Dollars and Sex (33 page)

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.

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.

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, those 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.

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.)