"The True Cost of a Date"

Let's just call this a change of pace, a respite, a bit of light humor for the economically inclined. It am referring to Ian Stanczyk's calculation of the true cost of a date. Link here. Via Simoleon Sense.

Stanczyk's focus is gainfully employed twentysomethings. He is not addressing the way the dating culture has been replaced by the hook up culture on college campuses. But it is not outrageous to think that it may have an application there too.

Economics has recently made important contributions to our general understanding of human behavior. More so than has psychology, in my view.

However much Stanczyk presents his study tongue-in-cheek, that is not a reason to dismiss it. After all, are we really all that confident that we know exactly what produces cultural shifts? And are we really ready to declare that there is not an important economic influence in the advent of hooking up and the diminished importance of dating?

Anyway, these are just some thoughts to mull over.

Friends with Benefits

If a hook-up goes well, a couple may decide to make a habit of it. Then, they become friends with benefits. By agreement they have occasional sexual congress, for the purpose of pure pleasure. Nothing about the arrangement implies that there is or will be a relationship.

Call it mutually agreed upon exploitation. He uses her for sex; she uses him for sex. They have agreed that sexual pleasure is an end itself. They imagine that because they have decided that their fun has no further meaning, it has no further meaning.

Clearly, friends with benefits is not the same as a man taking a mistress or a woman having a lover. Both of those arrangements are relationships. There is love and affection, even a real commitment, beyond the occasional romp.

Before modern feminism merged with some very peculiar ethical thinking, precious few women would have allowed themselves to be used for sex without receiving something of an emotional commitment.

What do I mean by peculiar ethical thinking? If you believe that two people who have agreed to exploit each other are therefore, by their act of consent, making the arrangement less exploitative, then you are fooling yourself.

If friends with benefits is your pleasure, be my guest. But at least understand the situation for what it is: a trick to engage women in sex without emotion or commitment.

And don't be fooled by the fact that the woman is enjoying the sex. Or that she feels that she is using him. She may very well be using him as a sexual object, but that does not obviate the fact that she is allowing him to use her. Being a sexual object is being a sexual object. You do not become less of a sexual object because you are taking turns at using each other.

How can you tell the difference? Simply, by listening to the testimony of people who are involved in these arrangements.

Take Lizzy, who wrote to Sarah Walsh's site, HookingUpSmart. Link here. If you scroll down the comments you will find some of my own remarks. The topic and the discussion were very engaging, indeed.

Lizzy found herself in a situation that is best called friends with benefits. She and a young man of her acquaintance got together on occasion, mostly for sex, sometimes for a couple of days, and had what must be called a very good time.

Both Lizzy and the man understood that theirs was not a relationship and that it was not going to become a relationship. The man had stated as much, clearly and explicitly.

Yet, Lizzie allowed herself to draw a different conclusion. She observed the quality of their interactions, the quality of their affection for each other, the quality of the sex they were having, the quality of their togetherness... and she allowed herself to entertain the idea that it was going to become something more, a long term relationship.

By her reasoning, if it felt like a relationship, it had to be a relationship.

Her musings lasted until she discovered that her friend had moved on to another woman. Now, Lizzy asked an important, even a crucial question: How could she have so thoroughly misread the situation? When it comes to the male mind: How's a girl to know?

In her post Sarah Walsh begins with the obvious point, a point that is so obvious that we all overlook it: she should have listened to his words, not her heart. The man was doing what he said he would do; no more, no less.

Nothing mysterious there; no need for further exegesis. He meant what he said and said what he meant.

We all say that we are good listeners, but if you think you are, ask yourself whether you take people at their word. Do you try to find hidden meanings, their true feelings, feelings so deeply hidden that they do not even know about them? If so, you are not listening. You are interpreting.

Walsh then offers an intriguing metaphor. For a man some women are an exotic vacation. They stay for a while, enjoy themselves fully, and then pack up and go home.

Her point is well taken. Men do distinguish between women who are more like an exotic vacation and women who feel more like home. And keep in mind that exotic and homey do not, by definition, coexist.

Later in the comments section, Walsh buttresses her point by reporting a conversation she had had with a male college student. He was explaining the difference between women he would hook up with and women he might want to settle down with.

He and his friends were happy to hook up with girls who were full of themselves, and who were in love with their own basic hotness. By his reasoning, hooking up with them was going to be a humbling experience. Almost like therapy for their narcissism.

To him and his friends, girls they respected were not hook-up material. If they saw a girl as a genuinely good person, they would not want to hook up with her. In a way they were saving her for a long term commitment.

Meantime, the lesson I would draw from Lizzy's experience is simple: when it comes to romance men and women do not speak the same language. If a woman judges a man as though he were speaking her language, she will be more likely to misjudge his intentions.

How can she read his language? One of the commenters on Walsh's site pointed in the right direction: by examining his public behavior. She might think that spending a weekend between the sheets is a relationship high, but it might simply mean that he is not comfortable being out with her, or else that he cannot afford to take her out.

And Walsh mentions another important point. Is he ready for a committed relationship?

How can you tell whether a man is ready for a relationship? Simply, by seeing how he is established in his career. Is he on a positive career path? Is he ready to take on the responsibilities entailed in providing for a wife and children?

If he is unemployed or temping or looking for direction the chances are very good that he is not going to involve himself in any attachment that would lead to a long term relationship.

Admittedly, Lizzy might have learned in Women's Studies that the role of male provider is a social construct whose time has come and gone. Still, somewhere in the reptilian depths of the male psyche... it lives!

You discount it at your peril.

Someone will be thinking here that a woman might not really care about the man's career prospects. She loves him and is willing to take him as he is, unemployment and all. Should she tell him?

I vote against it. It sounds like adding insult to injury. No woman has every gotten very far by insulting male pride.

Are there other ways of knowing a man's intentions? She can begin, as one of the commenters on Walsh's site said, by observing the way he treats her in public.

Does she hang out with him and his friends? Has she met his family? Is she invited to family functions? And finally: How well does she get along with his mother?

A man may be in love with a woman, but if his friends do not like her, if he does not enjoy being out with her, and if his family would not accept her as his mate... the chances are better than average that she will remain a friend with benefits.

A relationship involves much more than two people sharing intimate, affectionate moments. It is a social connection; it involves friends and family. Each person has to be a good fit with the other person's world.

No sensible person, given the choice, will sacrifice friends and family for true love. If anyone offers to do it for you, you should run, as quickly as you can, for the exits.

The Road to Marriage

Maybe you've seen the old cartoon. A man driving through the countryside stops to ask directions from a farmer. The farmer leans toward the driver and says: "Come to think of it; you can't get there from here."

That was my first thought when I read Hannah Seligson's article: "Destination: Marriage. Route: Anybody's Guess." Link here.

At its best, her article reflects the state of the current dating scene. It does not offer solutions or directions. More importantly, it makes a point I have been at pains to articulate: social, culture, and sexual revolutions have left women disoriented and confused, not knowing how to attain the goal that most of them still want: marriage.

Seligson does not have a solution, but she is happy to cast blame. First, on society. Second, on men.

Surely, it is better than taking personal responsibility for one's own actions.

In Seligson's words: "... society's messages to young women are so mixed that the path to that goal [i.e. marriage] has been obscured and, at times, blocked."

Of course, she does not ask which messengers are mixing the messages and fostering an anarchic dating environment.

She continues to say that young women have learned from bitter experience that: "dating-- and getting into a relationship that leads to marriage-- is at turns ambiguous, arduous, perplexing, and often heartbreaking."

Seligson believes that in the "Wild West of dating" young women are looking for rules, anything that would "order the chaos," but can find none.

Apparently, there are no signposts and no guidance, so young women are being cast into a chaotic dating scene where they are being forced to make up their own rules as they go along.

Seligson is correct to note that things would be much better if there were a book outlining the rules for dating, especially for dating that would lead to marriage. As it happens, there is such a book. It is called "The Rules." As I have blogged, it was all the rage a few years back, and was attacked and discredited by people who prefer anarchy to rules, who prefer ad hoc arrangements to formal institutions like marriage. Link here.

The anarchic dating world was the creation of contemporary feminism. If you are going to denounce the message, you would do well to identify the messenger.

After blaming society, Seligson is happy to blame men. She is joined by Jenna Goudreau who writes in Forbes Woman today that marriage is: "the last frontier of the women's movement." Link here.

Apparently, men are to blame. For not being sufficiently attuned to feminist concerns. And for not living up to the stereotype that feminism has cast them in. One would be hard put not to conclude that men are being blamed for not being sufficiently docile and subservient.

Since feminism is an ideology, it wants women to have it all on their own terms. But when have you ever heard of a marriage in which one partner had everything on his or her own terms? At best, this is an unattainable ideal, one that actively discourages women from developing the negotiation skills that are essential to a happy marriage. At worst, it is a formula for domestic tyranny, one that will always end badly.

Let's follow Dr. Helen Smith and call this by its rightful name: misandry. As Dr. Helen has long explained, when men are constantly criticized and excoriated by the culture, when they are punished disproportionately in divorce courts, why would they ever want to get married?

Those who criticize men might think that they are trying to improve male behavior, but Dr. Helen is correct when she says that men hear the message as a red flag warning them against marriage.

How do these ideas infiltrate the culture? Read Dr. Helen's post on Suze Orman for a truly extraordinary picture of advanced male-bashing. Link here.

Orman, who has no real training in marriage counseling, is telling a woman on national television that she must divorce her husband. Orman makes no attempt to disguise her prejudice, and this means that she assumes that her view is the conventional and accepted wisdom. She does not even think that she is saying anything controversial.

When Lori Gottlieb recommends that women settle for a less than perfect man, would it not be reasonable to say that if men are as bad as the "women's movement" has made them out to be, a woman has no choice but to settle.

If there is no such thing as a good man, then a woman's task is to find the one who is the least bad.

And be assured, when a woman is prone to see the worst in men she will almost certainly find confirmation for her beliefs.

If you do not believe that there are any good men, you are not likely to recognize one when you see him. If he appears to be a good person, the culture would have taught you to assume that he is a sham, a simulation of human goodness. Your task will be to find fault, to criticize anything you can, to pick him apart.

Don't be surprised if this does not bring out his best. It will tend to induce him to act badly. Not so much because he has been repressing his essential wickedness, but because he will not want to disappoint your expectations!

I don't want to leave this on a pessimistic. Just because Seligson is clueless about how to get to from dating to marriage does not mean that I might not have a few helpful ideas for young women. After all, I spend some of my professional time doing relationship coaching.

First suggestion: act like you respect yourself. As everyone knows, the path from Girls Gone Wild to conjugal bliss is long and arduous. I am not saying that it is impossible, just that it is very difficult. If you want to get married, do not accumulate too many experiences that you will have to live down.

Second suggestion: if you have had a bit too much fun in your past, don't share it. It is none of his business. He does not want to hear about it. If he tells you that he wants to know, and if he swears on the Bible that he must know your past, he still does not want to hear about it.

Third suggestion: act like you respect men. If you do, most of the time they will be more than happy to be respectful toward you. And they will be far more likely to want to marry you.

Fourth suggestion: if your man is acting like a child, ask yourself whether you are treating him like a child. If you give a man most of the advantages of marriages without requiring any commitment, then you should not complain if he is happy to comply. As I said, he will not want to disappoint you.

Fifth suggestion: cultivate in yourself the virtues that you want to find in a man. If you want a man to be more responsible, be more responsible yourself. If you want a man to commit to you, honor all of your commitments to him. A woman who cannot show up on time when she swears she will do so cannot expect her man to see her as someone he can trust to honor a larger commitment.

Welcome to the Harem

Does anyone really get it? Even the young people who are engaged in the courtship dance called dating are often dazed and confused. Those of us who offer relationship coaching know how to help people find their footing in its shifting sands, but still, as a sociocultural phenomenon, the modern dating scene is chaotic.

Since I like simple explanations, I was drawn to Alex Williams' New York Times article about the gender imbalance on many college campuses. Link here.

If the ratio of women to men is 60%/40% this will obviously have an effect on dating and relationship behavior. One effect, as Williams points out, is that with men in such short supply those few remaining men have become empowered.

They can do what they want, when they want, with whom they want... and women, unhappy about being alone, go along because they feel that they have no other choice. If the choice is between hooking up with an anonymous male and going home alone, no small number of women are choosing the former, on the grounds that something is better than nothing.

In a related article, Charlotte Allen writes in The Weekly Standard that there is: "a buyer's market in women who are up for just about anything." Link here.

This feels crass and slightly exaggerated, but if Williams is correct, then it appears that on many college campuses and large cities there is simply "a buyer's market for women."

How did things get to the point where women have been disempowered in relationships, to the point where they are being induced to act out adolescent male fantasies, regardless of their wishes or needs?

Of course, it is reasonable to cast some responsibility in the direction of feminist thinkers like Naomi Wolf who told young women that they should explore their sexuality fully, because promiscuity was a concept invented by the patriarchy to control women and to keep them in their place.

And let us not forget Carol Gilligan and her effort to make schools into places that would enhance girls' self-esteem, even at the expense of boys. Gilligan's plan has been so successful that colleges are now suffering a severe gender imbalance.

Irony of ironies, these fully self-confident females are obliged to act desperate if they want to have dates or relationships.

The gender disparity has granted men so much power that women's voices, their needs, their interests become trivial psychocultural excrescences.

Of course, neither Gilligan nor anyone else in the self-esteem enhancement movement ever said that girls should be glorified at the expense of boys. Reality, however, said otherwise.

If girls and boys excel at different skills and if you want to enhance the self-esteem of girls in a competitive environment you need merely reinvent the curriculum to favor skills in which girls excel.

The more you value touchy-feely confessional exercises, the more you will grant girls a certain type of self-esteem. If you rewrite history to diminish warfare, competition, and heroics you will find that boys feel increasingly alienated from school. And alienated boys do not do as well as their fathers and grandfathers.

Boys retreat into their video games, sports, and fight clubs. In North Carolina, as the Times reports, they often forgo college to join the military, the one place where they will have a chance to become men.

Meanwhile back in college girls are learning to hook up. But, as Charlotte Allen points out, they are not hooking up with just anyone. Not just any man is going to succeed at the hook-up game.

A group of ersatz alpha males seems to have garnered a disproportionate number of women, while the beta and gamma males, nice guys, guys who would make good husbands or boy friends, are left out of the game.

Naturally, they want to be in the game. They do not esteem themselves and are not esteemed by women for their good qualities, so they decide that they want to become pick-up artists. Much of Allen's article is about how normal men, seeing women blithely go home with pick-up artists, decide that they must devalue their good qualities and emulate these ersatz alpha males.

The interesting part of all this is that a woman who engages in a casual sexual encounter with an ersatz alpha male, only to return to the comfort of the sisterhood, is acting like she is part of a harem.

What else does it mean to be one of many members of a pasha's harem?

This explains some of the peculiar aspects of the current hook-up scene.

Women are attracted to men who seem to have had many women, because that is a sign of being an alpha male. Inexperienced men, who who are awkward and shy around women, need not apply for pick-up artist or alpha male status.

Many of these men are not especially good lovers. This also becomes a sign of alpha maledom. If you are a pasha and can have any woman you want you do not need to be especially attentive to the woman's needs. You are not going to see her in the morning anyway.

Women learn to tolerate men who never call them again, because that too is a sign that he's an alpha male, that he is never going to be hers, but that she belongs to his harem.

Of course, as Charlotte Allen points out, these pick-up artists are not really alpha males; they are ersatz. They are playing roles; they are imitation alpha males; they are most often gamma or delta males whose special skill is acting out a woman'a fantasy.

The dating scene is an enacted fiction; it is about men pretending to be alpha males and women pretending to be part of a harem. Talk all you want about female empowerment, the consequence of the reforms that feminists promoted has been female disempowerment and female desperation.

Because women would not be acting this way if they were not desperate about their chances of having boyfriends. Worse yet, under the aegis of Naomi Wolf and her ilk, they mistake their desperation for desire and feel that they must act on what they believe is their heart's desire.

Sadly, they will often discover that they have not been liberated, but have been gotten so involved in living a myth that their sexual desires are no longer real.

The New Sex and/or Dating Game, Part 2

Last week I offered some remarks on the newest aspects of the New York sex and/or dating scene. Link here.

My remarks were occasioned by a New York Magazine article about its "Sex Diaries" column, a two-year old column where New Yorkers can offer diary entries chronicling a weeks worth of hook-ups and other sexual acts.

Today, David Brooks offers his take on the piece, and they are a worthy contribution to the discussion. Link here.

Brooks describes a world that has, perhaps foolishly, discarded traditional courtship rituals, but has not yet found a replacement. The result is a combination of anomie and anarchy.

In Brooks's words: "People once lived within a pattern of being, which educated the emotions, guided the temporary toward the permanent and linked everyday urges toward higher things. The accumulated wisdom of the community steered couples as they tried to earn each other's commitment."

Nicely put. The absence of norms, the absence of rules, the sense that no one really knows the game that is being played... these make it far more difficult for young people, as Brooks adds, to build trust. And without trust, without confidence in something resembling consistent behaviors, how can you conduct a relationship or make a life together.

Of course, out of this jumble people create a new game with a new set of rules. The "Sex Diaries" chronicle this process. And yet, the new game is more concerned with self-gratification and mutual exploitation than it is with finding a way to bring two people into a meaningful connection.

The New Sex and/or Dating Game

Those of you who do not live in New York may not have read New York Magazine's "Sex Diaries."

This feature allows an everyday twenty-something New Yorker to share his or her week's worth of sexual and/or dating experiences.

The columns have some entertainment value, but since the writers are self-selected, it would be a stretch to draw larger conclusions from their testimonials. Moreover, real people engaging in real conversations rarely offer the level of explicit detail that are a staple of these columns. I suspect that this applies even to twenty-somethings.

Dare I say that today's younger generation has an experience of sex that seems to be wildly at odds with that of those of us who are of a more advanced age. For this reason, the rest of us are intrigued by what is going on among today's youth, almost as though it were something out of science fiction.

Now New York Magazine assigned Wesley Yang to read through all of the columns and to attempt something like a psychosocial analysis. He did a great job. I recommend his cover article to your attention, no matter what your age or proclivities. Link here.

If you are a twenty-something lost in New York's sexual funhouse, you probably have even more of a reason to cast a dispassionate eye on this phenomenon.

As I read it, Yang is painting a portrait of modern anomie. He identifies the anxiety and despair that accompany the effort to live out your sexuality as though it were more virtual than real.

What could possibly be problematical about this free and open expression of human sexuality? For one thing, as Yang puts it, there are too many choices, too many opportunities for too many sexual experiences with a maddeningly large number of possible partners.

Too many choices create a fear of making the wrong choice, accompanied by a fear of not being chosen. When the opportunities are boundless, your duty to fulfill your responsibilities becomes erased by the chance that you might find someone or something better. I am surely not taking any conceptual liberties to say that the situation throws young people into a state of anomie.

From there Yang explains that players in this game have to learn what to do with the emotional component that would accompany normal human interactions. Emotion seems to be an unwanted intruder, one that drags people away from the virtual world back into the real world, generally destroying the fun.

To become an avatar you must sacrifice sincerity, emotion, and vulnerability. Otherwise you will be expelled from the game.

We should not be surprised, as Yang puts it, that this virtual reality has taken over the lives of many participants, to the point that it has produced something like: "an internet-enabled agoraphobia."

How did young people get to this point? Yang credits pornography, or better, the fact that young people today get their sex education from porn. Young people today did not learn about sex in the steamy backseat of someone's car.

Moreover, if porn is the new norm for sex, then it makes sense that young people would consider porn something to live up to, to emulate, to imitate.

And given that porn involves full exposure, that complete immodesty is not only possible, but desirable, young people have come to believe that modesty is bad because it equals repression.

Thus, the sex diarists make it a point to be far more explicit than anyone would be in normal conversation. Yang is most intrigued by the women who write in, openly and honestly, expressing an attitude that suggests that they do not value their intimacy very highly. Where women in the past have found pornography and promiscuity to be inimical to their interests, female sex diarists seem to have no such feelings.

Yang is also correct to see that people are engaging in these sexual experiences for the entertainment value. They make for good stories and almost inaugurate a new literary genre, one that owes its inspiration to the language of texting.

In this hook-up culture sex is virtual and human connection is hanging on for dear life. People who play this new sex and/or dating game do not connect on anything like a human level. This produces what Yang calls "separation anxiety." I like his use of irony and would simply add that your need to connect with other human beings is not negated by your willingness to act as though you had become your own avatar. Technology has not yet caused the repeal of human nature.

Yang's last point is poignant and insightful. The people who are playing these games are in despair of ever being able to love.

Despite it all, the sex diarists seem still to be searching for love and relationships. The problem is that the game has wounded them so often and so deeply that they despair of ever finding it.

Finding love involves healing the wounds of this new game. To do that, they would do well to start getting real.

Some Good Dating Advice

It struck me as I was reading Jag Carrao's article this morning that I have not offered very much in the way of dating advice lately.

One reason might be that my rather traditional approach to these matters tends to provoke rather strong negative reactions. Admittedly, I do not believe that new social customs have created a different human species. And I can only observe that for those who are looking to develop a lasting relationship, the more traditional approach works better.

So says Jag Carrao, and I agree fully with her remarks. Even though they are addressed to women, it is not a bad thing for men who are involved in the dating world to check them out too.

Link here.

Why Are Women Attracted to Attached Men?

Apparently, Angelina Jolie is not as much of an anomaly as we had all thought.

According to the London Daily Telegraph, researchers from Oklahoma State University have discovered that women prefer attached over unattached men. 90% of women were attracted to men they were told were attached, while only 59% were drawn to men they knew were unattached.
Link here.

This research suggests that sexual attraction is not merely something that happens to people while they are not paying attention. It involves conscious decision-making.

But why would women choose to be more attracted to unavailable men? The psychoanalytically-correct interpretation would have it that this proves that people have an Oedipus complex, thus, that they are more attracted to the forbidden than to the available.

Of course, this interpretation demeans women, suggesting that they are drawn to futile exercises or are unconsciously involved in self-sabotage.

The fact that an interpretation casts aspersions on someone's character or intelligence does not make it true.

I should mention in passing that once this issue moves out of the laboratory and into the world, things become more complicated. We know that there are attached men and women who are also available, and that there are unattached men and women who are thoroughly unavailable. There is no necessary correlation between attached and unavailable.

Happily, the researchers at Oklahoma State University did not fall back on the psychoanalytically-correct conclusion. They note correctly that when a woman knows a man is attached she also knows that he is capable of being in a relationship, and that he has effectively been "pre-screened."

This is not foolproof. It simply reduces the risk of falling for Mr. Wrong.

A second reason might be this. As happened in the case of Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina, when a woman gets involved with an attached man, the relationship will develop slowly and deliberately, without there being any immediate demands for sexual favors. Many women have a decided preference for such a gradualist approach to romance.

Why do women today need to have men pre-screened?

In the past when people lived in small communities where everyone knew everyone else, everyone knew who was a good prospective mate and who was not. Reputation was a known quantity and could be relied on when choosing a mate.

In a small community a woman would have access to extensive information about a young man, his habits, his predilections, his family, his friends, his accomplishments, and so on.

Nowadays, in the great cosmopolitan metropolis or on your average university campus women seeking mates do not have the benefit of this pre-screening. A man might be good looking or hot, but if he comes from an entirely different culture, he is effectively a cipher.

Young women are more vulnerable, at greater risk, and have more invested in the mating process, so they are quicker to adapt to these new circumstances. They do so by choosing to be attracted to men who have been vetted and vouched for by other women. It may not be good news, but it makes good sense.

Dating Advice From a Matchmaker

Matchmaking is coming back. And not just because people are so busy at work that they do not have the time to troll the local bars looking for mates.

People are turning to matchmakers because the dating scene is unmanageable. In a great cosmopolitan metropolis a young person can meet so many potential mates that sorting through them would be a full time job.

A matchmaker makes the selection process manageable. It is easier to choose among a dozen possible mates than it is to choose among a cast of thousands.

As economists have discovered, the more options you have the less likely you are to make any decision at all. You will be saying to yourself that you have not yet exhausted the possibilities, thus, that the perfect one might be just around the corner.

Unfortunately, this embarrassment of riches has turned some young people into serial daters. This is a problem. If you are too good at dating you will likely be less adept at conducting a relationship.

So says Patti Stanger, star of the television show "The Millionaire Matchmaker."

To her comment I would only add that people who serially date suffer serial disappointment and rejection. Serial daters have often been serially traumatized to the point where their priority is not how to find a mate, but how to avoid another trauma.

Given that most people want to form relationships, matchmaker Stanger has written an article apprising young women of their more common dating mistakes. While I would prefer that young people not think about avoiding mistakes-- because it is better to embrace good habits than to avoid bad habits-- Stanger makes some excellent points. Link here.

Among others she tells young women that they should not expect to meet men when they go out to dinner in packs. Few men will risk intruding on a group of a dozen women.

Men will simply not want to take the risk. A woman who is involved in a closed conversation with a bunch of her closest friends is saying that she has chosen to spend the evening with them.

Stanger recommends that a young woman go out by herself, sit down at a bar, and open a copy of "The Da Vinci Code."

It may be a good conversation starter, and it is certainly better than reading the latest issue of Marie Claire, but most men will find it strange that a woman would be reading an outdated book.

I also disagree because Stanger seems to be advising young women simply to go to the other extreme from going out in a large group. If the latter makes a woman too invulnerable, sitting alone at a bar will often make her feel too vulnerable.

It is better to find the mean between these extremes, and to amble through a museum, browse a bookstore, or better, attend a class or a wine tasting where you have an opportunity to meet other people naturally.

Next, Stanger offers some excellent advice. Too many women, she says, overshare. After a few drinks and an animated conversation they think they have found a soul mate and pour out their heart and soul to him.

Once a woman does that-- making herself too vulnerable, as it happens-- she will expect that her date will reciprocate. And there is some truth behind her expectation. Human relationships are based on reciprocity; we connect by exchanging gifts and reciprocating when people offer us hospitality.

But if you take things too far, if you offer too much of yourself to someone who is not inclined to share as much with you, then your confession is really a demand.

Once something is implicitly and imperiously demanded, it cannot be offered freely.

Turn the situation around. When a man overspends on a woman-- men are far less likely to overshare-- is he not trying to put her in a position where she will feel obligated to offer her favors in return?

Most women will reject men who are trying to buy them with extravagant gifts. The same applies when a man is faced with a woman who is giving out too much personal information. He will reject her.

That is the only way he can feel that he is not being bought.

Once you understand how reciprocity works in a relationship or on a date you can use your knowledge to keep the situations under control.

If you want to know the other person better, begin by making a small offering, a small piece of information about yourself. Then sit back and wait to see if it is reciprocated.

If you mention something about an incident with your pet snake you should expect your date to disclose something about his own experience with pets, even if it is his regret at never having had a gerbil.

If your disclosure is not reciprocated, you know that you have overstepped. Then you should shift the conversation away from childhood memories on to more neutral ground... sports, the weather, a good book, the financial crisis. Anything will do, as long as it is less personal and less direct.

One thing for sure: do not follow up your oversharing with the inquisition you believe you have just earned the right to inflict on him.

Whatever Happened To Gallantry?

Krista describes herself as a petite female college student. Confused by contemporary dating practices she wrote to Philip Galanes, proprietor of the New York Times column, Social Q's. Link here.

Krista is puzzled because when she goes out on "bona fide" dates, her male companions, all of whom live close to her, do not walk her home. They do not even offer to walk her home. Once she even walked her date home. At times these dates last until 3:00 a.m.

She asks this question: "Is it old fashioned to expect my dates to go slightly out of their way when we live in a relatively safe neighborhood? Is the problem my expectations or their manners?"

Galanes begins by exclaiming the feelings that I had when I read this: whatever happened to gallantry? Whatever happened to common courtesy? When did we all forget that a young woman out by herself at 3:00 a.m. might be vulnerable in ways that a man would not be?

Apparently, gallantry and courtesy and respect for women went the way of gender equality.

Many men have been trained to believe that walking a woman home after a date-- even suggesting such a thing-- is an insult to her strength, her Independence, her autonomy, and her ability to fend for herself. Thus, they do not even offer.

The old notion that men might protect women went the way of the patriarchy.

But since women still seem to be more vulnerable to certain kinds of attacks, would it be too much to question the dubious assumption on which this dismissal stands?

Ask yourself this: what should an enlightened young college man do if his date is attacked or if he comes upon a woman being attacked by a man? Should he respect her independence and autonomy and let her fend for herself?

In fact, this has nothing to do with a woman's autonomy and respect. It involves her adherence to a cause and her willingness to advertise her adherence by making her life a testimony to it. Personal safety be damned!

As always, Galanes offers a reasonable and judicious solution. Correctly, he tries to split the difference. Emphasizing the fact that Krista's neighborhood is "relatively safe" he says that the real issue is how to get her home safely.

He recommends that she flat out ask her next date if he would not mind terribly walking her home. An excellent suggestion.

Most young men have been acculturated into treating young women rudely, but often a gentle nudge will allow them to tap into their reservoirs of repressed courtesy.

Let's place some emphasis on the fact that dropping a woman off on a street corner at 3:00 a.m. is rude and disrespectful. Once you have trained men to treat women rudely, is it any wonder that they feel that they have the right and duty to toss them aside after hook-ups?

College men should be strong enough to resist feminist demands that they let young women fend for themselves in the middle of the night. They should have enough backbone to stand up for what is right and polite, even at the risk of being denounced as a relic.

To young men I would offer one last piece of advice. The young woman who chastises you for not allowing her to fend for herself at 3:00 a.m. is not relationship material.

If she is that enamored of her ideology, she is not going to feel very connected to you. Unless you wish to make your relationship into fodder for the culture wars, stick with the women who will allow you a last measure of gallantry.

The Sexual Marketplace

Call it the sexual marketplace or the dating scene or just plain courtship... no matter what you call it, it is undergoing a massive transformation. Or better, a reversion to the mean.

Young men who are jobless or bonusless are less likely to date and less likely to mate. And they can hardly be expected to shower the objects of their affections with limitless gifts.

So, what is the new dating scene going to look like?

After markets go to extremes, they tend to revert to the mean. At least, that is the theory. But when it comes to dating, what is the mean?

Different ideas have been put forth. Writers in the Washington Post and the Atlantic Monthly have written cogently on the issues involved. Link here and here.

Some have suggested that the mean is a feminist version of gender equity. Most of the jobs lost have been held by men, and this might lead more men to stay home and become nurturers while more women become sole breadwinners. This would obviously affect the sexual marketplace, perhaps leading women to look for more nurturing men and men to look for more dynamic, career-oriented women.

But Emily Bazelon, writing in Slate.com, has thrown doubt on this outcome. Link here.

Bazelon suggests that since men react much worse to unemployment than women do, many women might decide to leave the workforce to open up jobs for their husbands, roughly as happened after World War II.

If the mean is not the advent of a gynocracy, then perhaps it will be a more Darwinian world where gender roles are more strictly defined and where sexuality reverts to its traditional role in a calculus of fertility and reproduction.

This would not, however, be as radical a change as it first appears. The excesses that characterized certain segments of the dating scene seem to have been produced by Darwin on steroids.

For several years now the New York sexual marketplace has been defined by the mega bonuses that young investment bankers, hedge fund traders, and financial advisers were using to impress young women.

Think what you will about this ostentatious display of wealth, it signified an ability to provide for a wife and children in the great cosmopolitan metropolis.

All things considered, you needed something like a Wall Street bonus to afford a co-op in a good neighborhood. Add to that the cost of private school, and you had to be in either finance or real estate to bring up a family in New York City.

Spending thousands of dollars on a date showed that the man in question could provide a New York lifestyle for himself, his wife, and his children.

Unfortunately, the women who were receiving all of that largess were often at pains to reciprocate. And they often felt like they were being bought and sold. If they yielded to temptation and married the men with the massive bonuses, their simmering resentment often led to marital misery and divorce.

But that world is over. And it is not coming back any time soon. Thus, the male status hierarchy that had been skewed by the overemphasis on money is adjusting to a new reality. Men who have prestige, but perhaps not fortunes, are becoming more desirable than unemployed financiers.

The previous dating culture was something like a free-for-all where everyone was laboring under the assumption that they could have it all.

As we know, serious money forgave some seriously bad behavior.

Now women will perhaps become less tolerant of bad behavior and men will work on developing other qualities that will make them desirable in the sexual marketplace. A good place to start would be: making money the old fashioned way, by earning it.

From Free Love to Hooking Up

It is not very far from free love to hooking up. After all, hooking up is giving it away for free.

Unfortunately, giving it away for free does not make you a generous person. Nor does it mean that you place a high value on yourself. Hooking up is not the royal road to self-esteem.

Hooking up is not news. Tom Wolfe offered a sardonic definition at the turn of the millennium: "In the year 2000, in the era of hooking up, 'first base' meant deep kissing ('tonsil hockey'), groping and fondling; 'second base' meant oral sex; 'third base' meant going all the way; and 'home plate' meant learning each other's names."

Even though we have known about hooking up for some time now, people still react strongly to each new article, like the recent one by Charles Blow in the New York Times. Link here.

Older people, like Blow, find it sad that young people no longer date. Younger people feel misunderstood and unfairly judged.

In place of dating young people go out in groups-- girl groups and boy groups. When one young person in one group finds another in another group reasonably attractive they chat a bit and go home together.

Many young women insist that this does not man that they are indulging in random sexual encounters. They say that they are choosing partners from a group of friends. If they were hooking up with people they just met, their reputations would be compromised.

This means that the old morality is more resilient than many young people think.

Hooking up may pretend to be a new ritual, but it simply reverses the order of the old dating ritual. When people dated they went out together, got to know each other, developed an attraction to each other, formed a relationship, and consummated their feelings.

In the anti-ritual of hooking up, first, you have sex, then you get to know each other, then you discover whether you like each other, then you develop a relationship, then you go out on a date.

This anti-ritual is displayed in the popular movie: "Knocked Up." There, a random alcohol-fueled sexual encounter leads to pregnancy, to getting to know each other, to learning to like each other, to developing a relationship, to becoming a responsible parent.

So, the goal of hooking up seems to be identical to the goal of the old dating ritual. Yet, since precious few hook ups lead to anything resembling a relationship, the Hollywood ending feels more like an illusion that women use to rationalize behavior that they are not very proud of.

I suspect that if young women did not believe that hook ups were going to lead to relationships, they would be far more parsimonious about handing out sexual favors.

Feminists used to insist, unimpeachable, that women should not be used as sexual objects. Now, postmodern thinking has persuaded them that if two people agree to use each other for sexual pleasure, then no one is being exploited.

According to this twisted mindset, if everyone agrees that something is true, then it is true.

If hooking up is supposed to achieve the same goal as dating, then we need to understand something about the socially prescribed ritual.

Daring is a venerable ritual that allows people to make meaningful connections before they make larger life commitments. It seems to have originated in the West about a thousand years ago in the practice of courtly love.

That elaborate courtship ritual involved a woman what had been left alone while her crusading husband was fighting the infidels and a teen aged boy who was working at a menial job in her castle.

The romantic attachments of courtly love were, by definition, adulterous. Ostensibly, they were not even consummated.

Romance did not die with the crusades. It morphed into other institutionalized adulterous practices, producing the king's favorites, mistresses, and courtesans. As long as marriage was arranged, love and romance were side shows.

The first crack in the system occurred in England in the seventeenth century. There, for perhaps the first time in human history, women were allowed to choose their mates freely. This required a new ritual, a courtship ritual, that could be engaged by unmarried young people. Borrowing from the well-developed romantic practices, it simply changed the focus of courtship from adultery to marriage.

Evidently, courtship morphed into dating. Both rituals tried to give young people a better basis for choosing a mate. Presumably, this was going to make for better marriages, and enhanced marital fidelity. It would also reduce the sometimes lethal confusion over bloodlines and inheritance.

Dating was also designed to protect young women from being exploited by their families and from being used by men.

Dating required that a young man make a public show of interest and a minimal commitment to a young woman. He had to ask her for a date, pick her up, take her out, pay for her, and finally, to escort her home at a reasonable hour.

When a man followed this ritual he made a public commitment to a woman, presented himself as someone who would care for her and protect her, and made a display of respect for her as a woman.

Young people today find this quaint and objectionable. They reject the notion that women need to be cared for or protected.

Modern women can take care of themselves. They want to be independent and autonomous. They can do anything a man can do, and God help you if you do not agree.

This view has a lot to recommend it. In many areas of human experience it is true. The problem arises when a man and a woman engage in an act of coitus.

Think what you will, they are not engaging in the same act. The emotional investment is different; the oxytocin levels are different; the risks are different; the potential consequences are different.

The dating ritual, having developed over centuries through trial and error, takes this into account. To decide one day that human experience should be ignored because it does not correspond to a trendy idea is a dangerous gambit.

Confucius famously said that people should observe rituals whether they understand them or not. But that requires a respect for the authority of tradition, and young people today have been cured of such respect by the time that they start hooking up.

Why do they hook up? Perhaps because they have to make sense of the ritual on their own. After all, most of the young people who hook up eventually start dating, at around the time that they are ready to settle down.

Dating Chaos

People sometimes ask me how I can be both an executive coach and a relationship coach. Aren't they two distinct and separate fields? Actually, they overlap in strange and interesting ways. Consider the following:

A young man attends a workplace seminar where he hears about the importance of ethical behavior. In it he learns that he and his colleagues need to treat each other with respect, to show common courtesy, and to make good connections. All of which makes sense to him.

It even makes sense that workplace diversity might produce anomie, feelings of not belonging to the group for not having understood its codes and customs. He agrees that he and his colleagues need to make a special effort to produce a strong corporate culture. He also accepts that if everyone is just pursuing his own self-interest, the company culture will be undermined.

Later that same evening this young man is hanging out in a bar. After scanning the room he is drawn to a woman he sees at the end of the bar.

He is not a neophyte on the date scene, so he knows how to go about connecting with her. He knows that if he is polite and respectful, women will dismiss him as a chump. He knows that if he is in touch with his feminine side, they will see him as weak and ineffectual. He also knows that bad boys finish first, so he is going to repress his good character, at least for the time being. Having read a book about the "Game" he knows that his first move should be to sneer at her with contempt.

He is happy to play this game, though he is somewhat dismayed that it works at all.

So, here are the new rules of a dating scene that appears to have been arranged so that no one will every develop a relationship. For an extensive report on them, see Kay Hymowitz's article: "Love in the Time of Darwinism." Link here.

If you are not personally involved in this scene, the descriptions are surprising, even to the point that they feel like caricatures. And yet, they do reflect something of the current dating scene.

If you are looking for anomie, the dating scene is a great place to find it. As Hymowitz said: "...the dating and mating scene is in chaos." Single young men: "are moving around in a Babel of miscues, cross-purposes, and half-conscious contradictory female expectations that are alternately proudly egalitarian and coyly traditional."

Hymowitz is especially disturbed to see the most sophisticated, talented, competent generation of young women be so utterly incapable of the most elementary form of self-definition.

These young women do not just want it all; they want to be all things to all people. Hymowitz describes a confused young woman who: "may be hoping for a hook-up, but she may also be looking for a husband, a co-parent, a sperm donor, a relationship, a threesome, or a temporary place to live."

The woman needs to find out more than what she wants. She has to know who and what she is. If she wants to be a girl about town, flitting from one hook-up to another, living a Sex and the City lifestyle, her chances of finding the kind of husband she wants are diminished. If she wants to be a wife and a mother, she would do best not to give herself away for free.

She may think that she is exploring her sexuality, or she may have made a more complex decision, to the effect that she wants to have meaningless impersonal relationships so as not to be distracted from her work. Be that as it may, if she wants to settle down one day, she is making things more difficult for herself. And it will be that much more difficult if she has left an online record of her exploits.

Men are open-minded, and occasionally non-judgmental. Yet, if they know about her past behaviors, they will hold it against her... consciously or unconsciously. They will not accept that she was one kind of woman then, and another kind now.

They will treat her as she defined herself. And women, as men, define themselves by the way they conduct themselves.

Hymowitz sees young men as dazed and confused, put off and angry, generally lost in the funhouse. She sees them disrespecting women and she blames women for not acting like they respect themselves.

Of course, they are also active participants in this culture. One might say that they are simply revealing their predatory side. But one might also say that if a woman offers herself to you for free, you would have to be a cad to turn her down. Saying no would add insult to injury, and most men still feel somewhat gentlemanly... i their own way.

I am not entirely persuaded that these practices are quite as pervasive as everyone things. Surely, they exist. And just as surely, they are more prevalent than they used to be. But people whose lives make for good stories are more compelling, and command more ink, than those who go about things the old fashioned way, who date and mate without incident.

Hymowitz also wants to say that the young people who are practicing these new dating rites are born-again Darwinists.

Darwinian thought posits a male who wants to spread his seed as far and as wide as he can... regardless of the consequences. And it offers a female who is far more selective in her choice of mates. A man can walk away from the consequences of his sexual activity far easier than a woman can. Also, a woman has fewer reproductive possibilities and invests far more in each reproductive attempt than a man does.

Here I differ with Hymowitz. If these young people were fashioning their behavior on Darwinian theory, then the women would naturally be more modest, more selective, and less reckless in the way they deploy their sexual resources.

Darwinian theory might explain why men hook up, but it does not tell us why women do. When women risk their reputations and their sexual health, to nothing of the possible pregnancy, for some thrills, they are not being Darwinians.

Hymowitz would counter that all women are searching for alpha males, for the best providers of genetic material. And she adds, strangely, that this leads some women to look for bad boys, men who mistreat them... omega males, I would call them.

Alternately, we might say that women choose men they consider losers because they run far less of a risk of becoming attached to them, this because they would never seriously consider settling down with them.

You do not have to have lived too long to know that bikers and brutes, muscle-bound behemoths, and down-on-their-luck artists are not alpha males. they are caricatures of masculinity.

Some women like these bad boys because it is like having a toy with a pulse. Yet, in the end, they will want to choose husbands who are more capable of providing for a family.

The problem is: if a young woman works her way through a series of bad boys, will she be capable of responding to a man who is not a perverse caricature of some idea of maleness. The attraction to bad boys, however limited it is, feels to me more like a fetish than a rational choice. The problem is, once you get involved in fetishistic behavior, it is not easy all to shift to more normal modes of attraction.

The hook-up culture, the new anomic dating scene, shows what the world looks like when some people decide that they should pursue their own selfish interest, no matter the cost. but it also raises an important ethical issue: if two people decide they are going to use each other for sexual pleasure, and if they both consent to the arrangement, are they both being used?