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12:34 p.m. - 2008-04-16
In which I take on the Eligibile Male Paradox and shy away from Game Theory
The next article has come across my screen. I do love my friends for sending these to me. This one comes from Poppy.

I relish the opportunity to respond to these articles because it gives me a chance to put my brain to work on subjects that I think are relevant to my life if not most of ours. Gender politics is something that most of us deal with every day, so here is my next entry to this series in what The Short Stop refers to as my �on-line sex manual��

As I see it, the article looks to answer the so-called �eligible bachelor paradox� by applying Game Theory. �Eligible,� in this case, meaning marriage material or being �available, sociable and attractive.� It lays out the explanation of The Paradox, which I have to say was a little easier to grasp than Game Theory. The Theory is then used as the basis for the �auction� scenario. I chose to take his �auction� scenario and look at it a different way.

Now, let�s take a look at what is deemed �eligible.� His first quality is availability! Granted, better the one we can have then the one we can�t, but still. If all it took was a man being available, then there would be a lot less men available, let me tell ya.

Besides, what about the ones that are not available right now? The ones that may currently be in relationships that are not going to end in marriage are still kind of on the market, right? Plus, the married ones sometimes have a different definition of what it means to be �available�. For some women, these obstacles do not immediately disqualify a man.

Next, we have �sociable.� Does this mean he is sociable with you or everyone? There are levels of sociability that need to be taken into account. Really, sometimes there is that guy who is socially awkward but treats you like a princess and makes funny comments when you watch t.v. together. Then, there is the guy who you can bring with to the company Christmas party and makes you look good in front of your boss because he can discuss both stocks and baseball. Finally, you have the guy who is a little too sociable. He is good with you, but also has a kind word and a touch on the arm of every other woman in the room.

Last, but in many cases certainly not least, we are left with �attractive�. He makes a reference to biology saying that, in nature, it is the male with the best plumage who gets the girl. I say that I have seen the pretty ones. I have even tried dating a few. They may get the most choice when it comes to women to date but they often are not the ones that get married. This is for either their own selfish needs, i.e. having the option to play the field, so they will. Or, they may be pretty, but they are not particularly good at much else, such as paying for things or having a real conversation. Rarely, you do get a pretty one who wants to settle down, and if you do, how many women will take him seriously as a catch and how much are they just written off as a plaything?

Granted, each woman has a different perspective of what makes a man �eligible.� I think the author left out a few key characteristics of eligibility. Where is economics? There will always be women who don�t care what a man does for a living. There are also those of us who don�t want a guy who can�t even pay for his half of the pizza. And there will always be women who don�t want a man who does not qualify for a certain tax bracket.

What about self-reliance? Personally, I have seen too many kids lately who have had their parents take care of every aspect of their lives for so long that they have no idea how to change a light bulb, let alone know how to pay the light bill. It all falls into the �failure to launch� phenomenon with 35 year old guys still living at home.

Lastly, I ask about stability. This may be part of availability, but the guy needs to be there. I think this covers both physically being around enough to qualify as stable, but also emotional stability. Who wants a guy that for some reason, be it fear of commitment, or worst case, mental disease or addiction, cannot give a woman the emotional support she needs?

Now that eligibility has been taken care of, I take issue with his belief that the marriage proposal is really at the whim of the woman who gets to choose from a wide range of suitors. He insists that this is a �rarely reversed archetype� that ends with the �man standing dazed at the altar.� From a woman�s point of view, how many of us have had to wait and wait to find a man and then to put months, if not years, of our lives into the relationship only to realize that this guy is never going to propose? How many women do you know that have had to corner their man and give him the big ultimatum �marry me or lose me?� How many of us actually have a wide array of suitors as if the men were a buffet line that we get to pick from? I�ll take the beefsteak with a side of compassion and drizzled with a rich sense of humor, please. Yeah, sure.

I�m not saying that men have it easy. I am also not saying that I understand what�s necessarily going through, or not going through, a man�s mind about marriage. I do, however, think that most men do feel as if they have a buffet line, as a friend of mine says.

Here is where I shy away from the �auction� scenario and Game Theory in general. I spent some solid time on Wikipedia trying to figure out Game Theory, but there have been several Noble Prizes given out to the geniuses working with Game Theory. My failure to fully grasp it is not solely my fault, nor the lame girl excuse of not getting math. I�m just not going to be played by Russell Crowe in a movie drawing strange formulas on my windows while trying to decide if my government informants are real or just figments of my insanity.

Instead, I�m going to take the buffet line metaphor and run with it.

If The Paradox does exist, then men have the wider pool to choose from, their buffet line is longer. And, if The Paradox exists, then men have better pickings on that buffet line then women do. They can choose the filet and truffled potatoes, while women are left with only a few filets but mostly chipped beef. What he wants us to believe is that women have let it get to this stage by waiting for the perfect filet to come to the table, only to see the others get snatched up by women who were either savvier or not as picky. Now it is up to the women to make that chipped beef look good because they are so hungry that chipped beef is starting to look like filet mignon.

Again, screw The Theory and The Paradox, but it seems to me like men win this scenario.

I realize that I have covered a lot of different issues here, but I feel that I have had to in order to respond to the author�s logic. Please feel free to let me know if think I have left anything out or rambled on a little too much or if my conclusions are incoherent and flawed.

The Eligible-Bachelor Paradox

HOW ECONOMICS AND GAME THEORY EXPLAIN THE SHORTAGE OF AVAILABLE, APPEALING MEN.

By Mark Gimein

Posted Wednesday, April 9, 2008, at 4:23 PM ET

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the available, sociable, and genuinely attractive man is a character highly in demand in social settings. Dinner hosts are always looking for the man who fits all the criteria. When they don't find him (often), they throw up their hands and settle for the sociable but unattractive, the attractive but unsociable, and, as a last resort, for the merely available.
The shortage of appealing men is a century-plus-old commonplace of the society melodrama. The shortage�or�more exactly, the perception of a shortage�becomes evident as you hit your late 20s and more acute as you wander into the 30s. Some men explain their social fortune by believing they've become more attractive with age; many women prefer the far likelier explanation that male faults have become easier to overlook.
The problem of the eligible bachelor is one of the great riddles of social life. Shouldn't there be about as many highly eligible and appealing men as there are attractive, eligible women?
Actually, no�and here's why. Consider the classic version of the marriage proposal: A woman makes it known that she is open to a proposal, the man proposes, and the woman chooses to say yes or no. The structure of the proposal is not, "I choose you." It is, "Will you choose me?" A woman chooses to receive the question and chooses again once the question is asked.
The idea of the woman choosing expressed in the proposal is a resilient one. The woman picking among suitors is a rarely reversed archetype of romantic love that you'll find everywhere from Jane Austen to Desperate Housewives. Or take any comic wedding scene: Invariably, it'll have the man standing dazed at the altar, wondering just how it is he got there.
Obviously, this is simplified�in contemporary life, both sides get plenty of chances to be selective. But as a rough-and-ready model, it's not bad, and it contains a solution to the Eligible-Bachelor Paradox.
You can think of this traditional concept of the search for marriage partners as a kind of an auction. In this auction, some women will be more confident of their prospects, others less so. In game-theory terms, you would call the first group "strong bidders" and the second "weak bidders." Your first thought might be that the "strong bidders"�women who (whether because of looks, social ability, or any other reason) are conventionally deemed more of a catch�would consistently win this kind of auction.
But this is not true. In fact, game theory predicts, and empirical studies of auctions bear out, that auctions will often be won by "weak" bidders, who know that they can be outbid and so bid more aggressively, while the "strong" bidders will hold out for a really great deal. You can find a technical discussion of this here. (Be warned: "Bidding Behavior in Asymmetric Auctions" is not for everyone, and I certainly won't claim to have a handle on all the math.) But you can also see how this works intuitively if you just consider that with a lot at stake in getting it right in one shot, it's the women who are confident that they are holding a strong hand who are likely to hold out and wait for the perfect prospect.
This is how you come to the Eligible-Bachelor Paradox, which is no longer so paradoxical. The pool of appealing men shrinks as many are married off and taken out of the game, leaving a disproportionate number of men who are notably imperfect (perhaps they are short, socially awkward, underemployed). And at the same time, you get a pool of women weighted toward the attractive, desirable "strong bidders."
Where have all the most appealing men gone? Married young, most of them�and sometimes to women whose most salient characteristic was not their beauty, or passion, or intellect, but their decisiveness.
Evolutionary psychologists will remind us that there's a long line of writing about "female choosiness" going back to Darwin and the male peacocks competing to get noticed by "choosy" mates with their splendid plumage. But you don't have to buy that kind of reductive biological explanation (I don't) to see the force of the "women choose" model. You only have to accept that for whatever socially constructed reason, the choice of getting married is one in which the woman is usually the key player. It might be the man who's supposed to ask the official, down-on-the-knee question, but it usually comes after a woman has made the central decision. Of course, in this, as in all matters of love, your experience may vary.
There may be those who look at this and try to derive some sort of prescription, about when to "bid," when to hold out, and when (as this Atlantic story urges) to "settle." If you're inclined to do that, approach with care. Game theory deals with how best to win the prize, but it works only when you can decide what's worth winning.


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