Steve Carter, vice president of matching at eHarmony, says they close 300 accounts per day that their "highly experienced, dedicated and slightly paranoid 'trust and safety' personnel" deem spam, also by using software and human intuition.
Like many online dating services, OkCupid amasses large amounts of data on its users, which Maxim says it uses to improve its products and monitor if the site or algorithm needs fixing. OkCupid president and co-founder, Christian Rudder, publishes some of this data and insight on the site's blog, OkTrends, admitting unabashedly that they experiment on users.
The years of data collection have also made the sites’ matching and operating algorithms smarter. Carter says eHarmony recently added a machine scoring system that can automatically crop photos for different devices and tell users which images will be most successful with possible mates. This data can also help sites be more personalized, says Vatsal Bhardwaj, general manager of Match. Sites catering only to redheads, farmers, tall people, cat lovers and Trekkies already exemplify this desire to find someone with a very specific type and tastes.
Experts agree that mobile will define the future of the dating industry, but what effects that will have on information is unclear. "There are a lot of ways in which the sharing of information online may grow or shrink," Carter says, "that could fundamentally change the way people use the Internet to find a mate." You can bet that the learning algorithms will change with them.
36 Questions
... a study by the psychologist Arthur Aron (and others) that explores whether intimacy between two strangers can be accelerated by having them ask each other a specific series of personal questions. The 36 questions in the study are broken up into three sets, with each set intended to be more probing than the previous one.
The idea is that mutual vulnerability fosters closeness. To quote the study’s authors, “One key pattern associated with the development of a close relationship among peers is sustained, escalating, reciprocal, personal self-disclosure.” Allowing oneself to be vulnerable with another person can be exceedingly difficult, so this exercise forces the issue.
The final task Ms. Catron and her friend try — staring into each other’s eyes for four minutes — is less well documented, with the suggested duration ranging from two minutes to four. But Ms. Catron was unequivocal in her recommendation. “Two minutes is just enough to be terrified,” she told me. “Four really goes somewhere.”
Set I
1. Given the choice of anyone in the world, whom would you want as a dinner guest?
2. Would you like to be famous? In what way?
3. Before making a telephone call, do you ever rehearse what you are going to say? Why?
4. What would constitute a “perfect” day for you?
5. When did you last sing to yourself? To someone else?
6. If you were able to live to the age of 90 and retain either the mind or body of a 30-year-old for the last 60 years of your life, which would you want?
7. Do you have a secret hunch about how you will die?
8. Name three things you and your partner appear to have in common.
9. For what in your life do you feel most grateful?
10. If you could change anything about the way you were raised, what would it be?
11. Take four minutes and tell your partner your life story in as much detail as possible.
12. If you could wake up tomorrow having gained any one quality or ability, what would it be?
Set II
13. If a crystal ball could tell you the truth about yourself, your life, the future or anything else, what would you want to know?
14. Is there something that you’ve dreamed of doing for a long time? Why haven’t you done it?
15. What is the greatest accomplishment of your life?
16. What do you value most in a friendship?
17. What is your most treasured memory?
18. What is your most terrible memory?
19. If you knew that in one year you would die suddenly, would you change anything about the way you are now living? Why?
20. What does friendship mean to you?
21. What roles do love and affection play in your life?
22. Alternate sharing something you consider a positive characteristic of your partner. Share a total of five items.
23. How close and warm is your family? Do you feel your childhood was happier than most other people’s?
24. How do you feel about your relationship with your mother?
Set III
25. Make three true “we” statements each. For instance, “We are both in this room feeling ... “
26. Complete this sentence: “I wish I had someone with whom I could share ... “
27. If you were going to become a close friend with your partner, please share what would be important for him or her to know.
28. Tell your partner what you like about them; be very honest this time, saying things that you might not say to someone you’ve just met.
29. Share with your partner an embarrassing moment in your life.
30. When did you last cry in front of another person? By yourself?
31. Tell your partner something that you like about them already.
32. What, if anything, is too serious to be joked about?
33. If you were to die this evening with no opportunity to communicate with anyone, what would you most regret not having told someone? Why haven’t you told them yet?
34. Your house, containing everything you own, catches fire. After saving your loved ones and pets, you have time to safely make a final dash to save any one item. What would it be? Why?
35. Of all the people in your family, whose death would you find most disturbing? Why?
36. Share a personal problem and ask your partner’s advice on how he or she might handle it. Also, ask your partner to reflect back to you how you seem to be feeling about the problem you have chosen.
36 Questions - The Reaction
Last month, a few days before Mandy Len Catron’s essay “To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This” appeared in Modern Love, she aired some concerns about the coming exposure on her blog, writing that while a few hundred people may see one of her blog posts, thousands would see this column.
She underestimated by about 8 million.
In the essay, Ms. Catron told of how she found love by replicating a 20-year-old experiment by the psychologist Arthur Aron that involved two strangers asking each other 36 increasingly personal questions followed by a four-minute staring session to see if doing so would lead to intimacy and love. For Ms. Catron and the man she barely knew, the experiment worked.
Readers found this combination of romance and science (with a happy ending) irresistible. Ms. Catron’s story went viral, with couples across the country and around the globe trying the questions themselves.
The New Yorker and Dame magazine spoofed the experiment with 36 questions about how to fall out of love.
One man even posed the questions to his disengaged cat in a YouTube video, which amassed nearly 40,000 views.
A ticketed singles event in Manhattan drew 70 hopefuls who paid $40 each to be paired up and guided through the experiment.
The notion of falling in love from a quiz may sound like a gimmick, but the broad resonance of Dr. Aron’s 36 questions may be partly explained by the fact that there is nothing gimmicky about them. In this age of Tinder and self-curated dating profiles, where image and first impressions hold sway, these questions go deep.
But as Dr. Aron cautions, this isn’t an experiment that can be easily repeated with a series of romantic prospects, because you risk having canned answers if you keep using the same questions.
Since the essay appeared, we have been receiving reports from strangers and longtime couples who have tried the quiz, often armed with one of several quickly created apps featuring the quiz (The New York Times, in consultation with Dr. Aron, has created one as well, available at nytimes.com/36questions).
Two weeks after her essay appeared, Ms. Catron was still trying to adjust to what it had wrought. She and her boyfriend were out at a pizza parlor when he took out his phone and started typing. She assumed he was texting someone, but he slid the phone across to her. It read: “the couple next to us is doing the 36 questions.”
Sure enough, they were. In that moment, the full impact of her article finally hit home.
How You Affect Others
If you’re lucky, you know someone who makes you feel happier just by being around them. And maybe you can also think of someone whose very presence stresses you out. The idea that certain people elicit certain emotions in those they interact with is something psychologists call affective presence, and the research is starting to suggest that the way you make others feel could be as much a part of your disposition as, say, your tendency toward optimism.
“For example, some people make others feel happy, and this is stable enough to be identified as part of what emotionally distinguishes one individual from another,” said Raul Berrios, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Sheffield, who led a new study on affective presence recently published in the European Journal of Personality. For his study, Berrios recruited 40 students for a speed-dating scenario, producing a total of 134 four-minute dates. Immediately after each date, the students reported how their partner had made them feel, choosing from one of eight emotions: happy, sad, angry, enthusiastic, bored, stressed, calm, or relaxed.
After analyzing their answers, Berrios and his team found that people consistently rated certain people in the same way. “This allowed us to determine that certain emotions are consistently elicited, and — more importantly — that some people indeed tended to make other feel a certain way,” Berrios said.
The two most common feelings that people tended to bring out in others were enthusiasm and boredom, which makes sense to Berrios, “considering that when people are looking for a potential romantic partner they pay much more attention to the degree to which they feel aroused.” He also found that people are more likely to bring out positive rather than negative emotions in others.
Each of the participants also filled out personality questionnaires, plus a survey designed to measure their emotional intelligence, and the results of these suggested that people who said they were better at regulating their own emotions tended to bring out positive feelings in those they interacted with. Extroverted and agreeable people also tended to make their dates feel good.
Next, Berrios would like to investigate to what degree people are able to change the way they make other people feel. If affective presence is as stable as personality, then the answer will likely be that it’s possible, but not easy. And, obviously, more research needs to be done in a variety of different settings, because dating comes with its own unique set of pressures. Overall, though, the concept is a fascinating new way to think about what makes up you. “People usually believe that they are what they think, all those things that live in our very own minds," Berrios said. “But the affective presence phenomenon suggests that we also 'are' what we create in others, such as certain emotions.”
The Mathematics of Love
The secrets to finding love have been revealed: choose someone who had few colds as a child, have ugly friends and, when online dating, show your paunch.
Hannah Fry, author of The Mathematics of Love, told the Oxford Literary Festival that maths was “perfectly placed to study the patterns” of human behaviour. Even if mathematicians were not renowned for their success in the field of love, she added.
For a start, it seems humanity’s belief in symmetrical faces as a thing of beauty has an evolutionary purpose. “As a child, every time you get a cough or a cold your face tends to grow in a slightly asymmetrical way,” Fry said. “So in thinking symmetrical faces are more attractive, you are validating an underlying bill of health.” That is, someone with a slightly mismatched face doesn’t have the best immune system.
One must also pay attention to the Discreet Choice Theory, or Decoy Effect. This holds that “the presence of an irrelevant alternative can change how you view your choices”. So, for example, if the preferences of men ranking the attractiveness of Woman A and Woman B are split 50-50 but a third woman comes along who looks like a less attractive version of Woman A, then Woman A becomes more popular.
Fry said: “If you are trying to choose a wing man or wing woman, choose someone as similar to you as possible, just slightly less attractive.”
Analysis of a dating website also showed that overweight men who cropped their photos to show only their faces, or bald men putting on hats, were not maximising their chances. Showing flaws meant more hits were likely to be from prospective partners.
“People who are unbelievably goodlooking will always do well but the rest of us would be better to divide opinion,” Fry writes in her book.
Finally, complete with unfathomable formulae, comes the Optimal Stopping Period. This holds that if one imagines the “dating period” as being from 15 to 35, the ideal partner will arrive after 37 per cent of this period, at age 22.
Luxury Goods A Signal
The peacock has its tail, the bird of paradise has its plume — and the human male has its Ferrari 458 Spider and Patek Phillipe watch. And it’s lucky for us that he does, because scientists have claimed that when men buy pointless luxury goods to impress women they are not just having a midlife crisis — they are becoming a key driver of our economy.
It all started, claims Jason Collins from the University of Western Australia, with cavemen. Archaeological digs have found they often produced far more axes than they needed, to a far greater precision than required. Why?
These days, it is seen in the continued existence of the Swiss watch industry — an entire market sector dedicated to producing vastly overpriced timepieces. “Why do these watches exist?” Mr Collins asked. “Because there is someone with a great big bucket of money, looking for a way to signal that he has it.”
They are, in other words, our version of a peacock’s tail. “The peacock’s tail works as a wonderful signal of underlying quality,” Mr Collins said, “and the reason why it works is it demonstrates the quality of the resources the peacock has, compared with those who don’t have such resources and can’t engage in such wasteful behaviour as producing a big tail.” Peahens can assume that if a cock can waste its time producing an impractical fan of feathers, it can also dedicate resources to producing offspring.
While the significance of this, for peacocks, ends there, for humans the story is different. MrCollins used mathematical equations to produce a simplified model of an economy. In a paper in the Journal of Bioeconomics they show that, as soon as women start developing a preference for men who conspicuously consume, this behaviour begins to power our economy and create growth.
“Why do men get up in the morning and go to work?” Collins asked. “The basic needs for survival require little effort, so what are they trying to acquire these resources for? They need resources to attract females, and our argument is that this is a strong driver of growth.”
Online Dating
WE turn to screens for nearly every decision. Where to eat. Where to vacation. Where to eat on vacation. Where to get treatment for the food poisoning you got at that restaurant where you ate on vacation. Where to write a negative review calling out the restaurant that gave you food poisoning and ruined your vacation. So it’s no surprise our screens are becoming the first place we turn to when looking for romance — because you need someone to take care of you when you get food poisoning on your vacation, right?
One of the most amazing social changes is the rise of online dating and the decline of other ways of meeting a romantic partner. In 1940, 24 percent of heterosexual romantic couples in the United States met through family, 21 percent through friends, 21 percent through school, 13 percent through neighbors, 13 percent through church, 12 percent at a bar or restaurant and 10 percent through co-workers. (Some categories overlapped.)
By 2009, half of all straight couples still met through friends or at a bar or restaurant, but 22 percent met online, and all other sources had shrunk. Remarkably, almost 70 percent of gay and lesbian couples met online, according to the Stanford sociologist Michael J. Rosenfeld, who compiled this data.
And Internet dating isn’t just about casual hookups. According to the University of Chicago psychologist John T. Cacioppo, more than one-third of couples who married in the United States from 2005 to 2012 met online.
Online dating generates a spectrum of reactions: exhilaration, fatigue, inspiration, fury. Many singles compare it to a second job, more duty than flirtation; the word “exhausting” came up constantly. These days, we seem to have unlimited options. And we marry later or, increasingly, not at all. The typical American spends more of her life single than married, which means she’s likely to invest ever more time searching for romance online. Is there a way to do it more effectively, with less stress? The evidence from our two years of study, which included interviews around the world, from Tokyo to Wichita, Kan., says yes.
TOO MUCH FILTERING The Internet offers a seemingly endless supply of people who are single and looking to date, as well as tools to filter and find exactly what you’re looking for. You can specify height, education, location and basically anything else. Are you trying to find a guy whose favorite book is “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” and whose favorite sport is lacrosse? You’re just a few clicks away from this dream dude.
But we are horrible at knowing what we want. Scientists working with Match.com found that the kind of partner people said they wanted often didn’t match up with what they were actually interested in. People filter too much; they’d be better off vetting dates in person.
“Online dating is just a vehicle to meet more people,” says the author and dating consultant Laurie Davis. “It’s not the place to actually date.” The anthropologist Helen Fisher, who does work for Match.com, makes a similar argument: “It’s a misnomer that they call these things ‘dating services,’ ” she told us. “They should be called ‘introducing services.’ They enable you to go out and go and meet the person yourself.”
What about those search algorithms? When researchers analyzed characteristics of couples who’d met on OkCupid, they discovered that one-third had matching answers on three surprisingly important questions: “Do you like horror movies?” “Have you ever traveled around another country alone?” and “Wouldn’t it be fun to chuck it all and go live on a sailboat?” OkCupid believes that answers to these questions may have some predictive value, presumably because they touch on deep, personal issues that matter to people more than they realize.
But what works well for predicting good first dates doesn’t tell us much about the long-term success of a couple. A recent study led by the Northwestern psychologist Eli J. Finkel argues that no mathematical algorithm can predict whether two people will make a good couple.
PICTURE PERFECT People put a huge amount of time into writing the perfect profile, but does all that effort pay off?
OkCupid started an app called Crazy Blind Date. It offered the minimal information people needed to have an in-person meeting. No lengthy profile, no back-and-forth chat, just a blurred photo. Afterward, users were asked to rate their satisfaction with the experience.
The responses were compared with data from the same users’ activity on OkCupid. As Christian Rudder, an OkCupid co-founder, tells it, women who were rated very attractive were unlikely to respond to men rated less attractive. But when they were matched on Crazy Blind Date, they had a good time. As Mr. Rudder puts it, “people appear to be heavily preselecting online for something that, once they sit down in person, doesn’t seem important to them.”
Some of what we learned about effective photos on OkCupid was predictable: Women who flirt for the camera or show cleavage are quite successful. Some of what we learned was pretty weird: Men who look away and don’t smile do better than those who do; women holding animals don’t do well, but men holding animals do. Men did better when shown engaging in an interesting activity.
We recommend the following: If you are a woman, take a high-angle selfie, with cleavage, while you’re underwater near some buried treasure. If you are a guy, take a shot of yourself spelunking in a dark cave while holding your puppy and looking away from the camera, without smiling.
TOO MANY OPTIONS As research by Barry Schwartz and other psychologists has shown, having more options not only makes it harder to choose something, but also may make us less satisfied with our choices, because we can’t help wonder whether we erred.
Consider a study by the Columbia University psychologist Sheena S. Iyengar. She set up a table at an upscale food store and offered shoppers samples of jams. Sometimes, the researchers offered six types of jam, but other times they offered 24. When they offered 24, people were more likely to stop in and have a taste, but they were almost 10 times less likely to actually buy jam than people who had just six kinds to try.
So what's happening? There’s too much jam out there. If you’re on a date with a certain jam, you can’t even focus because as soon as you go to the bathroom, three other jams have texted you. You go online, you see more jam.
One way to avoid this problem is to give each jam a fair chance. Remember: Although we are initially attracted to people by their physical appearance and traits we can quickly recognize, the things that make us fall for someone are their deeper, more personal qualities, which come out only during sustained interactions. Psychologists like Robert B. Zajonc have established the “mere exposure effect”: Repeated exposure to a stimulus tends to enhance one’s feelings toward it.
This isn’t just a theory. In a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the University of Texas psychologists Paul W. Eastwick and Lucy L. Hunt suggest that in dating contexts, a person’s looks, charisma and professional success may matter less for relationship success than other factors that we each value differently, such as tastes and preferences. In fact, they write, few people initiate romantic relationships based on first impressions. Instead they fall for each other gradually, until an unexpected or perhaps long-awaited spark transforms a friendship or acquaintance into something sexual and serious.
Think about it in terms of pop music. When a new song featuring Drake comes on the radio, you’re like, “What is this song? Oh another Drake song. Big deal. Heard this before. Next please!” Then you keep hearing it and you think, “Oh Drake, you’ve done it again!”
In a way, we are all like that Drake song: The more time you spend with us, the more likely we are to get stuck in your head.
No one wants to invest too much on a first date. After all, the odds are it won’t be a love connection. It’s hard to get excited about a new person while doing a résumé exchange over beer and a burger. So stack the deck in your favor and abide by what we called “The Monster Truck Rally Theory of Dating”: Don’t sit across from your date at a table, sipping a drink and talking about where you went to school. Do something adventurous, playful or stimulating instead, and see what kind of rapport you have.
SWIPE AWAY Apps like Tinder boil the dating experience down to assessing people’s images. Compared with stressing out over a questionnaire, swiping can be fun, even addictive. Within two years, Tinder was said to have about 50 million users and claimed responsibility for two billion matches.
As with all other new forms of dating, there’s a stigma around swipe apps. The biggest criticism is that they encourage increasing superficiality. But that’s too cynical. When you walk into a bar or party, often all you have to go by is faces, and that’s what you use to decide if you are going to gather the courage to talk to them. Isn’t a swipe app just a huge party full of faces?
In a world of infinite possibilities, perhaps the best thing new dating technologies can do is to reduce our options to people within reach. In a way they’re a throwback to a past age, when proximity was crucial. In 1932, the sociologist James H. S. Bossard examined 5,000 marriage licenses filed in Philadelphia. One-third of the couples had lived within a five-block radius of each other before they wed, one in six within a block, and one in eight at the same address!
Today’s apps make meeting people fun and efficient. Now comes the hard part: changing out of your sweatpants, meeting them in person, and trying for a connection so you can settle down and get right back into those sweatpants.
Interpreting Flirting
Most women have probably experienced being friendly around a man, only to have it be misinterpreted as flirtatiousness. Simple signals of interest in a conversation — smiling, laughing, being interested in a conversation — are all somehow perceived as come-ons. Straight men, research has found, are a lot more likely than straight women to fool themselves into thinking someone is romantically interested in them when they aren’t.
But what accounts for this gender difference? As Mons Bendixen, a psychologist at the Norwegian university of Science and Technology, writes in a study recently published in Evolutionary Psychology, there are two main theories: Error-management theory argues that men have evolved to overperceive sexual interest in non-familial female relationships so they don’t miss out on the opportunity to reproduce — at best, they get to pass on their genes; at worst, the woman ends up saying no and they move on. Women, on the other hand, have evolved to underperceive sexual interest, because sex with the wrong guy means risking pregnancy and child-rearing without the help of a mate, not to mention lost opportunities to procreate with other, less flaky men. In other words, the sexual stakes are higher for women than for men — or they were, at least, in the distant past, when evolution shaped behaviors that linger to this day.
Social-roles theory, on the other hand, argues that gender differences in rates of sexual misperception — not to mention in other sorts of behavior — come down to societal norms and expectations. So in places that lack gender equality, one would expect a large disparity between men’s level of misperception and women’s, with the rates becoming more and more similar the more gender-egalitarian a culture is.
Bendixen realized that if the social-roles theory were true, it would probably show up when you examined rates of sexual misperception in different countries. In places where there’s more equality between the sexes, the social-roles theory would predict that men would misinterpret women’s interest about as much as women misinterpret men’s. If, on the other hand, error-management theory is true, then men’s levels of overperception would be consistently higher everywhere, since the bias comes down to evolutionary hardwired gender influences.
So Bendixen decided to try to replicate a famous 2003 study about gender-based differences in sexual misperception — one that took place in the United States — in Norway, which is known for being very solid on the gender-equality front: At the time of the study, it was ranked in the top five most egalitarian countries on the U.N.’s Gender Inequality Index, as compared to the U.S.’s rather cringe-worthy rank of 42.
These differences extend down to the dating world, Bendixen explained in an email. “Norway is very sexually liberal compared to the USA,” he said. “A Norwegian woman can play a more active and proactive part in the dating game than an American one without being subject to the same degree of derogation.” Bendixen’s version included 308 heterosexual university students between 18 and 30 years old, and he asked them the exact same questions that were posed in the American study. The results were overwhelming: 88 percent of women reported having experienced at least one incident in which their friendliness was misinterpreted as sexual interest by a man, and on average it had occurred about 3.5 times in the last year alone. Men also reported experiencing sexual misperception, but the rate — 70.6 percent — was far lower. These rates were pretty similar to what was found in the original, U.S.-based study, which found that around 90 percent of women reported that their friendliness had been misperceived at least once in their lifetimes, on average 2.7 times in the last year, with about 70 percent of men reporting having experienced this.
The results, Bendixen argues, suggest that men’s misperception of friendly signals can’t be traced back to unequal opportunities for men and women or misogynistic culture; rather, he thinks sexual misperception occurs across different cultures and demographic groups, because it’s a universal evolutionary adaptation. “Despite America and Norway’s cultural differences, the findings suggest that men and women make systematic errors in their attempt to read each other’s minds in dating and mating contexts,” he said. “These errors follow the predictions of error-management theory.”
Two studies can’t fully unravel how this stuff works, of course: There’s still a lot to learn about how nature and nurture interact when it comes to sexual misperception, particularly in countries that, unlike the U.S. and Norway, aren’t “weird” — that is, Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. Still, Bendixen’s work does score a point for those who believe that deep gender-based differences can strongly influence behavior.
So, ladies, the next time a guy misinterprets your friendly smile in a sleazy way, try to keep in mind that somewhere deep in his brain, he may still be a bit of a caveman.
Tinder
Last night, the Twitter account for Tinder went on a tear against the Vanity Fair journalist Nancy Jo Sales, who recently argued, in her feature “Tinder and the ‘Dating Apocalypse,’” that dating apps are causing changes in human mating rituals of a magnitude comparable to those that occurred after the establishment of marriage. “As the polar ice caps melt and the earth churns through the Sixth Extinction, another unprecedented phenomenon is taking place, in the realm of sex,” Sales writes. “Hookup culture, which has been percolating for about a hundred years, has collided with dating apps, which have acted like a wayward meteor on the now dinosaur-like rituals of courtship.”
The traditional methods of dating and courtship are out; endlessly jumping from fling to fling is in. And women, despite the supposed benefits of sexual liberation, are coming out losers in this hurried new sexual landscape — used, then discarded in a pile of dick pics. For the article, Sales conducted “interviews with more than 50 young women in New York, Indiana, and Delaware, aged 19 to 29,” as well as many men, and it adds up to a series of sleazy, depressing stories. And she’s hardly the first journalist to raise this alarm: Over the last few years, reports on “hookup culture” — some focusing on alcohol and campus culture, some on technology, and some on both — have become a thriving genre.
Although Sales pins her case on online dating in general, she’s mostly focused on Tinder, whose “swipe” function she sees as the epitome of quick and easy shopping for sex. Tinder did not like this, and 30 ill-advised tweets ensued, first questioning Sales’ reporting, escalating to claiming that Tinder is bringing people in China and North Korea together, and culminating in the grand pronouncement that “Generation Tinder” is changing the world.
This was standard-issue self-importance from the tech industry, a place where people go to make billions overnight while telling everyone that they’re also enlightening humanity. But here’s the thing: Tinder had a point, at least about the way Sales portrays modern dating culture.
If you hang out with stats geeks for long enough, one of them will probably utter the sentence, “The plural of anecdote is not data.” This is a well-worn nerdism, but it reveals an important truth: When we consider our experiences and those of our friends and family, we’re only getting a tiny chunk of the full story of humanity. In that town over there, or in that state on the other side of the country, things might be very, very different, and it would be a mistake to extrapolate from our little slice of the world. This is worth keeping in mind whenever a new moral panic is afoot.
Sales’ account is loaded with anecdotes: There’s the finance guy who claims to have slept with 30 to 40 women off Tinder in the last year; the 23-year-old male model who insists that women want guys to send them dick pics (cool story, bro); the sorority sisters bemoaning the fact that college men, drenched with easy access to sex, are so bad at it; and the 26-year-old guy — think of him as a Tinder-era Walter Sobchak — who assures Sales that if he wanted to, he could find someone to have sex with by midnight.
The problem is that while Sales certainly spins a good yarn, it doesn’t really add up to evidence that something revolutionary is afoot. It’s one thing to write an ethnographic piece about Tinder-maters in their natural habitat; it’s another to extrapolate this to make sweeping claims about the epochal ways dating and sex are changing. This goes back to that anecdote/data thing. Wandering about and talking to people is important — is, in fact, a cornerstone of journalism — but there are inherent limitations to it. There will inevitably be some bias in who you talk to, or in who’s willing to talk to you; in Sales’ case, we hear almost exclusively from young, single people who are active (sometimes overactive) Tinder users, and almost entirely from men who are constantly looking for casual sex. In other words, Sales is talking to exactly the sorts of people you’d expect to use dating apps in a way that will help them find more people to sleep with, and then, having discovered that these promiscuous people use a promiscuity-enabling app to find other promiscuous people to have promiscuous sex with, reporting back to us that we’re in the midst of a promiscuity-fueled dating “revolution” in how people deal with romance and sex. This is known as confirmation bias.
Tinder super-users are an important slice of the population to study, yes, but they can’t be used as a stand-in for “millennials” or “society” or any other such broad categories. Where are the 20-somethings in committed relationships in Sales’ article? Where are the awkward, lonely young men who feel like they can’t find anyone to have sex with, let alone date them? Where are the women who stay off Tinder because they don’t like the meat-market feel of it? Where are the men and women who find lifetime partners from these apps? (Just off the top of my head, I can think of one guy I know who met his husband on Grindr and a woman who met her fiancé on Tinder, as well as countless long-term relationships that started on OKCupid.) Where are the many, many millennials who get married in their early or mid-20s? Reading Sales’ article, you’d think Tinder had wiped out all these millennials like, well, that aforementioned asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs. But there are still millions of young people muddling through relatively “traditional” experiences of dating (and romantic deprivation).
If anyone is equipped to answer these questions about dating and sexual mores in a more rigorous way, it’s the social scientists who use national surveys to study attitudes and behavior change over time. In her piece, Sales cites the research of Jean Twenge, a professor at San Diego State University and the author of Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled — and More Miserable Than Ever Before. Twenge is the co-author, with Ryne Sherman of Florida Atlantic University, of a study released earlier this year in which the pair analyzed the results of the General Social Survey, a (mostly) annual, nationally representative survey that’s been administered for decades, between 1972 and 2012. The data, culled from between about 27,000 and 33,000 Americans (there were different numbers of responses available for different questions and years), showed that millennials appear to be having sex with fewer partners than the last couple generations were — specifically, “Number of sexual partners increased steadily between the G.I.s and 1960s-born Gen X’ers and then dipped among Millennials to return to Boomer levels.”
If dating culture were in fact imploding into a sticky morass of one-night-stands in any meaningful way, it would likely show up in this sort of data. But Sales addressed this study solely to brush it aside in a parenthetical paragraph noting that the authors told her “their analysis was based partly on projections derived from a statistical model, not entirely from direct side-by-side comparisons of numbers of sex partners reported by respondents.” Well, no — there are plenty of side-by-side comparisons in Twenge and Sherman’s research, since the study is based on a survey in which the same question is asked in the same way over the years. As for the “projections,” that just refers to the fact that the authors can’t provide lifetime numbers of sexual partners for millennials who are still very much alive, so they projected that one category. It doesn’t bear on the overall finding that there’s no sign of an explosion in promiscuity. (To be fair, the paper’s data ends in 2012, which was pre-Tinder, but well into the era of OKCupid and other online dating services that opened up a whole new world of sex and dating partners.)
Twenge told me that when she spoke with Sales, the journalist seemed to have arrived with some preconceived notions of what the real story was here, and was therefore very skeptical of Twenge’s data. “She said, ‘Well, I’ve gone around the country talking to college students and adults and all I’m hearing is about the hooking up and so on. I don’t believe what you’ve found,’” said Twenge. “I said, ‘Well, there’s a really big difference between going around and talking to people and a nationally representative survey,’ and I must have repeated that five or six times, and it was clear she was not really hearing me.’” Twenge made it sound like a classic case of journalistic and social-scientific culture clashing: “Suffice to say that this reporter had her conclusion and then just didn’t want to believe anything I told her about her analysis,” Twenge explained.
I emailed Sales about Twenge’s work: “The conclusions of the study seemed somewhat suspect to me,” she said. “And contradictory. For example: It finds that, while millennials have more open and accepting attitudes about sex, they also have fewer sex partners. This didn’t make sense to me. Nor did it make sense that people who are waiting longer to marry (or not marrying at all, so far) — that is, millennials — would also have fewer sex partners than past generations, who married earlier.”
But it doesn’t matter whether the conclusions of the study “make sense” to Sales. The whole point of a large, nationally representative sample is that it captures a bigger slice of the picture than more piecemeal efforts like traditional journalism. Later in her email to me, Sales referenced Twenge’s argument in her paper that the fear of AIDS could explain the fact that while acceptance of casual sex is going up, there hasn’t quite been a commensurate rise in the number of people’s sexual partners. “This really didn’t seem correct to me, either, since fear of AIDS has been much reduced by the advancement of AIDS drugs and other social factors.” But, again — it doesn’t matter whether or not given findings “seem correct” unless you can explain why the data’s wrong.
(Data isn’t infallible, of course, and Sales said she hired a data scientist who found issues with Twenge and Sherman’s analysis but couldn’t fit it into the piece. Sales told me she couldn’t put me in touch with the data scientist because she’s traveling; Twenge, for her part, said her co-author Sherman, who did the brunt of the data analysis for the article, spoke with Sales about the data scientist's concerns — Sales said the data scientist was too busy to speak with Sherman herself — and was convinced she was making a fundamentally wrong critique.)
Taking a moral-panic approach to something like mobile online dating makes for a good story, but it also drowns out the opportunity for a richer conversation, and hardens certain false notions about millennial culture. Online dating clearly is changing how many people meet other people and date and have sex. But it’s probably changing their behavior in all sorts of different, sometimes conflicting ways. In some cases, it’s probably helping people find husbands and wives sooner, leading them to have fewer sex partners. In others, it probably does lead to some decision paralysis and frustration with dating. In many cases, it probably just reinforces the user’s preexisting preferences — pro- or anti-promiscuity, pro– or anti–finding someone to settle down with.
But you wouldn’t be able to fit “apocalypse” into that headline.
*******************************
Millions of singles use the dating app Tinder, but critics say it offers only meaningless sex while reducing the chance of finding real love.
Tinder does not respond well to rejection. In fact, avoiding rejection is one of the reasons the dating app was set up — so that you can see someone you fancy, probably someone out of your league, and instead of risking the humiliation of asking them out, simply send them a virtual wink from your phone.
The app presents users with endless pictures of potential partners. If you fancy them you simply “swipe right”. If they like you too, you’re a match. But if they don’t, you never hear about it.
No wonder Tinder, so keen to avoid confrontation, was heartbroken last week when Vanity Fair publicly dumped on it from a glossy height. Nancy Jo Sales wrote a take-down of millennial dating culture, headlined “Tinder and the dawn of the ‘dating apocalypse’ ”.
Sales depicts a world in which deadeyed millennials spend Saturday nights in bars affixed to their phones, rampantly using Tinder to arrange loveless one-night stands. It is a dystopia in which boys have sex with “Tinderellas” and do not even walk them to the door afterwards. The culture evoked is one of instant sexual gratification for a generation inundated with connections, yet too disassociated to form meaningful relationships.
When Vanity Fair’s article was published, what played out next was like a lovers’ tiff. Furious at being “slutshamed”, Tinder went into a meltdown on Twitter like a bunny-boiling ex, high on Prosecco and tears. It accused Vanity Fair of “one-sided journalism” that “doesn’t seem . . . interested in facts”, tweeting sarcastically: “@VanityFair Little known fact: sex was invented in 2012 when Tinder was launched.” Another tweet said: “The Tinder Generation is real . . . But it’s not at all what you portray it to be.”
Tinder has always been protective of its sexual reputation. Sean Rad, the chief executive, has been irritated by jokes claiming it spreads chlamydia and encourages people to choose lovers not by personality but by postcode (it works by GPS on your phone). He has claimed it “is reflective of people and their desires, not the other way round”.
On Twitter, however, Sales’s readers called her article “spot-on and raw”. “I just deleted the app. You probably saved my sanity,” joked one. “Tinder is basically an app for booty call,” one male tweeter wrote. “@Tinder is a cybersex supermarket,” someone else agreed.
The New York Times summed up Tinder’s defence with the ironic headline: “Tinder doesn’t contribute to hook-up culture (says Tinder)”. Describing the row on Newsnight, the BBC presenter Evan Davis, who is gay, landed himself in trouble by suggesting that Tinder allowed “straight people to behave like gay men”.
Has Tinder turned the under-35s into virtual slags? Or does it really just reflect our desires, as the app claims? As anyone witnessing two friends breaking up will tell you: it is impolite to take sides. But as a millennial who has done my Tinder time, my answer to the question of whether it enables promiscuity is: yes. Absolutely, yes. No question, yes. IN 2013, less than a year after Tinder was launched, I wrote about trying out what was viewed then as the crazy new trend of the dating app. Two years later, Tinder is ubiquitous among millennials.
For this article I asked friends about their Tinder experiences. Two were on Tinder dates as we spoke. The only people I know who claim they do not use Tinder are in relationships. I am sure they’re lying.
Tinder’s success has been removing stigma and sadness from online dating and somehow making it cool. The app says it generates 26m matches a day and has led to more than 8bn matches, thousands of relationships, marriages and Tinder babies. But it is not all wedding bells and honeymoons in the Seychelles.
“I think personally that it’s a very cold way for folk to have sex,” one male friend told me. “It’s more of a hook-up app than a finding-love app,” another agreed, claiming he had “heard the male clientele is made up of either players or losers who want to maximise their conquests. If a woman’s looking for love, Tinder is probably not the place to go.”
Paige Padgett Wermuth, an assistant professor at the Texas University health science centre, who has studied technology’s effects on dating, agrees. “The Vanity Fair article is not representative of all Tinder users, but it definitely speaks to a growing trend of technologically enhanced openness and acceptance of uncommitted sex — hook-ups,” she said. Padgett considers that couples meeting via apps may tend to hook up faster because of the way “intimacy is accelerated”. Bonds form quickly with the speed of communication that apps allow. “Swiping to the right” can instantly put in motion a sexual encounter that otherwise might have taken more time.
“Technology offers new opportunities for meeting potential partners,” said a spokesman for Relate, the relationship support service. “Our inhibitions can be reduced when we are behind a screen, and the temptation to take risks or try out fantasies can instantly be acted upon without time to reflect on the consequences.”
Vanity Fair’s article suggests the “shag-and-go” culture gives women a raw deal. One interviewee, a girl named Fallon, is quoted as saying: “Sex should stem from emotional intimacy, and it’s the opposite with us right now, and I think it really is kind of destroying females’ self-images.” Sales talks of women receiving endless “sexts” and crass pick-up lines. On a site called Tinder Nightmares, women share the worst messages they get. Most, unprintable here, amount to sexual harassment.
Tinder’s irritation at being portrayed as a hook-up app may stem from the fear it will put off women. As co-founder Justin Mateen has claimed, disingenuously, Tinder “was never meant to be used for hooking up . . . Fundamentally women aren’t wired that way, right? So even if we had tried to create it for that, it wouldn’t have worked.”
Yet plenty of women I spoke to enjoyed using Tinder for casual sex. “I was happy having casual sex, why shouldn’t I?” said a 33-year-old interior designer. “I don’t think you should expect anyone to owe you anything after you have had sex. At the end of the day that was your choice.”
A 29-year-old beauty therapist said: “Women are now pursuing their needs more aggressively, and that includes getting sex too. Some women say to me they have a high sex-drive and don’t want the drama of a relationship . . . There is no shame in the game any more.”
Perhaps the real irony of Tinder, however, is not that it enables a casual sex culture but rather that it means fewer real-life interactions. Anyone who has used the app will attest that for the hundreds of matches you might make on your screen, few lead to an actual encounter. It is used by a generation so used to staring at their phones that they are reluctant to meet.
Surprisingly, studies show that millennials get less action than their 1990s counterparts did. A study of US hook-up culture comparing modern 18 to 25-yearolds to those of two decades ago found that they “did not report more sexual partners since age 18, more frequent sex, or more partners during the past year than respondents from the earlier era”.
In Britain, young people are having fewer STDs and there are fewer teenage pregnancies. A study by Manchester University found many held traditional values and favoured monogamy. A recent Relate survey showed that 51% of adults in the UK had not had sex in the past month.
Perhaps this is why Maxwell Luthy, a trend predictor at trendwatching.com, believes future dating apps will favour real-world encounters. “Flirting will get physical again,” he said. Instead of scrolling through endless profiles, alerts on devices such as Apple Watch will gently nudge us to make a move on people nearby.
This is already suggested by the rise of dating apps such as Happn and Coffee Meets Bagel, which focus on face-to-face interactions.
Last week Tinder announced a break-up of its own: its chief executive, Christopher Payne, was leaving after just five months, to be replaced by Rad. Both parties suggest they realised they were not a long-term match. Perhaps that is why Tinder was feeling so sensitive about Vanity Fair. By Wednesday it had admitted that it had “overreacted”. But a source close to the company said Tinder was still “really upset” by an article it regarded as “a cruel, deliberate take-down”.
Sex is a numbers game. The more connections you make, the greater your chance of finding someone who likes you back. But if you put it out, there are also plenty of people who will not like what you are offering.
One of the questions raised is whether under-35s who become addicted to instant hook-ups will ever be capable of commitment. I think they will. Eventually we all get sick of “swiping right” on endless photographs. Sometimes more is less. Sometimes all you want is something real.
*******************************
The female view: Scarlett Russell
According to Nancy Jo Sales’s précis of Tinder in Vanity Fair this month, the online app prompts easy access to instant hook-ups and has created a generation of sex-obsessed commitment-phobes. “You’re always prowling, you can swipe a couple hundred people a day,” says a “handsome twentysomething man” she interviewed. The controversial article even made it onto Newsnight last week, when presenter Evan Davis asked a psychologist whether women were “disadvantaged” because of the hit-it-and-quit-it culture Tinder has allegedly invented. Is Sales’s account brutal, or brutally honest? According to my male mates, yes, most men go on Tinder just to hook up. As Andrew shrugged: “Finding a girlfriend on Tinder is like trying to find one in Ibiza.” But, if we’re being brutally honest, it’s not just men exploiting the app for their sexual gain. I think the idea that women are at any disadvantage is entirely patronising. Though most of my single, female friends use Tinder in the hope of meeting “a nice guy who won’t just send me pictures of lubricant,” I know several who are on it purely for casual dates, and some simply for casual sex. Every bloke I know on Tinder has had at least one proposition from a girl he’s “matched” with on the app before they’ve even swapped phone numbers.
You can spot very quickly the men who just want to get laid
But while there’s no doubt Tinder has contributed to today’s throwaway dating culture, it can’t solely be blamed for it. The 50 women Sales interviewed were aged between 19 and 29 – no man over 30 crops up. The fact that twentysomething blokes want to sleep around is hardly Tinder’s fault. And wasn’t it supposed to be Sex and The City that encouraged modern women to get their stiletto-clad kicks in the bedroom back in 1996? I’d imagine that if Sales talked to 50 people aged 30-plus, her findings would be rather different. I know countless couples who met through Tinder, all in their thirties. It’s not always the case, of course – I’ve dated a 27-year-old bloke who owned his own business, only ever had monogamous relationships and was desperate to settle down; and a 35-year-old man with the emotional maturity of a tadpole – but, generally, I think men in their 30s are slightly more comfortable with the idea of shared bank accounts and Sunday afternoons at the playground rather than the pub. This age group was actively dating pre-Tinder, so the concept of meeting people through friends, at work or – gasp! – in public, isn’t totally obsolete, it’s just slightly harder. My friend Josh, 33, who’s engaged to Sarah, 32, says: “I slept around in my 20s without the help of Tinder. When it came along, it enabled us to meet loads of women that obviously resulted in some fun, but I dated loads of girls I actually liked, too – including Sarah.” Single Stuart, 35, adds: “All my mates are now married or settled. Tinder does make sex readily available, but I’m kinda over that. I want a girlfriend.”
I joined Tinder a year ago after a breakup and have had a love/hate relationship with it since. In the vulnerable post-breakup stages it can be a devastating minefield of mixed messages and rejection. I ended up flicking through images searching for a perfect replacement of my ex and, naturally, was bitterly disappointed. A month or so later I hopped back on with no expectations and met several fun, interesting men with whom I had great chat, lovely dates and no pressure of sex whatsoever. You can spot very quickly the men that just want to get laid. They tend to be over-zealous with emojis from early on, before a mis-spelt proposition (“u wanna snuggle!? Lol”) wings its way over. Sometimes they’ll send pictures of their unkempt torso or genitalia. We’ll sigh, maybe laugh and show our mates, then “un-match” them, thus blocking further contact. Last week a profile popped up of my friend’s boyfriend. The next showed nothing but a topless, faceless selfie with a phone number underneath. Despairing, I deleted my account. But, despite that, I still maintain that not all men go on Tinder just to have casual sex. Today’s dating culture, where options are endless and no one has time to wait for pasta to boil, let alone find The One, is ruthless. Tinder certainly has its part to play, but it’s not running the show.
The male view: Dean Kissick
After that Vanity Fair article about dating apps and the “hookup culture” that surrounds them, an unknown Tinder employee tweeted out a storm of protestations, including: “Our data tells us that the vast majority of Tinder users are looking for meaningful connections.” Now as anyone who has ever used the app can tell you, that’s just not true. Tinder is for finding casual sex, and everything about it is casual and its unique selling point is a parade of noncommittal sex partners to be pursued, or disregarded, by such a lackadaisical, non-committal gesture as a swipe. Many men swipe right – approving all before them – until they reach the upper limit of around 100 approvals every 12 hours. One of my mates wakes up and swipes right 100 times every morning, then repeats that in the evening; and occasionally he has a match, and after that a couple of hours of mechanical, loveless sex. Nothing much unusual about that. There’s a lot of fishing for meaningless sex on Tinder; it’s a hobby, like angling – a man sitting on his own in the rain waiting for a rainbow trout.
However, none of this means that the app is tailored to men, or somehow exploitative, because women are interested in casual sex, too, aren’t they? Actually, I believe that women hold all the Tinder-power because they have so many matches, and most men don’t. My female friends have hundreds of matches and so many unanswered messages, whereas I rarely receive anything, and neither do my mates. Our phones lie fallow, with neither chirrup nor ping. It’s lonely, like one of those tragic restaurants that are always empty, and every time you walk by you wish – really wish – that there were customers inside, but there never are. It is rather emasculating like that.
Phones are passed around groups of young women at the pub and absurd messages are sent to strangers
I suppose most inhabitants of the Tinder-verse find what they’re looking for – a meaningless, practical shag – but women have many more options to choose from. Back in 2013 three college students in Orem, Utah, started an account for an imaginary 21-year-old girl called Sammy, portraying her through found photographs of Miss Teen USA. They matched every man in the area and invited them out: “I’m going to yogurt shop called yogurtland tonight at 9 in Orem with some girl friends if you want to meet up).” That night they arrived at the frozen yoghurt sellers to find men, around 70 of them, consumed by lust and confusion, wandering aimlessly, like stags standing around a meadow waiting to fight.
Yesterday I spoke to a German banker – attractive, early 20s – at a birthday party and she explained that Tinder is very reassuring when you’ve just left a relationship, because you realise that there are thousands of other people out there, so much choice, so much opportunity to meet strangers outside your social circles. She also told me that it is frivolous, entertaining, and you can tease lascivious men in the messages, if you like. I’ve observed this, it’s not at all uncommon; phones are passed around groups of young women (sometimes men) at the pub, and absurd messages are sent to strangers for a laugh, and it’s cruel and also highly amusing. All of these apps are, essentially, forms of entertainment.
Vanity Fair’s article begins inside an upmarket bar in Manhattan’s financial district in which everyone is Tindering; their rapt, aroused faces illuminated by the lights of their phones. Why would anyone do this, on an evening out drinking in New York? That’s just crackers! What is wrong with us?! If we weren’t staring into our phones constantly we might fall for a stranger walking past in the street, suddenly imagining what that other person might be like, what life we might lead together – maybe she’s a cellist in the orchestra! – but all this magical speculation is rather undermined when you read a Tinder biography that says something like (an example from just this afternoon): “Travel, treehouses, festivals, food, sun, skiing, sausage dogs, steel drums, bike rides, canal boats, desert islands.” How tiresome, and underwhelming. Because the whole point of falling in love is that you cannot choose who you fall in love with. Your sweet, sweet fantasy might be utterly impractical, pie-in-the-sky, totally unapproachable, but that’s what’s exciting; and Tinder just sucks all the joy and romance out of this.
*******************************
“God,” sighs Marie (Carrie Fisher), having just listened to her best friend’s latest dating nightmare in my very favourite scene in one of my very favourite movies, When Harry Met Sally. “Tell me I’ll never have to be out there again.”
“Tell me I’ll never be out there again” is the audible wail emitting from your latest copy of Vanity Fair, which contains an already much-discussed investigation into the terrifying world of – what, Isis? The darknet? Leicester Square on a Saturday night? Nope, Tinder.
“Tinder and the Dawn of the Dating Apocalypse” screams the headline and, indeed, the article does paint a brutal picture of modernity where men “order up” women, and women despair at men’s boorishness (“I had sex with a guy and he ignored me as I got dressed and I saw he was back on Tinder”). One academic posits the theory that “there have been two major transitions [in dating] in the last four million years. The first was around 10,000 to 15,000 years ago, in the agricultural revolution, when we became less migratory and more settled. And the second major transition is with the rise of the internet.”
There are two responses that come immediately to mind. Has Vanity Fair only just discovered internet dating? And second, surely there have been certain other developments that have changed dating in the western world more, developments without which internet dating wouldn’t exist. Oh you know, things like women’s liberation, the sexual revolution, the pill. But heaven forfend I should question the wisdom of a pithy academic quoted in a glossy magazine.
Anyway Tinder, with adorable aptness, has reacted to this Vanity Fair article like that awful person you met on an internet dating site who bombards you with constant texts demanding to know why you never got back in touch after that one drink. In a rant of 31 tweets – step away from social media after that late-night bottle of white wine, Tinder, we’ve all been there! – Tinder railed against the magazine’s “incredibly biased view” of something it called “#GenerationTinder”, a moniker guaranteed to make anyone despair of modernity even faster than the offending article in question.
We don’t need to spend time on Tinder’s self-defence, in which it styles itself as the saviour of the human race. Instead, I would like to address the idea that dating apps represent the end of intimacy, as the article suggests. Hmmm, the end of intimacy – that phrase sounds familiar
Carrie Bradshaw Sex and the City
‘How the hell did we get into this mess’ Carrie Bradshaw mused to the camera in the first episode of Sex and the City back in 1998. Photograph: Craig Blankenhorn/AP
“Welcome to the age of un-innocence. No one has Breakfast at Tiffany’s and no one has Affairs to Remember. Instead we have breakfast at 7am, and affairs we try to forget as quickly as possible. Self-protection and closing the deal are paramount. Cupid has flown the coop. How the hell did we get into this mess?” mused Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) to the camera in the first episode of Sex and the City. As this was made back in the bleeding cutting edge of 1998, Tinder could not be blamed here. Instead, the programme pointed a manicured finger at women’s liberation and Manhattan weirdness – which, as chance would have it, is precisely what Vanity Fair’s article does too.
The article never says it but the story here is less about Tinder and more about how awful it is to date in New York City – not, you might think, exactly an uncovered issue. It even opens with a scene from “Manhattan’s financial district” to show what modern dating is like, which is like claiming a speed eating competition in Iowa reflects the typical modern attitude to food.
Dating apps may have altered modern dating rituals – namely by adding the term “swipe” to the language of romance – but what Vanity Fair inadvertently shows is that it really hasn’t changed anything about dating in New York, which is where the magazine’s article is set.
At the risk of indulging in the kind of generalisations of which Carrie Bradshaw was so fond, New York dating is a weird mix of frenetic meet-ups and Edith Wharton-like formalised unions of those from similar backgrounds. (For examples of the latter, I refer you to New York Times Vows column, which in one recent and typical entry mentioned eight times that the featured couple had attended Yale.) I dated in New York in my early 30s and can verify that the horrors described in Vanity Fair’s article are very real. But seeing as I lived there before Tinder even existed I, like Carrie Bradshaw, could not blame the dating app for any of them.
Here's the sordid truth. If you're a jerk in real life, you'll be a jerk when you use a dating app
But the real crux of these “Tinder is the end of love!!!!!” articles is something as old as dating itself, and that is an older generation’s horror at the dating rituals of the young. Dating stories always sound horrific to those who have left the scene, because dating is generally horrific and awkward and weird, as it should be – otherwise we’d all marry the first person we ever met for coffee. Add in the twist of dating formats altering between generations, and you have a guaranteed reaction of incomprehension topped with hypocrisy.
To hear former liberals of the 80s and 90s, let alone the 60s, tut-tutting over dating apps is to hear the sweet, sweet sound of self-delusion and selective amnesia. (Intriguingly, the article seems utterly unconcerned about Grindr, the dating app for gay men – only heterosexuals, especially women, are at risk of moral degradation, apparently.) Because while dating methods evolve, the human emotions underpinning them never do, namely, hope, loneliness, a search for validation, a generalised desire for sex, and eventually a specific desire for love.
Here’s the sordid truth about dating apps and human behaviour: if you are a jerk in real life, you will be a jerk when you use a dating app. If you are a decent person who gives people a vague modicum of respect, you won’t be. Internet dating gives single people more options – which I think is a good thing – and this will work for some and it will encourage others to turn into compulsive over-daters. Such are the varieties of human nature.
Finally, if you swipe right on guys who work in Manhattan’s financial district, chances are you’ll end up on a date so bad it will become an anecdote. And your friends will look at you and say, “God, tell me I’ll never be out there again.”
I'm very happily dating a wonderful woman that is the love of my life. However even though I mention that I'm not single, or perhaps because I'm not single, sometimes women will keep hitting on me even though I have specifically said I'm not on the market and not interested.
So I decided to start playing a game I call "Rich but Evil". I could of course just leave instead, but where is the fun in that?
The idea is to drop hints in the conversation that I'm rich, but Evil. As we talk I'll gradually create a character that is more and more wealthy but more and more likely to be the spawn of Satan himself.
So I might say that I work at a pharmaceutical company, but we're holding off on releasing a life saving drug because the less effective version we already make is more profitable.
Or I'll say that I inherited land in Africa including the rights to a diamond mine, but my family has a deal with the local government and we love to kill endangered species.
Or that I own a mega yacht, but I think that Hitler did nothing wrong.
You get the drift. Rich, but Evil.
The goal is to see just how Evil a character I can create before they call it quits. I've found that as long as I keep ramping up the Evil and wealth proportionally they keep playing along.
It's both amusing and horrible.
Online Dating
But the fear that online dating is changing us, collectively, that it's creating unhealthy habits and preferences that aren't in our best interests, is being driven more by paranoia than it is by actual facts.
"There are a lot of theories out there about how online dating is bad for us," Michael Rosenfeld, a sociologist at Stanford who has been conducting a long-running study of online dating, told me the other day. "And mostly they're pretty unfounded."
Rosenfeld, who has been keeping tabs on the dating lives of more than 3,000 people, has gleaned many insights about the growing role of apps like Tinder. They are important today — roughly one of every four straight couples now meet on the Internet. (For gay couples, it's more like two out of every three). The apps have been surprisingly successful -- and in ways many people would not expect.
In fact, by several measures, online dating has proved even more useful — both to individuals and society — than the traditional avenues it has replaced.
I spoke with Rosenfeld to hear more about his research, to learn about the ways in which the rise of online dating is defining modern love, and to talk about the biggest misconceptions people have about online dating. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You have one of the most unique data sets about modern romance. What have you learned about how people date today?
Well, one of the first things you have to know to understand how dating — or really courtship rituals, since not everyone calls it dating — has changed over time is that the age of marriage in the United States has increased dramatically over time. People used to marry in their early 20s, which meant that most dating that was done, or most courting that was done, was done with the intention of settling down right away. And that’s not the life that young people lead anymore. The age of first marriage is now in the late twenties, and more people in their 30s and even 40s are deciding not to settle down.
The rise of phone apps and online dating websites gives people access to more potential partners than they could meet at work or in the neighborhood. It makes it easier for someone who is looking for something very specific in a partner to find what they are looking for. It also helps the people who use the apps by allowing them to enjoy a pattern of regular hookups that don’t have to lead to relationships. I think these things are definitely characteristic of modern romance.
Part of what you have uncovered during your research is how drastic the rise of online dating has been. That's something not everyone thinks this is a good thing. Why are many people skeptical?
The worry about online dating comes from theories about how too much choice might be bad for you. The idea is that if you’re faced with too many options you will find it harder to pick one, that too much choice is demotivating. We see this in consumer goods — if there are too many flavors of jam at the store, for instance, you might feel that it’s just too complicated to consider the jam aisle, you might end up skipping it all together, you might decide it's not worth settling down with one jam.
What do you think?
I don’t think that that theory, even if it’s true for something like jam, applies to dating. I actually don’t see in my data any negative repercussions for people who meet partners online. In fact, people who meet their partners online are not more likely to break up — they don’t have more transitory relationships. Once you’re in a relationship with somebody, it doesn’t really matter how you met that other person. There are online sites that cater to hookups, sure, but there are also online sites that cater to people looking for long-term relationships. What’s more, many people who meet in the online sites that cater to hookups end up in long-term relationships. This environment, mind you, is just like the one we see in the offline world.
There’s no obvious pattern by which people who meet online are worse off. And, conversely, online dating has real benefits. For people who have a hard time finding partners in their day-to-day, face-to-face life, the larger subset of potential partners online is a big advantage for them. For folks who are meeting people everyday—really younger people in their early twenties—online dating is relevant, but it really becomes a powerful force for people in thin dating markets.
In a 2012 paper, I wrote about how among heterosexuals, the people who are most likely to use online dating are the middle-aged folks, because they’re the ones in the thinnest dating market. It’s harder to feel alone when you’re 23, because everyone is a potential partner. But when you get to 40, most people your age are already settled down.
So it’s fair to say that the experience, at least from a bird’s-eye view, isn’t as different as we make it out to be? At the very least, it isn't worse in the way many say?
Yes, I think that’s definitely right.
Look, there’s always a fear that comes with a new technology. The idea that the new technology is going to undervalue some really important social values is real and rampant. People have had that fear about the telephone and the automobile. They have even had it about things like washing machines. If people weren’t going to go to the laundromat to wash their clothes together, how would we spend time together? That was something people were legitimately concerned about. But now that we have washing machines — and know that people still talk to each other — it’s clear that that fear was overblown, that it was unnecessary.
I think the same fears are expressed a lot about the phone apps and Internet dating. The worry is that it's going to make people more superficial. If you look at apps like Tinder and Grinder, they mostly function by allowing people to look at others’ pictures. The profiles, as many know, are very brief. It’s kind of superficial. But it’s superficial because we’re kind of superficial; it’s like that because humans are like that. Judging what someone else looks like first is not an attribute of technology, it’s an attribute of how we look at people. Dating, both modern and not, is a fairly superficial endeavor.
When you walk into a room, whether it’s a singles bar or a church, you’re making these same sorts of judgments, the same kind of subconscious evaluations. It's not the technology that makes people superficial. How someone else looks is important to us — it always has been. The visual cortex of our brain has a very powerful hold on how we interact with the world around us. There’s nothing wrong or really new with prioritizing that.
One of the most interesting things you have found is that online dating, despite its reputation, actually seems to usher people toward marriage in a way real life dating doesn't. Can you elaborate?
That's right. One of the things I have found out as part of my research is that people who meet online actually progress to marriage faster than people who meet offline. I think this is happening for many reasons.
No. 1: You can be more selective because you have a bigger group to select from. When you’re using online dating, and there’s the possibility of selecting on characteristics that you know you’re going to like, you’re going to know a lot more about people before a first date.
No. 2: There tends to be extensive communication before the first date. A lot the information-gathering that courtship is really about is sped up by the information you can gather from the profiles and from a person before actually meeting them.
What’s the difference in terms of the timetable — between how quickly people marry through online and real-life dating?
If you look at the couples who stay together, about half of the couples who meet through online dating have transitioned to marriage by year four of the relationship. If you look at people who didn’t meet through online dating, the time frame is much longer — half of those couples transition to marriage by year 10 of the relationship. So there’s a substantial difference.
This is because there are couples who meet online who get married right away. I mean, that happens with people who meet offline, too. But when you look at the data, it’s just more common online. And I think that’s because online you do this big, calculated search for your soul mate, and find someone else who agrees and then transition to marriage much more quickly.
Is there also a bit of a self-selection process? Is it possible that people who meet online are marrying faster because they tend to be more marriage-driven from the start?
Yeah, I mean that certainly could be. I think it’s likely that people who look to online dating sites are more intent on finding a partner, especially those using sites like Match.com and eHarmony.
What’s interesting is that that kind of undermines the image that critics of the new technology try to put on the new technology, which is that online dating is all about hookups and superficiality. It turns out that the Internet dating world replicates the offline dating world in a lot of ways, and even exceeds it in others. There are a lot of places you can go where people are looking for more long-term relationships, and there are a lot of places you can go where people are looking for something else.
It’s not just superficiality that the Internet is about. People looking for longer-term relationships exclusively tend to choose the dating websites where profiles are more lengthy and text-driven. If you're looking for a life partner, online dating is pretty good for that.
So there’s a misconception. In aggregate, it’s actually doing a lot of good.
The need for love, romance, relationships and sex — these are pretty basic human needs. And the ability to match people who would have otherwise not found each other is a powerful outcome of the new technology.
About 75 percent of the people who meet online had no prior connection. They didn’t have friends in common. They’re families didn’t know each other. So they were perfect strangers. And prior to the Internet, it was kind of hard for perfect strangers to meet. Perfect strangers didn’t come into contact in that intimate sort of way. One of the real benefits of Internet search is being able to find people you might have commonalities with but otherwise would never have crossed paths with.
If we’re meeting perfect strangers in ways we weren’t before, is there anything to be said about online dating and the bringing together of people from different races, cultures, religions?
One of the most interesting questions about the Internet as a sort of social intermediary is whether it brings different kinds of people together more than would have been brought together before. If you think about the traditional technology of family, which was the marriage broker of the past, the family was very selective in terms of its reliance on introducing you to people of the same race, religion and class as potential partners. What’s more, if you were marrying young — at the age of 20 or younger — you really could only marry people from within your close network, from your neighborhood. These were the only people you knew, and they were probably very much like you.
The question about Internet dating specifically is whether it undermines the tendency we have to marry people from similar backgrounds. The data suggests that online dating has almost as much a pattern of same-race preference as offline dating, which is a little surprising because the offline world has constraints of racial segregation that the online world was supposed to not have. But it turns out online dating sites show that there’s a strong preference for same-race dating. There’s pretty much the same pattern of people partnering with folks of the same race.
What’s unclear is how much of this tendency online is really a result of preference and how much is due to the websites feeding you potential partners that are of the same race as you. These websites use algorithms to try to figure out who you like. And if they assume you’re going to prefer people of your own race, they might feed you a steady diet of potential matches of the same race. Since the algorithms tend to be proprietary — they don’t share them — we don’t know whether this is skewing the data.
There are other aspects in which online dating leads to different results than offline dating. One is that people are more likely to date someone of another religion. I think that’s because you can’t tell what someone’s religion is from their picture. On online dating, the picture marks you with gender and race pretty clearly, but religion is something that you have to dig through to figure out.
The other big difference is that same-sex couples are much more likely to meet their partner online. In my data, about 22 percent of straight couples met online. For gay couples, it’s about 67 percent. Online is tremendously more efficient for gays and lesbians. And that’s because it’s much harder for them to identify potential partners offline.
What about socioeconomic class? Are people more likely to partner with people of different socioeconomic backgrounds when they meet online?
In my data, it’s pretty much the same. The preference for partners of similar socioeconomic and education backgrounds has always been there, but it’s never been an overwhelmingly strong preference. It’s never been the case that people who married someone of a greater or lesser education level were ostracized in the way other attributes might have been.
From what I can tell, there’s a little bit of a tendency for people — especially women — to prefer people who claim to make a lot of money. But the truth is that most profiles don’t report income, and in the income ranges where most people live there isn’t that much of a difference in profile attractiveness. Whereas in the actual attractiveness of their photo, there is. So social class turns out to be kind of a secondary factor.
I want to bring back the jam analogy, if that’s okay. When there are more jams to choose from, do people end up trying more jams than they would otherwise before figuring out which flavor they like best? In other words, are people dating several people at once more often now because of online dating?
Relationships are different from jam in that when you get involved with somebody, they have feelings too, they have a claim on you more than the jam does, right? The jam doesn’t care if you try another jam next week, but if you form a relationship with somebody, they would or at least might care.
I haven’t seen that the rise of this technology has made people more skittish about commitment. One of the things that we know about relationships in the United States, contrary, I think, to what many people would guess, is that the divorce rate has been going down for a while. They have been going down since the early 1990s, when they hit their peak. So during the Internet era, during the phone app and online dating era, it’s not as if people are leaving their marriages and going back out into the dating market. Even people who are regular online dating users, even people who are not looking to settle down, recognize that being in the constant churn finding someone new is hard work.
It’s not all sunshine in the hookup culture. But I don’t think that it defines online dating. That’s not what the data say. The declining divorce rate is among many signs that the rise of this technology is not ruining relationships.
I don't know about multiple partners, specifically, but I wouldn't be surprised if that were true. The people whom I have interviewed about Tinder and Grinder, some of them are on a steady diet of short relationships, where they meet a person, hook up, and then the next weekend they’re looking for somebody else. Part of what’s cool about the phone apps is that it’s not only easier to meet people, it’s easier to block people and then get them out of your space. There’s a sort of safety enhancement that I think allows people to stop someone else from following them around. It makes hookup culture easier.
You speak to a lot of people as part of your research. You hear a lot of their stories. Have any stood out that somehow encapsulate the spirit of modern dating? Or is there something you've learned that others don't seem to appreciate?
I think we have a tendency to assume that settling down is what everybody wants. That’s an assumption that’s built into the way in which we narrate people’s life histories and the way Hollywood crafts movie endings, where people end up together. They might not get married, as they tended to in most older movies, but at the very least the male protagonist and the female protagonist tend to be united by the end. That kind of theme, we assume, is what everybody wants.
There’s a little bit of a tendency now to put off settling down. I don’t see that as problematic. Nor, as it happens, have I found it to be the consequence of online dating.
Lonely Middle-Aged Women
I think a lot about middle-aged women online. They can be uniquely vulnerable. Young and youngish women grew up with the internet and can broadly navigate it and look after themselves. Parents of much younger girls are aware of its dark corners and can adjust access accordingly. But a small subsection of the middle-aged (and early elderly) find that none of this stuff comes naturally. Their online activity is punctuated with cries of “Oops, where’s it gone?” and “Oh dear, I think I’ve broken it.” When you say: “Look, do it like this and then that won’t happen,” they laugh and refuse to listen. The computer is, to them, like mysterious dark magic. They can skitter around its periphery, but remain wilfully baffled by the rest.
These women are in a minority, obviously: there are zillions of middle-aged geeks, and lots of them are running businesses from their kitchen tables. But I worry terribly about the minority in the context of online dating. There are two court cases that I think about all the time. In one, a woman doctor and her elderly mother were swindled out of £250,000 by a man the woman met online. The other is still in progress, so I can’t write about it in any detail, but it involves a man charged with the alleged murder of his partner, whom he also met online. There are dozens of these cases every year, and many more that go unreported, I suspect, for reasons of shame.
Loneliness and naivety are the most atrocious combination. Throw in embarrassment — because, to these women, meeting a man online is still somehow peculiar and desperate — and you have the makings of a disaster. Men who prey on lonely women are nothing new, it’s just they now have this vast pool of potential victims, which they can access from their sofa.
What I keep returning to as I mull this over on my dog walks is that, at some point, the women in some of these cases must have known, or at least had an inkling. One day, brushing their teeth, or sitting on the Tube, or lying in bed, they must have thought, “This isn’t quite right”, or “That thing he said doesn’t make sense”, or “That’s the third time he’s asked me for large amounts of money”. The other thing I can’t bear is that in many of these cases, the women are often “genteel”.
There’s a 20th-century word for you. A 20th-century way of being, too: modest, unassuming, horrified by even the suggestion of ostentation. Spartan, tidy kitchens, pristine sitting rooms, ready for guests that seldom come. Crosswords, marmalade, slippers. Meagre income, but a healthy nest egg that it would be bad form to dip into.
And, sometimes, galloping loneliness. And because the fear of being alone — of dying alone, unloved, in a single bed with hospital corners — trumps all other fears, those women brushing their teeth or sitting on the Tube or lying in bed push away the uncomfortable thought, or talk themselves out of it. So what if he’s asked them for money again? He’s clearly going through a difficult patch. It’s fine. It’s even nice that he felt able to ask, and nice that they are able to help. And it’s so lovely to be loved.
Lots of people do indeed meet their partners online. But my God, the horror of the alternative scenario. I don’t have any solutions — except that many of us know a woman like this, and that it wouldn’t hurt to be more stickybeaked. To point out that the silver fox with the Ferrari traditionally goes for the 30-year-old, rather than the postmenopausal. To insist on meeting this wonderful new man. To ask pointy questions if, as is so often the case, he seems oddly friendless and appears to have no family. To loudly sound the alarm if he urgently needs to borrow money. There’s not much point in being worldly if you don’t do anything useful with it, and sometimes nosiness is an extension of friendship.
Icebreakers
To all but the most enthusiastic few, icebreakers are just a necessary evil — even though they’re supposed to dispel the awkwardness, forced getting-to-know-you games often feel like they’re just making an awkward event even more so, whether you’re at freshman orientation or a corporate retreat. So why do we insist on beginning so many situations by suffering through trust walks and elaborate name games? Is there any value to making a roomful of people miserable with false cheer?
Psychologist Anton Villado is adamant that the answer is yes, and that icebreakers don’t have to be pleasant to be effective. Formerly a professor at Rice University, Villado now consults for restaurant owners on how to improve company culture — a job, he says, that involves plenty of icebreakers. (His favorite is a game he calls “pick-a-penny”: everyone grabs a coin out of a bag and explains what they were up to the year it was minted.)
A well-done icebreaker, he says, will accomplish three things. The first is calming any nerves people may have about being in a new situation. “Everyone has this anxiety about speaking up in a group for the first time in a new setting. Icebreakers force people to speak up when the content of the response doesn’t really matter, so that eliminates or reduces that anxiety,” he explains. “There’s no right or wrong answers. You can tell me what your number-one thing to take on a desert island would be, and I’m not going to critique you on it.”
The second purpose is modeling behavior: The icebreaker sets the tone for how the rest of the session is going to go. Is the facilitator cool with interrupting and shouting things out? Then both are probably fine in the main event, too. Are they rigid about taking turns and waiting to be called on? It’ll probably be a more structured afternoon. If the icebreaker is being led by someone you’ll be interacting with over the long term — say, an RA — it may be a good indicator of what you’re in for. (They’re also a good way to model your own behavior, so to speak: Do you want to be seen as the funny one? Use your intro to tell a joke. Want to come off as smart or accomplished? Share a fact that reflects that. It’s an opportunity to control the first impression.)
And the third and most important purpose is encouraging people to talk about themselves. “That’s the foundation of relationships: self-disclosure,” he says. In new relationships, “we engage in self-disclosure over some period of time — typically lots of time — and icebreakers are simply meant to hasten that. They’re this opportunity to take what might happen naturally over several days or several hours and compress it into a few minutes.” Research backs this up: In one 1997 study, researchers were able to spark feelings of closeness between two volunteers by asking them to share things about themselves. At the end of the experiment, the pairs who engaged in self-disclosure described themselves as significantly closer than the pairs that engaged in small talk.
Susan Mohammed, a professor of industrial and organizational psychology at Penn State, says that the key to getting something out of an icebreaker is managing your expectations: At most, it’s just a start. It’s more like an ice-thawer. No one expects you to become best friends based on the two minutes you spend interviewing the person sitting to your left. No one expects you to trust someone with real, important things just because they caught you in a trust fall. “Icebreakers are generally a first step and they can be valuable in … getting people to know each other,” she says. “But in terms of group cohesion or deep levels of trust or psychological safety or an open climate, it’s just not going to be enough.”
Still, something has to get the ball rolling. “One of our theories of group formation, it starts with forming — that members have to get to know one another,” she says. That theory, known as Tuckman’s model, breaks group development into four stages: forming, in which group members begin to build trust, create a team identity, and start setting collective goals; storming, in which individual differences and conflicts emerge; norming, in which the group figures out how to resolve those conflicts and creates a greater sense of cohesion; and performing, in which everyone works together toward a common purpose. (There’s also a fifth, not-quite-rhyming phase, alternately known as mourning or adjourning, for when a group disbands.) Especially in a professional setting, she adds, “forming” can also be a way of building a transactive memory system — getting a sense of who knows what, so you know whom to rely on for different scenarios or parts of a project.
And even when the bonds it creates are superficial and temporary, both Villado and Mohammed say that an icebreaker can help to foster a sense of “psychological safety,” or an atmosphere in which people feel free to speak up — to question, criticize, say something out-there — without fear of being ostracized. “Having people do weird and crazy stuff, or step out and do something wild — having people feel kind of uncomfortable, basically — would begin to help foster that,” Mohammed says. You may hate every second of it, but you’re not the only one undergoing humiliation. If everyone in the room has to tell their life story in a silly voice, or mime their favorite thing to do on weekends, at least you all look stupid together.
Even the lowest, most cringe-inducing depths of silliness can still have a point, in other words. But the primary reason people hate icebreakers, Villado offers, is that most of them lack that sense of purpose. “I think part of it is people perceive that they’re not well thought out,” he says. “And nobody likes to sit through a meeting, a training, whatever it is, where it’s not purposeful, where someone hasn’t put time and effort into it.” At work, that’s time that could be used to cross more pressing things off your to-do list; in class, well, it’s hard to listen to the 15th person drone through name/major/hometown and not think those minutes would be better spent on sleeping in.
Another reason, Villado says, “is that we see what you’re trying to do. If I put you in a room with someone and say, ‘Get to know this person,’ it seems contrived and planned.”
“And of course it is. It is planned,” he adds. “But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work.” He compares it to students’ reviews of their teachers, which have been shown to have little bearing on how much the students actually learned in the class. Similarly, “even if people don’t really enjoy the relationship-building that we’re trying to stimulate, trying to enhance here, it still works,” he says.
And one way to make people a little more engaged, Mohammed says, is to outline right off the bat what they’ll be doing, explain the goal of the icebreaker — are they there to build trust? learn something new about a person? figure out roles for a team? — and to reiterate those same points again once it’s all done.
“People want to know why this isn’t just a waste of time, or some goofy activity with no purpose,” she says. “Sometimes you do these and there’s no feedback [about] what happened here, what was the use of this, why was this worth investing in … to kind of debrief a little bit about where this went, and why it was valuable, can make a big difference.” You still don’t have to like it. But knowing why you’re stuck in this room with these strangers may make the whole thing just a little less painful. And anyway, if you do it right, at least you only have to do it once.