It appears that refundable bride prices reduce female infidelity and increase male infidelity. However, once the authors control for family characteristics (such as education, polygamy, children, and whether or not the husband is a farmer), the male effect almost disappears, but the female effect persists and is statistically significant.
You may think this system of writing financial contracts to ensure that women comply with their marriage vows is primitive, but prenuptial agreements that include clauses that limit the financial responsibilities of the husband if a wife is unfaithful, or vice versa, serve the same purpose. This is also true in states in which the courts still apply “at fault” rules to the division of marital assets; the spouse who cheats is penalized in the financial settlement.
This all seems fine, but as long as men earn higher incomes and hold a greater proportion of the wealth than do women, or when courts take a harsher view of female infidelity than male infidelity, these systems will only increase male infidelity in the way that refundable bride prices increased male infidelity in Uganda.
The reason is that they prevent couples from forming implicit contracts that looks something like this: if you are faithful, I too will be faithful, but if you cheat, then I will cheat as well. These contracts put women and men in a better position to negotiate fidelity if the threat to reciprocate is credible.
The thing is, while the observation that monogamy is the marriage institution preferred by wealthy men is a mystery, the fact the wealthy men are less monogamous (in term of fidelity to their one wife) is actually a myth.
There is no evidence that rich men cheat in their marriages any more than do poor men. In fact, after controlling for a variety of different effects, Donald Cox finds very little connection between a man’s income and his willingness to cheat on his wife.
The real effect of income on cheating is with women; women in poorer households are significantly more likely to cheat than are women in wealthier households. That evidence is supplied in Cox’s paper and also in Robin Baker’s well-known book Sperm Wars: The Science of Sex. Baker says that while 10 percent of all men on average are raising children they mistakenly believe to be their own (the same figure as found by David Buss), when we look at men who are at the bottom of the income distribution, that share increases to 30 percent. The share of men in the top of the income distribution who are raising children who are not their own, however, is a mere 2 percent. If this is true, it is very compelling evidence that women are more likely to cheat on poor husbands than they are to cheat on wealthy husbands.
The cost-benefit analysis discussed above illustrates why this relationship between income and infidelity for women is what we would expect. Women who are living in poverty have less to lose financially if their husbands leave them as the result of infidelity than do women whose household income provides them with a comfortable life. It might also be the case that poorer women are hoping to use infidelity as a means of finding a mate who not only supplies good genes but also is a better provider.
While a higher income doesn’t increase the likelihood of a man’s infidelity, and actually decreases woman’s likelihood of infidelity, the characteristic that really predicts infidelity isn’t income but power. If that’s not a completely new revelation, you might be surprised to learn that powerful women are just as likely to be unfaithful as are powerful men.
A study by a group of Dutch researchers (Joris Lammers, Janka Stoker, Jennifer Jordan, Monique Pollmann, and Diederik Stapel) uses data collected from managers, team leaders, and CEOs that report how often these managers had been unfaithful, measured their willingness to cheat again, and probed both the managers’ opportunities for cheating and their confidence in their ability to seduce new lovers.
Among their respondents, 26 percent had cheated on their partner at least once. Those who wielded more power in their jobs were not only more likely to be among the cheaters, but the higher up the corporate ladder they had climbed, the more extramarital encounters they reported, and the more likely they were to say that they expected to cheat again in the future.
What explains the link between workplace power and fidelity? Business travel and long hours at the office provide opportunities to cheat (and reduce the probability of being caught), but that is only part of the story. The most convincing statistical explanation has to do with confidence; more powerful business people reported much higher levels of assurance that they could find a sexual partner should they want one.
The women in this study behaved just like the men in indicating a history of cheating; more powerful women cheated more and felt more confident about their ability to seduce new sexual partners.
What I find interesting about these results is that they suggest that one of the reasons why we have observed lower levels of female infidelity in the past is not because women are more inclined to be faithful, but rather because they have traditionally occupied fewer positions of power. If this is true, then the next generation of women might be as promiscuous as men.
CHEATERS NEVER PROSPER
The one piece of evidence that appears repeatedly in the literature is that people who cheat in their marriages are less happy than those who are faithful.
The Elmslie and Tebaldi paper finds that married women who reported being “not too happy” were 10 percentage points more likely to report having cheated on their current husbands than were women who reported being “very happy.” Unhappy married men are even more likely to also be unfaithful; they were 12 percentage points more likely to report having cheated on their current wife than were men who reported being “very happy.”
That difference between male and female unhappiness when cheating could be related to prostitute use. A different study on happiness by David Blanchflower and Andrew Oswald finds that not only were those who reported having been unfaithful in the previous year less happy, but those who reported prostitute use were unhappier still.
The reason for the relationship between unhappiness and infidelity is unclear. Maybe infidelity itself is making people unhappy. Or maybe unhappy people are more likely to have an extramarital relationship, perhaps using it as a strategy to exit an unhappy relationship. Others may be unhappy for another reason unrelated to marriage and are using extramarital sex as a way to deal with that unhappiness.
Psychologists Denise Previti and Paul Amato used data collected over seventeen years to see if infidelity is a direct cause of divorce or a consequence of an unhappy marriage already on its way to divorce. They find that men and women in couples who are already likely to divorce are more likely to have sex outside of their marriage; infidelity is the consequence, not the direct cause, of an already unhappy marriage. They also find, not surprisingly, that following infidelity, the quality of the marriage deteriorates further, and it is that further deterioration in the quality of a marriage that increases the likelihood of divorce.
Infidelity, it appears, is both a consequence, and a cause, of unhappy marriages.
FINAL WORDS
You are probably wondering if Leonard’s second wife ever found out about his attempts to find sexual relationships outside of their marriage. I honestly don’t know, but I suspect she knew when she married him that he was likely to stray if he had the chance. Why would she agree to marry a man who would have a hard time being faithful? Probably because she correctly predicted that he was unlikely to ever get the opportunity. His new job promotion might have given her cause of concern, but she really needn’t have worried—the small amount of power he held was not enough to persuade young fertile women that his genes were worth the trouble.
Infidelity is an economic story, but not for the reason you might have expected—that wealthy men are the most likely to be unfaithful to their wives—but because the decision to have, or not have, extramarital sex is the solution to a cost-benefit problem. The costs in this story are a function of several economic factors, including lost income in the case of divorce, while the benefits are, for the most part, bio
logical.
For example, legislation that allows divorce courts to financially penalize adulterers should increase the cost of cheating and decrease its prevalence. In the absence of that legislation, prenuptial agreements that stipulate financial penalties for violations of the contract should serve the same purpose. The movement of women into positions of authority in the workplace appears to be increasing female infidelity not just because powerful people are more likely to cheat, but also because it gives women greater opportunities to be unfaithful without being caught. Increased access to the Internet may not be increasing infidelity, on average (as we saw in chapter 6), but it does reduce the expected cost of cheating by making it easier for those whose impulse it is to cheat to fulfill that desire.
One interesting implication of this argument that the changing economic climate contributes to the propensity to cheat, or not to cheat, is that it suggests that individuals can structure their relationships in a way that decreases the probability of divorce.
For some, that might be writing binding contracts that explicitly forbid infidelity. In the past, that contract was essentially sworn at the marriage altar, but explicit contracts can impose financial penalties in a way that making an oath before family and friends cannot. Betraying marriage vows can be costly, in ways that I have already mentioned, but for some, additional financial penalties can increase the cost just enough to prevent infidelity.
For others, that might mean rethinking traditional marital arrangements in the context of changing economic environment. The current mainstream arrangement was developed in a time in which men depended on marriage to ensure the paternity of their children and women depended on marriage to provide the necessities of life. With increasingly effective contraceptives and the economic independence of women, these two concerns have become irrelevant for many couples. Bargaining over an ability to explore sexual relationships outside of marriage is one possible way for couples to ensure that their marriage stays intact when the probability of cheating is very high. Those arrangements may not be for everyone, but then not everyone wants to have sex outside of marriage. For those who do, and have the opportunity, new ways of thinking about fidelity might be the rational approach.
As you will see in the next chapter, love on the later-in-life market can be very much like during the college years: the scarcity of men ensures their market power. As we are about to find out, though, unlike the women in college, many older women prefer to play the field rather than to find an end-of-life partner.
CHAPTER 9
LOVE IN THE SUNSET (YEARS)
OH, THE FUTILITY OF IT ALL!
The June 2, 1986, cover of Newsweek magazine carried the headline “The Marriage Crunch: If you are a single woman here are your chances of ever getting married.” Accompanying this eye-catching headline was a graph that illustrated the bad news for women who had spent their youth in a classroom when they should have been busy finding themselves a husband: their chance of now marrying was shockingly low. The report stunned a generation of college-educated women, warning them that if they were still single when they turned 30, the chance they would ever marry was only 20 percent. If they hadn’t married their Prince Charming by the age of 35, the chance they ever would fell to 5 percent. If, heaven forbid, a woman was still single at age 40, she had a better chance of being killed by a terrorist than of ever walking down an aisle clutching a bouquet of flowers.
Honestly. The fact that the article forecast that the probability of a single 25-year-old college-educated woman ever marrying was only 50 percent, in a period in which over 90 percent of women married at some point in their life, should have been everyone’s first clue that there was something horribly wrong with these predictions.
LOTTERY WINNING MAKES IT EASIER TO BE ALONE
Does winning the lottery give you a better chance of finding true love, or does it make it easier to say good-bye when the love is gone? A paper by Scott Hankins and Mark Hoekstra asks these questions and finds that money does not buy you love; in fact, for women at least, it buys the freedom to stay solo.
Using data that describe the choices of tens of thousands of lottery winners, the authors compare the relationship outcomes of those people who won the bigger jackpots ($50,000) with those who won less ($1,000). They find that single women who won the larger amounts were much less likely to marry in the three years following the win than were those who won the smaller amounts—40 percent less likely, in fact.
Why are larger-jackpot-winning women less likely to marry? It is possible that their new position of being financially independent gave the women a chance to take their time marrying and to be more discriminating about whom they choose to marry. Or they might not have wanted to share their control of the money with another person and so postponed marriage until the money was all gone.
There is no similar effect for single men—those relationship decisions appear to be completely independent of how much they won.
In terms of divorce rates, the effect is very small; the divorce rate of those who won between $25,000 and $50,000 in the three years following the win was less than 1 percent lower than among those who won $1,000. People are more likely to stay together following a lottery-winning event, though the money ought to make it easier for them to divorce.
This exercise may seem inconsequential, but it has an important implication. It suggests that as societies become wealthier, the coinciding increase in the age at which people marry is the result of marriage decisions that have been made by women and not those made by men. It also says that one of the explanations for the decline in women’s eagerness to marry young isn’t simply that they are dedicating themselves to their careers instead of the important business of finding a husband. The behavior of single female lottery winners—whose wealth has fallen into their laps—indicates that it is all about the money.
Thanks to the passage of time, and the availability of U.S. Census data, I can tell you now how many of these college-educated women who had dared to postpone marriage into their 30s and (gasp!) their 40s fared on the marriage market in the years following this publication.
By 2010, 75 percent of college-educated women who were exactly 30 years old and single in 1986 had married at some point in the intervening twenty-four years. Sixty-nine percent of women who were exactly 35 and single in 1986 married their Prince Charming. Even the old maids, the women who were 40 at the time that Newsweek made these dire predictions, were more likely than not to marry before their 65th birthdays: 68 percent married.
Notwithstanding the bad news media headlines, predicting the demise of the most sacred of institutions at the hands of selfishly educated women, most women and men marry at some point in their lifetimes. The reason why the marriage rate is so low today is that the measure is a snapshot taken at a single point in time. Marriage rates measured over individuals’ lifetimes tell a very different story—marriage has not become obsolete.
According to the United Nations World Fertility Report 2009, the average share of women, worldwide, who have ever been married by the ages of 45 to 49 has remained fairly constant, and above 90 percent, since 1970. Between the 1970s and the 1990s, the number of women who had ever married by the time they were in their late 40s had actually increased in all but two of the twenty-five developed nations in their study (Sweden and France were the only exceptions).
This ever-married rate has decreased somewhat in the intervening years in developed nations, but the increasing tendency of women to remain unwed in those countries almost certainly reflects not a rise in spinsterhood, but rather an increase in cohabitation and other nontraditional relationship arrangements.
Not surprisingly, the countries with the lowest ever-married rates for 45- to 49-year-old women currently are those with the most permissive views toward sexual relationships outside of marriage: Sweden (75 percent), Finland (80 percent), Norway and Denmark (82 percent), France (83 percent), and the Netherlands (85 percent).
Marriage rates, thos
e snapshots taken at one point in time, are incredibly low by historic standards—as of this moment, barely 50 percent of the United States adult population is married—but that doesn’t mean people do not want to be in committed sexual relationships. It just means that they are having those relationships at a different time of their lives and organizing them in a different way than they have in the past—for example, cohabitating rather than marrying.
What is very new is the incredible size of the late-in-life market for sex and love; many more people now are looking for short-term and long-term sexual partners later in their lives than have ever before.
THE LATE-IN-LIFE DATING MARKET IS BOOMING
Markets, as I have already said, can be described as being thick or thin. When markets are thin, there are few buyers and sellers—it is harder to arrive at price at which both buyers and sellers are willing to engage in trade—and few transactions take place. When the market is thick, however, there are many buyers and sellers, meaning that equilibrium is easier to achieve—buyers and sellers can settle on a market price at which they both want to trade—and more transactions take place.
Over the years, the late-in-life marriage market has become increasingly thick. This market thickness means not only that there are more “transactions” (i.e., single people getting together for sex and love), but also that the quality of relationships formed on this market has improved over what they would have been even ten or twenty years ago.
There are many economic explanations for why the late-in-life market for sex and love is so much thicker than it has been in the past.
Dollars and Sex Page 22