Dollars and Sex (35 page)

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.

According to the
National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior
, 23 percent of men over the age of 50 who are sexually active report that their last sex partner was a “casual acquaintance” and only 25 percent of the men who had a new sexual partner, or more than one partner in the previous year, said they had used a condom the last time they had sex.

Whether or not a couple chooses to use condoms during sexual intercourse depends both on how each weighs the expected costs of not using a condom against the benefit and how bargaining power is distributed in the relationship.

The expected cost of unprotected sex depends on both the probability that the person you are having sex with is infected with a disease and the probability that, if they are, the disease will be transmitted during unprotected sex.

Even as STD rates are increasing among older adults, they still have much lower STD rates than do younger adults; the syphilis infection rate of men between the ages of 20 and 24 is ten times higher than it is among men between the ages of 55 and 65, the gonorrhea infection rate is almost forty times
higher, and the chlamydia infection rate is one hundred times higher. So unprotected sex between older adults exposes each partner to much less risk of infection than unprotected sex between younger adults.

Having said that, older adult men are more likely than are older women to be infected with any of these diseases, so having unprotected sex with an older man is much more risky than having unprotected sex with an older woman.

The transmission rates, which are the probability that a person will be infected with an STD when they have sex with an infected partner, are much higher for women than they are for men. For example, the likelihood that a man will get HIV from having unprotected vaginal intercourse once with an HIV-infected woman is between 0.01 percent and 0.03 percent while the likelihood that a woman will get HIV from having unprotected vaginal intercourse once with an HIV-infected man is between 0.05 percent and 0.09 percent. These probabilities may seem low, but HIV is just one of several diseases for which women are subject to higher transmission rates than are men.

Infection and transmission rates are two good reasons why older women might want to insist on “no glove, no love,” but the declining cost of unprotected sex for men can make it difficult for older women to enforce that rule.

Difficult, but not impossible.

In fact, if older women prefer casual sexual relationships to committed relationships, then it should be easier for them to enforce condom use during casual sexual encounters than it was when they were younger. This is because they are no longer under any pressure to compromise in the hope that doing so will secure them a longer-term commitment from their partner. In this market, the men are the ones under pressure to compromise, that is, if they are looking for an end-of-life commitment.

There is a solution to market imbalance created by differential life expectancies, and that is for older women to have relationships with younger men. The evidence suggests that I am not the only one who thinks that is the best way to resolve this situation.

COUGARS AS A SOLUTION TO A MARKET PROBLEM

When I was 36, I found myself in an awkward position at a dinner party. I had been lamenting the fact that no one seemed interested in playing matchmaker anymore when my hosts realized, to their great delight, that they knew the perfect man for me. Given their description, he appeared to be my polar opposite on every measurable dimension. So it wasn't clear to me what exactly it was about him that made him my ideal mate, but (as I have already said) I like to keep an open mind when it comes to finding love. Having said that, I did put the brakes on the whole arrangement when they told me his age—he was 53 years old.

Why this event was so memorable was not that they wanted to set me up with a high school–educated rural tradesman who was almost old enough to be my father; it was the looks that my dinner companions gave each other when I said that I didn't think I would be interested in someone
who was seventeen years my senior. Those looks clearly communicated, “Which one of us is going to tell this babe that she is never going to do any better?”

I honestly wish I could tell you that this was a one-time experience.

Big differences in age can be problematic in long-term relationships. If you remember Jane's story in
chapter 6
, you will recall that being the much-younger spouse meant that she had very little say in the decisions that many couples make together and that her lack of bargaining power contributed to how unhappy she was in her marriage. John and Jane's inability to sustain their relationship over the long term was not directly the result of the differences in their ages, but the empirical evidence shows that age differences do matter in how successful marriages are in the long run.

Earlier I argued that household bargaining power within a marriage depends, in theory at least, on the relative opportunities outside of marriage. Relative ages are one factor that determines those outside opportunities. For example, in a market in which younger women are in greater demand than older women, a 25-year-old woman married to a 40-year-old man should have more bargaining power than would a 40-year-old woman married to a 40-year-old man, everything else being equal.

That theory suggests that, since Jane was much younger than John, and therefore had more outside options for remarriage, she should have had more bargaining power and not less. According to research by Sonia Oreffice, however, this is the most common experience in heterosexual marriages—the younger partner has less say in household decisions. What is really interesting about this research, though, is that in same-sex marriages, the relationship between age and bargaining power is entirely consistent with the economic theory.

One of the decisions that households make together is how members allocate their time between working on the labor market and either working on home production or simply not working at all (economists like to call this “consuming leisure”). We assume that the person with the most bargaining power will spend fewer hours on the labor market
(after controlling for factors like the number of children at home) and that the person with the least bargaining power will supply more; how much more depends on just how low their bargaining power is relative to their partner's.

Sonia Oreffice finds that if a wife is five years younger than her husband, this one factor will increase her annual labor supply by ten hours and decrease her husband's by almost eleven hours. This says that the older spouse (in this example, the husband, but this is true regardless of gender) holds more bargaining power in that they are able to negotiate fewer hours on the labor market for themselves and more for their spouse because of their superior age.

Within lesbian and gay couples, the dynamic works in the opposite direction and is much larger; the younger spouse holds more bargaining power and, as a result, is able to negotiate less time working on the labor market.

A woman who is five years younger than her (female) partner supplies twenty-one hours less of labor a year and her older partner supplies twenty hours more. A man who is five years younger than his (male) partner supplies twenty-two hours less on the labor market and his relatively old partner supplies twenty-three hours more.

The same relationship is found when we look at income transferred between partners instead of time spent working; in same-sex couples, the bigger the age difference, the more income the older partner transfers to the younger partner ($2,200 in lesbian couples and $1,500 in gay couples when there is a five-year age difference), while in heterosexual couples the income is transferred from the younger spouse to the older spouse ($900 when there is a five-year age difference).