“I had a hard time selling it, frankly,” he said from his office in North Carolina. “People want the softer side of love. They blindly move into relationships thinking, ‘We’re so in love, we’ll work it all out.’ Then they’re fighting all the time because they never sat down to talk about the division of labor, or how to allocate their finances, because it felt unromantic. Well, how romantic is it to argue because you never bothered to come up with a practical plan?”
Curtis’s book teaches couples how to create a vision statement for their relationship, outline specific objectives on various dimensions (family, fiscal, leisure, career), generate his and her job descriptions, and decide on compensation and benefits. A marriage has always been a socioeconomic partnership, Curtis said, but societal expectations began to change in the sixties and seventies.
Or as Stephanie Coontz put it in her book Marriage, A History: “The older view that wives and husbands were work mates gave way to the idea that they were soul mates.” But, she noted, “Only rarely in history has love been seen as the main reason for getting married.”
That’s why Curtis feels that love alone isn’t enough for a successful marriage. “Marriage is like running a business in a lot of ways—who cooks dinner, who picks up the towels, who pays the bills, what is the budget we’re working with—and two businesspeople would never start a business without knowing who’s going to do this, who’s going to do that, what the timeline is for certain goals. If you’re forming a partnership with someone—including a romantic partnership—there’s more likelihood for success if you sit down together and articulate your shared vision for the partnership early on.”
It made sense to me now. What I didn’t realize when I chose to date only men who excited me from the get-go (without considering the practical side of things), is that what makes for a good marriage isn’t necessarily what makes for a good romantic relationship. According to my married friends, once you’re married, it’s not so much about who you want to go on a tropical vacation with; it’s about who you want to run a household with. Marriage isn’t a constant passion-fest; it’s more like a partnership formed to run a very small, mundane nonprofit business.
And that, they say, can be really, really nice. Having a solid, like-minded teammate in life is pleasurable in its own way, and for most people, it’s certainly better than not having one at all.
OLDER, OVERWEIGHT, AND BALD (WHICHTHEY ALL EVENTUALLY BECOME ANYWAY)
If this sounds unromantic, when I look at my friends’ marriages, with their routine day-to-dayness, they actually seem far more romantic than any dating relationship might be. Dating seems romantic, but for the most part it’s an extended audition. Marriage seems boring, but for the most part it’s a state of comfort and acceptance. Dating is about grand romantic gestures that mean little over the long-term. Marriage is about small acts of kindness that bond you over a lifetime. It’s quietly romantic. He makes her tea. She goes to the doctor appointment with him. They listen to each other’s daily trivia. They put up with each other’s quirks. They’re there for each other.
“I just want someone who’s willing to be in the trenches with me,” my single 41-year-old friend Jennifer told me, “and I never thought of marriage that way before.”
I hadn’t, either. When I was in my late thirties, my long-married friend Renée offered this dating advice to me in an e-mail: I would say even if he’s not the love of your life, make sure he’s someone you respect intellectually, makes you laugh, appreciates you . . . I bet there are plenty of these men in the older, overweight, and bald category (which they all eventually become anyway).
At the time, I thought she was kidding (she wasn’t), but now it sounds smart. Thinking about marriage in a romantic vacuum isn’t much different from being a naive tenth-grade girl who gets pregnant by her high school boyfriend and goes around telling everyone, “Oh, we love each other, we’ll make it work.” Love doesn’t conquer all in a reality-based world.
If I’d been thinking practically when I was younger, I probably would have been with better-suited men for what I want now—a smart, like-minded partner who will be an involved parent. I knew I wanted that, of course, but I also wanted fifteen other things that were not only idealistic, but antithetical to those very practical traits I sought. For a while my boyfriends had to be “artistic” and “unconventional,” but most of those guys had neither the temperament nor the means to help me run the future household I hoped for.
Now I was starting to realize that there’s a practical underpinning to almost every aspect of romantic relationships—and it starts with how we date.
THE PRINCE CHARMING PRICE TAG
One night, a married friend and I added up the costs—financial, logistical, and emotional—of dating for a year versus being married for that year, once you’re in your thirties. It went like this:
Say you’re single and you want to meet someone. You’re no longer in school, so on a typical day, you don’t encounter available, age-appropriate men as often as you used to. You may have been working in the same place for several years, in which case few new single men come into your orbit. Even when one shows up, he’s not necessarily interested in you and/or you’re not necessarily interested in him. You may even work in a field populated almost exclusively by women: teaching, social work, fashion, publicity, nutrition, design, fund-raising, publishing. By the time you’re over thirty, many people are married, and some have kids, so social events like parties or barbecues happen less often than they did in your twenties, and there are fewer single male guests.
Given that your social life probably involves a lot of dead-end dates, short-lived relationships, and other single women friends (usually talking about how hard it is to meet men), you realize that you need to be proactive. You join an online dating service for a year ($200). When you become burned out on the first site, you may even join a second one ($200). You spend five hours a week corresponding with people and doing searches (cost: whatever your professional hourly rate is plus the emotional exhaustion involved). If you have a ticking biological clock and you’re pulling out all the stops, you may even hire a matchmaker (anywhere from $500 to several thousand dollars).
You need to look attractive on first dates, so there’s the cost of the wardrobe—skirts, pants, blouses, sweaters, camisoles, coats, shoes, purses, jackets, jewelry. You have to be prepared for everything from a dressy restaurant to a boho coffeehouse to a basketball game or an afternoon hike, in all kinds of weather conditions ($1,000 for six outfits, through four seasons). You need a good hair-cut every two months ($450 for six cuts with tip). You might also need color to cover the gray roots—welcome to your thirties ($400 for four times). You need an eyebrow wax, and as you get into your mid-thirties, you’ll probably need a lip wax for the burgeoning premenopausal mustache ($25 a month). Makeup and skin care products aren’t cheap, either ($300 a year). Some women also indulge in manicures ($15 a pop), pedicures ($25), facials ($50), and even teeth whitening ($650). Every date takes an hour of round-trip transportation time, an hour of getting dressed time, two hours of actual date time, and, for some of us, an hour of therapy time to talk about how depressing it is to still be single ($100 a session).
Now, let’s say you’re lucky enough to meet someone you want to date. I’ll call him Brad. You and Brad have “chemistry”! He’s smart, funny, attractive, cool, and likes the same music you do. Suddenly you have more wardrobe costs (you can’t wear your first- and second-date outfits over and over). Granny panties won’t cut it, so you have bra and panty costs (even at Target, we’re talking $100, as you’ll need several sets). If you’re over 35, gravity will be taking a toll, so you may have to splurge for one of those super-duper Miracle Bras ($50 each). Your waxing costs are higher (it’s no longer just about the, uh, eyebrows).
Then, two months in, it’s Brad’s birthday. You’re excited about each other. You want his birthday to be great. You either m
ake him dinner ($50 for food, $50 for wine, plus a lot of time shopping, preparing, and cooking) or you take him out someplace (a nice restaurant, a concert—none of this is cheap). You buy a cake and a gift ($100). You two keep dating, so you continue shopping, waxing, getting pedicures. Soon it’s the holiday season. Again, you buy him gifts ($75). You’re spending more time together, so you’re giving up the opportunity to meet other available men while you’re still this age and look this good and have this much time left on your biological clock.
But four months later, the relationship isn’t working out so well. You’re losing interest, he’s losing interest—doesn’t matter. You break up. Now you have to start over—all that time, money, emotional energy, and lost opportunity spent on yet another failed relationship.
Total cost so far: $2,000 without the therapy, $3,600 with the therapy.
So you go back to trying to meet a guy. You’re hanging out online (already paid for). You’re asking friends to set you up (cost: time, effort, and humiliation). You’re going to bars ($15 for drinks, one hour to get ready, one hour of round-trip transportation, $40 dry cleaning bill for the beer some guy accidentally spilled on your suede boots). You’re constantly going to places where you might meet men: dinner parties ($20 for the dessert you brought), ball games ($20 for the ticket plus the annoyance, since you don’t like basketball anyway), photography classes ($100), museum openings ($10 for the ticket, only to see that every guy there is gay or married), and library lectures (ditto).
You meet someone! Steve’s not your fantasy—he’s not very athletic, and you’re not feeling as much chemistry as you’d like—but he’s cute, kind, smart, and really into you. You invest in that relationship (financially, emotionally, logistically). You meet Steve’s parents, you become close with his sister, and spend a lot of time with his family. But after five months, you worry that he’s not what you’re looking for. He’s just not . . . you can’t really articulate it, but you’re certain that when you meet The One, you won’t have these kinds of doubts. So it’s back to the drawing board.
Three weeks later, you meet your future husband! Finally, you think, it’s happened! You go on to date the guy you’re convinced is The One, only to realize two months later that he’s self-absorbed, clueless, arrogant, dumb, humorless, dull, mean, afraid of commitment, or just-not-that-into-you.
The costs at the end of one year: $4,000 without therapy. $9,000 with therapy, although you’ll probably quit therapy right about now because even your therapist can’t keep track of all your dates’ names at this point.
SUNK COSTS AND OPPORTUNITY COSTS
What you’re left with is what economists call “sunk costs”—all the time, money, and emotional reserves you’ve invested in something with absolutely no payoff. It’s like renting a new apartment every six months, paying the moving costs, decorating it, and throwing all that rent money the landlord’s way, instead of investing in a place that you’ve bought and that will build up equity over the years. Not only do you have start-up costs with each new relationship (the money, time, and effort of retelling your entire life story and imparting information like your favorite pizza toppings, along with learning someone else’s), but none of those costs are transferable to the next relationship. By dating for “better,” you’re losing net worth, and you’ve gained nothing except the enormous stress of getting older and still being single.
Maybe you’re saying, “Wait, there was a payoff. I did gain something. I grew as a person in that relationship.” Okay. But at what point is growing as a person in relationship after relationship as valuable as growing as a person inside a realistic but happy marriage? In your twenties, breaking up is largely about heartbreak and loneliness; in your thirties, it’s also about the angst of possibly ending up alone.
Of course, men who can’t accept a good enough spouse also have sunk costs—especially if they’re paying for more of the meals and entertainment. But what they don’t have to the same degree are the “opportunity costs” of the quest for a “better” mate. While you spent time in a relationship that didn’t work out, you lost the opportunity to be out there meeting other guys. Men, on the other hand, don’t have a closing window in which to have biological kids. Moreover, if they spend six months or a year in a go-nowhere relationship, they don’t lose value in the dating market the way women in their thirties do. If anything, men become more valuable in their thirties, and if they start to lose their value around age 50, they can still meet and marry someone ten to fifteen years younger and start a family together.
As any economist will tell you, it’s all about supply and demand. The longer you hold out, the more the supply of available men goes down at the same time that their demand goes up and a woman’s marital value goes down. The result, for women, is like a really bad dating recession.
THE BACHELOR AUCTION
In 2008, a Slate magazine article by Mark Gimein used an auction analogy to explain the low supply of men as women get older. If dating is like an auction, you’d think that the stronger bidders—the more appealing women—would “win.” Instead, Gimein says, the strong bidders are so confident in their ability to find a guy that they bid too late. While the strong bidders wait for the best possible prospect, the weak bidders—the less conventionally appealing women—bid earlier and more aggressively because they know they can be outbid.
So what happens? More and more appealing men, rejected by the strong bidders, are taken off the dating market by the weak bidders. In the end, what’s left are the least appealing men—the ones even the weak bidders didn’t bid on!—along with the most appealing (but overly confident) women.
After reading this article, I thought about the men older women I know have married over the past few years: a still-trying-to-make-it-in-his-forties actor who works as a temp; a depressed widower with three nightmarish kids; a workaholic who spends all his time trying to start new businesses that inevitably fail—but who refuses to consider working for a company. It’s not that these men have no good qualities or that the women who married them are crazy. It’s just that the few available men who will also date an older woman require far more of a concession than the men who would date us when we were younger but too cocky to bid in the auction.
“Where have all the appealing men gone?” Gimein writes. “Most of them married young—and sometimes to women whose most salient characteristic was not their beauty, or passion, or intellect, but their decisiveness.”
A YEAR OF MARRIAGE
Now, let’s say that instead of being single for a year in your thirties, you spent that year married to a great guy (but not some fantasy Prince Charming). What are your costs? You’ll have to share a bathroom, but Prince Charming pees on the toilet rim, too. You might have to give up some independence and time alone, but how much quality alone time did you really have between the gym and a full-time job that pays the bills and going to bars or parties looking for men?
You’ll still get waxes and haircuts and buy clothes, but you can hang out in sweats and a ponytail on a daily basis and it won’t matter so much to a guy who leaves his underwear on the floor and farts in your presence. You don’t have to do the upkeep required to be in physical dating condition, which, as you get older, is harder not only because you’re probably supporting yourself with a demanding career, but because you’re constantly competing with younger and more attractive women for the same men. Your husband may wish that you still looked as good as you did when you were dating, but he’s been in love with you for a while, so he’ll overlook the tummy hairs.
If you’re married, your days are more pleasant because you can relax at home in the evenings and have a companion to talk to instead of running around town meeting strangers and trying to be charming and make a good impression. You’ll still do things for the holidays and your spouse’s birthday, and you’ll still go on vacations, but now you’ll have shared lifetime memories as a payoff for all that effort and expense, w
hich is well worth the economic investment. Even if you spend an annual $3,000 on a few outfits, manicures, waxes, haircuts, a weekend getaway, and gifts for your husband, it’s a long-term investment. There are no sunk costs, opportunity costs, or the cost of an album full of photos that you’ll have to crop in half (to get rid of the boyfriend you no longer speak to) if you want to have any visual memory of your life during that year.
And let’s not forget: The money you spend while married is, in effect, both yours and your spouse’s. Even if you keep separate checking accounts, there are two people maintaining the household, so you’re not sacrificing as much as if these were expenditures from an individual without the economic security and backup of a partnership. These are low-risk investments.
When my married friend and I finished our admittedly unscientific calculation, it seemed that from a cost-benefit perspective, being married over 30 clearly beat out being single over 30. Granted, the sunk costs could be compensated for if you had an unusually high income. The emotional costs could be dealt with if you could vent to a best friend who had the patience of Mother Teresa. But there’s simply no way around those opportunity costs.
The biggest opportunity cost, of course, is the possibility that you’ll give up a really good guy only to end up with nobody.
SELLING TOO EARLY
That’s what happened to Emily who, at 27, broke up with Sam, a nice, loving, and smart but not particularly “hip” technology guy she adored, in order to go out with Jonathan, an irresistibly sexy film agent who shared all of her interests. Two years later, that relationship fizzled out, and she realized that Sam was the right guy for her after all. Meanwhile, once Sam hit 30, his stock shot up in value, he had tons of women who wanted to date him, he didn’t forgive Emily for dumping him, and she couldn’t get him back (she tried!). Three years later, he was married. She sold too early.
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