Jessie has a beautiful personality and sparkling eyes. While single and open to dating already before the lockdown, her social life often fell victim to a grueling work schedule and frequent travel. She was also taking care of extended family living across the country. There was a constant silent underlying disappointment emanating from these constraints, which were as real as they were hard to avoid. Dating was a bittersweet experience for Jessie, who felt that it was easy to meet people but hard to find meaningful relationships.

Along came Corona and the lockdown. One day, travel was out; the next, the commute was off. And Jessie’s employer extended to every employee the flexibility of daily working hours that was soon becoming a bare necessity for working parents.

When I chatted to her last, Jessie confided that dating under Corona had developed into an interesting direction. It was frustrating not being able to meet anyone in person. But you ended up having more and better conversations with the people you already knew. Dating has not stopped. While face to face meetings disappear, online and phone interactions take over.

The figures back this up. On the 4^th of April, the OKCupid blog blog recorded “All over the world, matches on OkCupid have increased 10% — and conversations have increased over 20%! — as singles turn to online dating for connection. – In response to the new question “How do you plan on dating during this time of coronavirus?” a whopping 94% of respondents said they’ll continue to date, albeit virtually.”

And the conversations intensify. Jessie found that as there are fewer distractions, you actually focus on your date. You listen. You get to know each other much better than you would have if meeting face-to-face all the time.

OKCupid agrees. “Virtual dating is ushering in a new era of “slow dating” that’s been welcomed by singles. (..). – With virtual dating, the focus lands on the quality of conversations and time spent together, making it easier to figure out whether the person you’re talking to is compatible with whatever you’re looking for. – In just the past two weeks, there’s been a 5% increase in OkCupid users looking for long-term relationships and a 20% decrease in users looking for hookups.”

This lets many (especially female) singles breathe a sigh of relief. I literally see shoulders untense for many of my single friends. The last pressure point that Jessie saw fall was geography. If there was never strictly a need to be in the same city as your date, there definitely isn’t now.

She is not alone. “Women have also been more likely to expand their preferred location to “anywhere” so they can connect across borders. And those who do, have 5% more conversations than those who don’t.

What if ironically, confinement’s limitations lead to a wider global reach in dating?

With that in mind, I have written this blog as a little tour through the dating columns of the world. You will find that love is everywhere, while its form, and the priorities around it vary.

Have fun!

America

Modern Love in the New York Times is a wonderful series. This one proposes American husbands can be trained like dolphins and other wild animals. American wives too. (I shall try these tricks on a German husband soon.)

China

China has a popular TV dating game show, Fei Cheng Wu Rao, “If you are not serious, don’t bother me.” It involves quite a bit of conversation on stage, and interaction between groups of two genders to narrow down a choice. Rather than seeking lofty romance or high ideals, contestants do not shy away from materialistic pursuits. Famous quotes include “I would rather cry in a BMW than laugh on a bicycle.” It went so far that Government intervened and ordered a psychologist chaperone to accompany the talk show host.

Egypt

One of my favorite dating columnists of all times is Nehad Abolkomsan. She has a popular TV show ‘Nehad’s Stories’ which gives advice to young women, often in matters of love and courtship. Her advice is quite evidence based and matter of fact. When you learn that Nehad’s day job is that of a lawyer and chairwoman of the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights, you understand why her program focuses on empowering women, seeking to give them a voice, agency and confidence. Including and especially when negotiating the dating and marriage markets. Here you can watch an episode, which is beautifully put in scene and focuses on how women should select their groom. She encourages looking for qualities suggesting that he would be supportive of a woman’s ambition and slow to anger. She also promotes a longer than average engagement period, based on statistics that put Egyptian marriages concluded after a short engagement at high risk of divorce. Quoting a survey into the preferences of Egyptian women, she finds that 80% of young women care about the ethical values of the potential groom, followed by a distant 19% valuing family and lineage and 13% love and romance. The episode ends with an interview of a young woman from Upper Egypt who has defied odds and traditions to realize personal and professional success.

Germany

The weekly Die Zeit has a series on dating with the title ‘It’s Complicated.’ It loves lives up to the stereotype that in the country of poets and philosophers, every puddle needs to have depth. The articles raise questions, reflect and explore with open endings, rather than advise or present complete personal stories. Popular topics include the pitfalls of online dating, aging and age differences, gender and social expectations and their reversal, as well as honesty and trust and their challenges, up to safety risks such as stalking. The common thread seems to be the question ‘What If?’ ranging from the light hearted ‘What if your date blows on his coffee?’ to several serious columns asking implicitly ‘What if s/he is the wrongest of them all?’

Nigeria

Efua Oyofo runs the blog ‘Dating While Nigerian’, which has now become a facebook page. I find it interesting that Efua is a labor and jobs professional, given that search and matching are relevant for both labor and marriage markets, and that several economic models apply to both. Her blog is quite forward, and an Economist article featuring it suggests that Nigerian dating breaks a few Western rules.

I hope you enjoyed this brief tour and found some inspiration for your own Valentine’s Day!

PS If your country has a popular dating column, please send me a link.

Best time to sit in the garden between roses and peonies and question 50-year old romantic advice, from an economist’s point of view. Get me my iced matcha latte.

Where were we?

11 Get a job in a medical, dental or law school.

Hm. The idea behind this counsel was probably to immerse the ladies in an environment where they would find a doctor, dentist or lawyer husband. What was meant by ‘a job’ in those schools? Teaching jobs may not be in rich supply or easy to pick up. So, more likely an administrative job?  – This advice dates from a time where marriages were not yet, on average, assortatively matched. But nowadays, they are. Assortative matching means, partners in a couple tend to correspond in age, wage and education. In other words, lawyers tend to marry lawyers, and doctors other doctors, or at least someone of similar education and wage. This trend has started around the end of the second world war and has become stronger since (also see here and here.)

Therefore, for better or worse, a clerical job in a law or medical school will normally not make the job holder an eligible prospect for the budding lawyers and doctors studying there.

This basic assumption, of marriages not being between (professional) equals, but rather of female hypergamy (women marrying up) recurs several times in the original article on the ‘129 ways’. It makes for a big part of the smirks we cannot suppress when reading, because in our day and age it does not hold any more.

12 Become a nurse or an air-line stewardess -they have very high marriage rates.

I have no idea where the authors of the ‘129 ways’ got their statistics. I researched a bit, and the marriage rate itself does not seem to vary so much across professions. It varies more with educational attainment, but not even that much: the more educated you are, the more likely it is you will marry (over 90% for those with a full college degree, about 80% for those with secondary school only, using US labor force data.)

Now, what is well documented, is the divorce rate of different occupations. I am not so sure you want to marry a flight attendant after reading those: they have the third highest divorce rate, at 50.5%.

Look out for an actuary instead.

13 Ask your friends’ husbands who the eligible men are in their offices.

There is nothing wrong with a bit of networking. Beware though of whom your friends’ husbands might recommend. I have found out over the years that a straight man may not be the best judge of what you could find attractive. Let’s just say, my father and brother had interesting date suggestions for me growing up. So you may want to specify a few criteria. Say 1-5 binary criteria that can be easily checked by your proxies.

14 Be nice to everybody – they may have an eligible brother or son.

Always a good rule, although ‘kind’ might be more authentic than ‘nice’.

Then, on second thoughts – why were you inclined not to be nice to someone in the first place? Was that particular person a source of trouble? It matters, because according to the above thinking they could be the family you are marrying into. Worth thinking through.

Ok, dear readers, until next week. If we have another breather.

– If you don’t burn the chocolate, that is. But baked chocolate is also an inspiring taste. Trust me. Ok, where were we.. yes, let’s continue our review of the 129 ways..

4 Join a hiking club

On the one hand, this seems to be a good idea independently of wanting to date or not. Getting out, getting exercise, meeting new friends. On the other hand, if you want to do it with the particular aim of finding a partner, you need to do some prior research: who is in that hiking club, which demographics by age, gender, education, profession? Would these demographics appeal to you? Also, how much do you love to hike vs. other sports or causes? The day only has 24 hours and the hiking club competes with several other options. You should join causes and sports close to your heart and vision for yourself. If it is not clear to you which those are, your first step is to sit down with yourself and figure them out.

5 Look in the census for places with the most single men. (McCalls suggests Nevada)

It definitely matters where you are, as I wrote here before. One very important factor for quality of place when it comes to dating is the gender-ratio. A whole book as well as several of my blog posts have been written about the importance of gender-ratios for dating and it can hardly be emphasized enough. The gender in the minority will have more choice and will therefore set the terms. (Unless extremely powerful social or legal norms limit its decision-power or self-expression.) In that way, dating follows indeed the logic of a market and the influence over the result moves to the party that is in higher demand and shorter supply.

A remark on McCall’s choice of Nevada, which apparently had one of the highest single male/female ratios in the 1950s. It still performs well on this score, although cities on the West Coast, especially California, but also Oregon, and the state of Washington are all great places for women to date under this perspective. The metropolitan areas of the East Coast are the opposite (says the American Community Survey 2017). If you don’t live in America, look up the gender statistics of your country’s most recent census.

6 Read the obituaries to find eligible widowers.

This is weird. You don’t want to feed on someone else’s grieving. Such an attitude may disqualify you in the long run even if your company is appreciated in the short run. You also don’t know how long people need to grieve. The dating prospect may not be emotionally available for quite some time.

7 Take up golf and go to different golf courses.

Much better. Kindly refer to what I said on the hiking club. Note that the demographics of your nearest golf club may be quite different from the demographics of your nearest hiking club. The same may apply to the member fee. Assess and pick according to your preference.

To be continued next week.

Without burning the chocolate.

Rather, for those who are actually interested in how the 129 ways might perform in real life, let me explore them under an economist’s lens. I will do so in several installments, starting with the first three.

1 Get a dog and walk it

Getting out of the house and meeting people is definitely good. Frequency of encounters is vital to build acquaintance (see for example ‘How do friendships form?’). But that does not require a dog. Also, for courtship purposes it matters where you walk the dog. Are there a lot of sympathetic joggers on that path? Pleasant single dogwalkers?

Better not to get a dog just for courtship purposes. The dog is worth its own purpose. If you love dogs, and want a partner who loves them too, then of course go ahead.

2 Have your car break down at strategic places

Not a good idea. The underlying assumption seems to be that good men will stop and help you fix it, and that they know how to. A couple of things are at odds with reality here. First, the whole concept won’t work in an urban context. In the city, there will hardly be a place for him to stop and park right away, and on the highway, it is dangerous to just stop and park. So already you have to geographically limit the attempt to rural roads and villages. But that context also means that population density and therefore frequency of chance encounters is lower. Finally, 2019’s cars are not as easily fixed as 1950s cars, and car-fixing is no longer a frequent hobby. Bottom line: this strategy fishes in far too small a pond.

3 Attend night school – take courses men like

This one is really good, and the first example of some chance brilliance in this list. For dating purposes, it is a very good idea to seek out places where your own gender is outnumbered. So, ‘courses men like’ may have many men and few women. Excellent for bargaining power. I would still recommend making sure you choose a course you like, too – joint values and interests are great glue for any relationship.

To be continued next week.

A crisis at work brought the change. Carla was working with a bully who started ‘supervising’ her without ever having received that mandate. Her once loved job descended into drudgery. When I met her one day on the bus, she broke down. She vented, was comforted and gathered enough strength to file a complaint. She also switched perspectives and decided to give notice and move back to her home country. Which happened to be a cool place with mountains in perpetual fog.

Nothing else was foggy though. She started over in all areas: bought a flat, power-organized her things, and began an exciting and influential job that offered good work-life balance. She found enough time for a vigorous exercise regime and meeting friends. She dated online and offline, and in a city that had a natural gender balance. Before long, she started seeing George, an intellectual entrepreneur who shared her passion for travel and the outdoors and who is her partner to this day. Her professional and personal lives are gleaming from all angles. Only the actual weather is permanently autumnal, but that doesn’t keep Carla and George from climbing yet more mountains.

What happened here? It matters where you are. Not because of the weather, but because of who is there, of how people work, and how much control you can take over your life.

Who is there: if your own gender is over-represented, good luck. Unless you are willing to switch sexual orientation, which is rare after all, you will compete and have to line up for the acceptable candidates. Empirically, if you are a woman competing for men, that does not exactly improve men’s behavior. On average, when faced with too much freedom to choose, men tend to be somewhat sloppier in their work and career efforts, less committed and possibly polyamorous. – In other words: find yourself a place, a location, where your own gender is outnumbered. Especially if you are a woman.

How people work: you need spare time to date and have a good relationship. Sometimes a few miles of distance can mean a world of difference. There is comparative sociological evidence comparing the love lives of Eastern and Western Germans in the year of reunification, and as a Wessi I am sad to report that Easterners had more fun. Much more, and better fun. – If you interview women who personally experienced the before and after of communism, they point to shorter work hours, job security and free universal childcare. As a related article in the NYT resumes: “It was state socialism’s answer to work-life balance.”

To be fair, there are other differences in Western and Eastern love lives, and they are still measurable in the 2009 Parship study. One could say that East German relationships are, on average, more companionate and emancipated. Men tend to seek a confident woman that shares their interests, and women care less about their man’s salary than in the West. Eastern couples also talk with much more ease about intimacy. (Not only out of regional patriotism, I would like to point out that these statistics reflect percentages only, and that convergence is already happening. Before long, the twain shall meet.)

It is not just the time factor, it is about taking control of your work and life. That is compatible with working long hours out of choice, and on topics of choice. You may have heard of the Whitehall Studies, which have variously shown that in the same activity (in this case, British public administration), higher ranking officials were healthier than lower ranking officials. The difference was maintained when controlling for observable data that may correlate with rank, such as education and nutrition choices. Especially, stress measured as cortisol, and coronary heart disease showed a rank gradient. While the reasons have not yet been fully explained (and the Whitehall studies continue for a further generation), control over tasks and priorities, as well as predictability of work seem to play a role.

Now, what if you are stuck where you are? Stuck with a gender ratio and labor market that are less than lucky?  The internet is your friend. Online dating can bridge some of the divide to a better location. The gender ratio, for sure, is then no longer limited to the one of your physical dwelling place. Also, you can connect quickly, during your leisure or even your lunch break. It is no silver bullet, but it can un-stick a few constraints to start with.

Carla, of course, is well connected online. Which is while I can keep up with her latest. All I see these days are broad smiling faces, a super tidy creatively furbished flat, high mountains, adventurous trails, shining oceans and fog only in the background.

Do you still feel the holiday warmth? Our house for sure still breathes hot chocolate, cookies, spiced goose, gifts, generosity and good company. I love it, and would like it to linger.

Can it? Over the years I have found that what can last without boredom is the inner part, the family ties, the altruism, the generosity – non-material would be too simple an expression; family ties can be very material. But transcendental nonetheless. The consumption aspects grow stale far too quickly. I mean I lurrve chocolates. Really. But I can’t look at them right now. Not even the finest brands – which I usually crave all year.

Another phenomenon came up this holiday, and everyone, including president Obama apparently, is going gaga about Fates and Furies. I also enjoy the read. Being still in the first quarter of the book, it’s kooky and a little bit crazy, a tasty and lighter bite after Crime and Punishment, which my book club wormed through earlier.

The new book, as many of you may know, dwells on marriage. How it can be something altogether new even after a string of relationships. The book marvels, almost like a distant perplexed observer, about how marriage can last, about passion that lasts.

But it can. Yes it can.

Psychologists have found that the kind of passion that typically a new love brings can indeed last decades. In very long-term couples that report still being madly in love, MRIs find brain activity that suggests new love next to other feelings commonly found in older companionate marriages, such as trust, familiarity and a feeling of kinship.

I am actually not surprised. In fact, I am rather happy that someone else provides a good argument-ology to my anecdotal observations and doesn’t let me look like a doe eyed dreamer when I claim the same.

So what makes the joy of marriage last? There are six attitudes you need to hold on to and cultivate, according to this research. Hint, we are onto our seasonal theme again: inner values matter. Intentionality matters. Having friends matters.

So here you go:

1. Have some money, but spend it frugally and don’t care if your partner is rich. The couple should have solid earnings (i.e. more than $125k for the household). But only little should be spent on the engagement ring and the wedding, and neither partner should care if the other is rich.
2. Don’t care too much about looks either. People who report caring about the looks of their partner are more likely to divorce.
3. Go to religious worship regularly. This one is now well established in the research, and no wonder. Common values bond, a network of friends with the same values supports, and the whole thing is transcendental and non-consumerist = the essence of durability.
4. Date 3 or more years before engagement. It sure helps to know each other well, to weed out any remaining information asymmetry, and to have weathered some ups and downs together. But to be honest, this one is a bit of a trade-off with the previous habit. The religiously observant, for whom ‘time before engagement’ often means abstinence, will not be thrilled by the length of this time. Religious people tend to have shorter pre-engagement and pre-marriage times.
5. Have lots of friends at the wedding. People with bigger (but not more expensive) weddings are less likely to divorce. This one may be a proxy for ‘have lots of friends’ generally. People with lots of friends are probably not dramatically difficult to get along with, plus they have networks for help (with kids, the house) and emotional support. The appreciation of friends for the bride and groom is essential also because its absence would mean that partners would sometimes have to choose whom to spend time with, friends or spouse.
6. Go on honeymoon. People who went on honeymoon are significantly less likely to divorce than people who did not. This probably means, don’t be too stressed or too workaholic to have a honeymoon at all. Or, in other words, be able to rank your relationship more highly than any other gainful occupation.

In the hope that every reader’s joy may last during 2016 and beyond. Happy New Year!

What on earth would economists know about this, you may be asking. I must admit, a broken heart is not a topic I would have thought of by myself, but it is one that many friends bring to me these days. So I dug around in the treasure chest of empirical literature and found a few tissues helpful pointers. (Most of them come from Daniel Kahneman’s seminal article in the AER (2003)).

1 Gain perspective. It is not quite as bad as it seems. Human beings experience loss aversion. I.e. we feel a loss of a certain importance more strongly than we would feel a gain of equal importance. In plain English: your sadness without her is bigger than your happiness with her would have been. (Sounds about right?) This is how we humans work.

2 While an end with pain is better than pain without end, your perception may get this wrong. I know it’s hard to believe, but empirically, patients judge the pain of a procedure by the pain they feel at the end. A short procedure that ends with a sharp sting of pain is judged as worse than a much longer procedure with several stings of pain and two sharp stings in the middle. Look back critically: how much *pain* was there already in your time together, which your memory now tries to dismiss?

3 Good riddance indeed. You know, the opportunities you missed while dating your now lost love are likely a bigger loss than losing him now. It will not feel like it. But this is just another way our intuition plays tricks on us. Economists would coldly say ‘out of pocket expenditures are more painful than opportunity costs’. What it really means is that it hurts more to lose an actual mate than missing a good potential mate – even if objectively the latter is the bigger loss. Bottom line: rejoice; you are free to revive the opportunities you had missed in the meantime.

4 Replace the adrenaline and cortisol with endorphines. This advice is not from behavioral economists, but from doctors and experience. Adrenaline and cortisol are hormones caused by stress, such as fear or anger or sadness. Exercise can reduce their levels. Physical activity makes you less stressful. Difficult issues are easier to handle. What is more, exercise produces endorphines that create a sense of peace and pleasure. (Some people call this “runner’s high.”) To be precise, endurance sports are best for this effect: running, rowing, biking, aerobics, for example. For good balance, you may want to throw in something to wind down every other day, such as yoga or pilates.

5 Keep trying. Your past loss has no control over your future success. Meeting good people is a bit like waiting for a taxi, don’t you find? They pass by at rather random intervals. Sometimes you wait and none arrives, sometimes there are lots in parallel lines. The only thing you can predict is that the arrival and departure of one taxi is completely unrelated to the next. In nerdy terms, taxi arrivals follow a Poisson distribution. One arrival (or departure) is no predictor whatsoever of when (or how) the next one will arrive. I would venture that it’s quite similar with dates. Let go of your current pain; it has nothing to do with the next mate.

But let’s begin. Here are 5 essential lessons from Nash’s work for daters.

1. Make sure you can talk honestly with your date about everything of importance to you. If you want to cooperate at all, if you want to negotiate a good time together and maybe make some agreements, it is indispensable that the communication is open and honest. Otherwise, your agreements will be incomplete, or shaky, i.e. unreliable.
2. It is important that you can make agreements that work for both. It almost goes without saying, but after all I hear and see happening to many friends that are dating, I am not sure we can take this one for granted. Nash himself felt he needed to point it out as a key assumption before modeling cooperative games. You need to be able to agree on something, so that both of you understand what is meant by the agreement, and understand it in the same way. You also need to able to comply with and fulfil any agreements made. Given that we are talking dating, these agreements can range from the light (like, agreeing on a time to meet to go to the cinema) to the serious (agreeing to go exclusive, or, eventually, marry…). The ability to fulfil agreements implies:
3. None of you should have outside commitments that interfere with the relationship. Again, it should go without saying, but I am writing up some rational strategies here, based on a level-headed rational economist’s work. And from that perspective, anything can happen. Better check that your date does not come with baggage none of you is able to deal with. Neither should you. Incompatible outside commitments include, for example: being married, having another exclusive dating relationship, or having existing financial or time commitments that leave no money or no time worth mentioning for a new relationship.
4. Don’t take altruism for granted. It is safer to assume that your counterpart will go as far as he/she can without losing you. Better assume this first and assess any degree of altruism well before agreeing to, like, go steady. (Hint: you want a lot of altruism, while being mindful that all that looks too good to be true probably is.)
5. You may need an accountability framework. It is great if you can just blindly trust yourself and each other. But this is neither granted nor, possibly, as frequent as we’d like it to be. Nash suggests ‘something like an umpire’ to enforce agreements. Now, as this can prove complicated in dating, what about the following proxies: (i) a joint network of friends that knows or gets to know both of you well, and with whom you are willing to share where you stand dating wise; and (ii) for the younger or the more conservative among us: parents who are kept abreast of essential agreements. The accountability thing is naturally a small circle affair; I don’t advise publishing on facebook. It also should not be something that locks you into a relationship, but rather a trusted group that is in the know but otherwise neutral.

If this sounds too businesslike for love, ask yourself when you last held someone to these standards? If anything, your dating life deserves much more.

All this with the grain of salt that we are sometimes too irrational to apply the rationally obvious. But try and let me know how it goes!

Thelma is an attractive woman in her late thirties. She has had several boyfriends, but always something was missing. She has been going out with Jack for nearly two years – exclusively but without any physical expression of love. Not even holding hands. Jack, a successful 45 year old, is also still living with his parents in their large house and has a hard time contemplating moving out. – Sensibly,  Thelma left before they hit the two year mark. The only people she has been attracted to since were still in a relationship.

What is going on here? Well, Jack is not really available for an exclusive relationship; his heart is safely parked at his parents’. But Thelma neither: she unconsciously picks people who could never offer a full, durable, emotional relationship. Where there’s no relationship, none can be broken. True risk safely avoided.

What do economists make of this? What is an ’emotionally unavailable’ person doing in economic terms?
She is not on the market. She is not buying, let alone investing. Keeps her money safely in a low or no interest savings account, while she goes through the motions of shopping. We are talking about an extreme risk aversion here, that for tops is unconscious. The aversion is so high it keeps you out of any chances of a substantial return on your investment. Risk averse people want insurance. Thelma and Jack insure against the essential risks of amorous relationships by keeping healthy amour out; the true mutual connection.

How doe we get the amour back in? What can be done?

• Step 1 would be to make the process conscious. Instead of unconsciously avoiding productive risks, Thelma and Jack would consciously avoid them. Nothing wrong here, if that makes them happy.
• If it doesn’t make them happy, then in the medium run, step 2 would mean a realistic assessment of the risks of investing. Are they sizeable? Certainly. But not higher for oneself than for others. (Thelma needs to reality check her self esteem. And correct upwards. One way to do this is to avoid people that drag us down with reproaches and criticism. Sometimes this means creating distance to formerly close chums. And creating more proximity with friends that lift us up and appreciate us.)
• Step 3 would finally entail some stepwise and careful and proactive risk taking. Without inbuilt insurance. But with the option to dial back at any step if needed.

There are no guarantees. You may be hurt.

Or you may bond forever.