It seems like every time I open my email, I have a new message from someone unique saying that they are having a hard time finding someone to spend the rest of their life with. Different reasons seem to be holding each one down respectively, but the end result of sadness and confusion is usually the same. When you run into too many Mr. and Miss Wrongs and slowly begin to think that you will never find the Mr. or Miss Right.
Manhattan had the highest percentage of single people of any county in America except for an island in Hawaii originally settled as a leper colony. What was keeping New Yorkers apart? Tierney surveyed a sampling of personal ads in the city magazines of Boston, Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. He found that singles in the biggest city, New York, not only had the most choices but were also the pickiest in listing the attributes of their desired partners. The average personal ad in New York magazine listed 5.7 criteria required in a partner, significantly more than second-place Chicago’s average (4.1 criteria) and about twice the average for the other three cities. As one woman in New York put it in her ad: “Not willing to settle? Neither am I!” She claimed to be someone who “loves all NY has to offer,” but her definition of “all” did not include any male New Yorkers who were not handsome, successful, over five feet nine, and between the ages of twenty-nine and thirty-five. Another New Yorker demanded a man over five feet ten who played polo. A lawyer who listed twenty-one requisite qualities in his “princess” professed to be “astonished” to find himself unattached.
That survey of personal ads was just an informal study, but recently several teams of researchers have reached a similar conclusion from a far more rigorous analysis of people’s romantic pickiness. They’ve monitored tens of thousands of people seeking love through either an online dating service or speed-dating events. At the online dating service, customers filled out an extensive questionnaire about their attributes. In theory, that detailed profile should have helped people find just the right mate, but in practice it produced so much information and so many choices that people became absurdly picky.
The female demand for more education and financial success increases, thus raising the price of the desirable men. However, the male demand for women has significantly declined due to the increased legal risks and increasing age of women at first marriage, among other things, further reducing their supply. Anyone who has taken Econ 101 should be able to correctly calculate what the interaction of the moving supply and demand curves necessarily implies: women will find it harder and harder to find desirable men willing to marry them. In September, I pointed out that already, the math dictates "only one-third of women in college today can reasonably expect to marry a man who is as well-educated as they are." And that ratio is only going to continue falling as time goes on, barring massive social, economic, or political changes.
Too many choices makes people ridiculously picky.
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