The first is that many people are postponing their first marriages until later in life. This trend has been generated, in part, by a desire among men and women to have fewer children. Wanting smaller families has meant that women can marry later in life and still have the number of children they desire. Starting to have children in their 30s with a goal of having one or two is achievable for many women. However, starting to have children in their 30s with a goal of having four or five is achievable for very few.
At the same time, access to fertility treatments and lifestyle choices that make women look younger at older ages has helped promote the expectation, at least, that women can continue to have children into their late 30s and early 40s, removing the pressure for women who want children to marry at younger ages.
Increased access to premarital sex, thanks to the introduction of effective contraceptives and changing social norms (as we discussed in chapter 1), has meant that men and women don’t have to choose between being married and being celibate. This freedom to choose has allowed us the opportunity to have multiple sexual partners before making a long-term commitment. That freedom to be both single and sexually active has allowed singles to spend more time searching for a long-term partner.
Improvements in home production technology and the ability to purchase many of the goods and services that historically have been produced by women (like evening meals and clean laundry), have made it easier for everyone to be self-sufficient. Men no longer need women to produce these goods and services, and women can spend their time working for wages instead of performing traditional household tasks. This increased self-reliance of men and women has made it possible for them to remain single for longer periods of time.
These same economic forces have helped to destigmatize childbirth outside of marriage. As more women are able to raise children alone, social norms have evolved in a way that allows unmarried women who accidentally become pregnant to stay that way: unmarried. With shotgun weddings essentially a thing of the past, women who become pregnant as teenagers or young adults are marrying later in their lives.
The second reason why more people are searching for love on the late-in-life market than ever before is that, as we already know, the cost of searching for a mate has fallen with the widespread use of online dating and social networking sites. This fall in search costs has had a bigger effect on older singles than it has on younger singles; older singles tend to be more socially isolated than are younger singles meaning that, in general, their search costs, without Internet technology, are much higher. Because search costs have fallen with the introduction of online dating technology, more older people are entering the market for sex and love.
It is no coincidence that an international study conducted by the Oxford Internet Institute (authored by Bernie Hogan, William Dutton, and Nai Li) found that, among couples who have started dating since 1997, older couples were significantly more likely to have met each other online than were younger couples; only 19 percent of couples in their 20s met online, compared with 23 percent of couples in their 30s, 35 percent of couples in their 40s, 38 percent of couples in their 50s, and 37 percent of couples in their 60s.
The popularity of online dating for older men and women is obvious from the plethora of online services that specifically target that community. (Just as an aside, I have recently noted that with the passing of my most recent birthday, the advertising that appears on my Facebook news-feeds page has recently changed from “Single dads looking for love!” to “No young women please!” What a delightful daily reminder of where I stand in the market.)
The third reason why more people are searching on the late-in-life dating market than ever before is that people are living longer. For example, according to the 2007 U.S. National Vital Statistics Report, a man who was 60 years old in 1960 should have, if he was entirely rational, expected to live for only about fifteen more years. A man of the same age today can expect to live for twenty-one more years. A woman who was 60 years old in 1960 could expect to live only for twenty more years, while a woman of the same today can expect to live for twenty-four more years.
Increasing longevity is important for two reasons. The first, and perhaps most obvious, reason is that new relationships require an investment in terms of searching for a mate and establishing a new relationship (you can think of these as fixed costs to finding new love). The longer both partners are expected to live, the greater the return to that original investment. Thus, increased longevity makes older people more willing to spend the time to find new love.
The second reason is that as the life expectancy of men and women grows more similar, the length of time either partner will have to be widowed decreases. This effect should, on balance, increase older people’s willingness to enter new relationships, as women, in particular, may have avoided forming new attachments in the past for fear of being widowed, some for the second time.
Just as an aside, you might have thought that divorce was the main reason for why late-in-life dating markets have become so thick in recent decades, but in reality, divorce probably doesn’t explain this phenomenon at all. The reason is that, according to Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, the divorce rate, measured as the number of divorces per one thousand of the population, is currently at its lowest level since 1970.
This decline in divorce isn’t due only to the most recent recession, which as we have already seen has decreased divorce, but is actually part of a much longer trend toward fewer divorces. The divorce rate per thousand married couples has fallen from twenty-three divorces in 1979 to seventeen divorces in 2005.
SHORTER MEN HAVE YOUNGER WIVES
The observation that many women value height in a husband implies that shorter men looking for a wife must settle for a woman who is less attractive. According to economist Nicolas Herpin, however, there is a silver lining to being smaller in stature; a short man who is economically successful could find that later in life he has a younger wife than his taller friends.
Many studies have found a link between a man’s height and his income. A study using German data, for example, found that men who are 2¾ in/7 cm taller than average are paid a wage that is about 4 percent more than similar men who are of average height. There are several reasons why this relationship exists beyond simple workplace discrimination, not the least of which being that adult height is related to socioeconomic status in childhood. But it isn’t just income that is causing short men to fare worse on the marriage market; even when we control for income, women prefer taller men.
Dan Ariely, Günter Hitsch, and Ali Hortacsu, using the same experiment that we talked about in chapter 2 to determine racial preferences in dating, find that a short man would have to earn just over half a million dollars a year in order for a woman more than 5 in/12 cm taller than him to want to communicate with him on an online dating site.
The same study found that, in online dating, men who were between 6 ft, 3 in and 6 ft, 4 in/190 and 193 cm tall received about 60 percent more messages from interested women than did men who were between 5 ft, 7 in and 5 ft, 8 in/170 and 173 cm tall.
Using data from France, Herpin finds that shorter men are significantly less likely to be either married or in a serious relationship even when controlling for social status; only 60 percent of 30- to 39-year-old men who were less than 5 ft, 7 in/170 cm tall were married, compared with 76 percent of men between 5 ft, 7in and 5 ft, 11 in/170 cm and 180 cm tall.
Shorter men are more likely to still be single when they are a little older, however, putting them in a good position to take advantage of a later-in-life marriage market that is populated with younger women who are less concerned with their husband’s physical appearance and more interested in his ability to provide a stable income. Taller men are more likely to be married when they are younger, before they have established themselves as providers and are more likely to be married to women who are closer to their own age.
Certainly many people now find themselves looking for lo
ve again, after believing that they would ride off into the sunset with their first (or second or third) husband or wife. Those unrealized expectations, however, are not the reason why this market has grown in size. In fact, the current trends in divorce suggest that this market might shrink over time as fewer people find themselves single at an older age.
A BUYER’S MARKET FOR HORNY OLD MEN?
We have talked several times about casual sex markets—high schools, college campuses—in which women outnumber men and, as a result of that imbalance, men have more control over the sexual behavior of women.
Women often find themselves searching for a partner in markets where men have the advantage, despite the fact that there are roughly equal numbers of reproductive-aged men and women in the population. This is in part because women are more selective when they choose their sexual partners. But it is also because many women are searching for a single, long-term relationship on the same market in which many men are searching for serial, shorter-term relationships.
Certainly there are biological arguments for the difference in behavior of men and women in terms of the level of commitment they seek, and how selective they are; the behavior that increases the reproductive success of men is to have a series of short-term relationships with fertile women, while the behavior that increases reproductive success of women is to have long-term relationships with high-quality men.
We all know these arguments; in fact, they have become so well accepted that they are part of the lens through which we all have come to view female/male differences in sexual behavior. Is it reasonable, though, to believe that these biological predispositions drive our sexual behavior later in life, when our fertility is in decline?
(And, in case you are wondering, it isn’t just women who experience declining fertility later in life. According to medical research conducted in the United Kingdom by Mohamed Hassan and Stephen Killick, couples in which the man is more than 45 years old are five times more likely to have spent more than a year trying to get pregnant, and 12.5 times more likely to have spent more than two years trying to get pregnant, than are couples in which the man is less than 25 years old. They find this result even after controlling for the age of the woman and frequency with which the couple is having sexual intercourse.)
Changes in fertility, for both men and women, should change the choices older adults make in terms of the way they operate on markets for sex and love. Postmenopausal women, for example, lose their biological incentive to find a mate who will produce the highest-quality children at almost the same time that they lose their economic disincentive to having casual sex: namely, the risk that a mistimed pregnancy could reduce both their lifetime earnings and their ability to marry later.
Older men, on the other hand, might initially choose to seek out younger, more fertile, women in order to compensate for their own declining fertility, but beyond a certain age (particularly when fertile women are no longer available to them), the sexual decisions of men should cease to be based on their biological urge to reproduce. Again, this change happens at roughly the same time that a new economic incentive arises for men—the incentive to find a woman who is willing to care for them as they age.
Differential life expectancies between women and men, although decreasing, continue to give women a much overlooked comparative advantage in home production among older couples. The gains from trade within marriage that we discussed in chapter 4, however, depend on both partners bringing something to the table. For an individual woman, if the cost of caregiving is high relative to the benefit a man brings to a relationship, especially when casual sexual relations are less costly, then she will remain single rather than commit to a long-term relationship.
Declining fertility and women’s higher life expectancy should, in theory at least, increase the tendency of older women to seek out short-term partners and increase the tendency of older men to seek out long-term sexual partners.
This reminds me of a story. A few years ago, I was at home when an old friend of my father’s came to tell us that he was ending a relationship with a woman he had been seeing for a few years. When my father asked why they were splitting, he sadly shook his head and said, “She is only using me for sex.” This poor guy had to have been over 80 when he made this observation, but, while he was not my idea of a sex object, he obviously was for her and that just wasn’t good enough for him.
I started this section by pointing out the importance that gender ratios have played in the sexual decisions made by men and women. It is tempting to assume that it is a buyer’s market for horny older men and that older women are subject to the same sexual pressures as teenage and college-age women. But, personally, I think the underlying assumption that older women want marriage, in the way that younger women might, and that older men want casual sex, in the way that younger men might, is an incorrect assumption to make.
From a purely economic perspective, it makes sense to predict that when sellers are relatively abundant and buyers relatively scarce that the price that “good” is sold for is lower than when there are equal numbers of buyers and sellers. The price that is negotiated on this market is not measured in terms of money; it is measured in terms of the value of the match. If older women who are looking for relationships really are abundant relative to older men who are looking for relationships, then they should be willing to settle for a lower-value match than they might have otherwise.
This is a testable hypothesis: if older women are willing to settle for low-value matches, and older men are not, then we can conclude that older women are relatively abundant on the later-in-life dating market.
This is the hypothesis tested by William McIntosh, Lawrence Locker, Katherine Briley, Rebecca Ryan, and Alison Scott. They find that older men are more selective about their future mates than are younger men because they are more willing continue to look for a high-value match. That result isn’t really surprising since the sheer variety of women on the market should make it easier for men to find just the right woman, regardless of their market power. However, they also find that older women are not only more selective than older men about who they will date, they are also more selective than are younger women when it comes to qualities such as race, age, income, and height of a future mate.
It has been estimated that there are three women for every man over the age of 65, evidence that supports my contention that while women may outnumber men on the seniors dating market, that doesn’t necessarily mean that men have market power. This is because older women have an acceptable substitute to being in an inferior arrangement; they can always choose to be alone. For women who fear having to care for an aging older man, that just might be the preferred alternative.
I had a conversation recently with a friend of my mother’s, a lovely woman in her late 60s, during which she casually remarked that the only way she would consider dating again would be if she found a man willing to provide both a doctor’s note and a bank statement. I would have never thought of seeking dating advice from medical experts, but upon reflection it seems to me, at least, that any savvy older woman considering a new partner should not only want a doctor’s note, but might consider consulting an actuary as well.
Perhaps it is best to think of an older man as an annuity that provides a steady-income stream of love, affection, and sex. This annuity, rather than providing this income for a predetermined number of periods, has a termination period that is unknown when the asset is purchased. How much a woman is willing to invest then is not just a function of the (love, affection, and sex) income the annuity provides, but also the expected number of periods until termination. Since the number of periods is unknown when the investment in the relationships is made, a woman who is risk averse needs to be compensated for the possibility that her asset will expire, so to speak, before she has seen any profit.
If women are risk averse, the reality that men have lower life expectancies implies that women’s reservation values for matches are higher than they wo
uld have been otherwise. The reluctance on the part of older women to accept that risk unless match values are very high (i.e., they can find a man who fulfills all of their needs) gives at least some of the market power back to women on the later-in-life dating market.
Back to the comment made by my mother’s friend that she would require a medical certificate before having a relationship. I should come clean and tell you that I am, apparently, naive when it comes to the sexual behavior of senior citizens. I originally thought that the reason she needed a doctor’s note was that it was important for her to find a partner who would live for many years. I later discovered, after she shared a story about a promiscuous cruise ship captain and a boatload of horny old women, that what she was really seeking was to be assured that her prospective lover was STD-free—not just generally in good health.
That does sound like a good idea, especially since people over the age of 50 have been engaging in increasingly risky sexual behavior over the past decade and paying the cost with rising STD rates.
HOW TO TEACH MOM THE NO-GLOVE NO-LOVE RULE
The words “young” and “foolish” just naturally seem to go together. An 18-year-old man debating the costs and benefits of condom usage might be excused for mistakenly believing that he will live forever. You would think, though, that by the time that this same man is in his 50s, his primary goal would be to extend his time here on Earth as long as possible or, at a minimum, to avoid painful sexually transmitted diseases.
The young, apparently, do not have a monopoly on being foolhardy; STDs are on the rise in the over-50 population as a consequence of increasing rates of casual sex and extremely low rates of condom usage.
In the United States, among the population with HIV or AIDS, the largest group is people who are between 45 and 49 years old, and between 2007 and 2009, the largest increase in infection rates has been in people between the ages of 60 and 64 years old.
Dollars and Sex Page 23