Anna Fels’ insights about attention remind me of Sonia’s story. Sonia, a shy, smart girl, was your typical wallflower. She would not push herself to the limelight, was soft-spoken, and her smallish frame did not usually call the attention at parties. Sonia was not getting much attention. However, the people who made it through to her would realize how cute she actually was, as well as smart and funny. There had never been a boyfriend.

Sonia was active in her community and had a wide network of friends. Enter Fr. Jim. Sonia and Fr. Jim struck up a platonic friendship, and he would soon become some sort of older brother. Her sounding board, her affirmer – in short, he would shower honest, affectionate, but platonic attention on her. Sonia had a ‘man in her life’ like never before, and, if she had once felt a gap in that area, it was now at least partially filled.

Gradually, people tended to oversee her less. About half a year after becoming friends with Fr. Jim, she started dating Michael.  And the last time I checked they were happily married and had two kids. – By the way, Jacqueline, Beth and Becky also started dating their husbands roughly half a year after knowing Fr. Jim – and he didn’t introduce the husbands or know them.

Thing is, Fr. Jim was a rainmaker. (Do watch that film.)

So: get yourself a friend from the other sex to shower you with honest attention. Someone with a vocation of celibacy or gay or both. Then just wait.

These days I am reading Anna Fels: Necessary Dreams, a book that analyzes how and why women’s ambition may be socially chastised.  Fels, a psychiatrist, defines that ambition aims both at mastering a skill, and at earning the corresponding public recognition, i.e. positive attention.  Apparently it is the attention bit that women are not supposed to earn, but lavishly shower on men. She quotes John Gray who strongly recommends that Venus appreciate (i.e. give positive attention to) Mars, basically all the time. – This is an issue at all because the amount of recognition in space is not infinite. We all have limited attention spans.

The key reason why attention is such a hot commodity is that it defines us: from childhood we shape our view of ourselves through the attention and remarks we are getting from others. Kind of an empirical data collection on ‘who am I’. A second cool thing about attention is the Hawthorne effect: if we receive genuine, interested attention to what we are doing, we become better at it. We grow.

Fels is onto something. Having these effects in mind can do wonders for your dating. By giving positive attention to your date, you can make them feel better about themselves, and develop the actions and inclinations you would like to see. It’s not manipulation, because the effects only work if the attention is genuine. We kind of knew the trick since ‘Mars and Venus’;  the news is that it works both ways, for Mars and for Venus.

Sidebar, it then dawned on me that the Hawthorne effect can also explain what faith does to people – another big fuzzy topic economists are tempted to get their hands on. If you pray – and think that God is watching you – you receive genuine attention from the most competent being there is. You become better at what it is you are collecting attention for and you grow. Next to other things, faith is one gigantic Hawthorne effect.

The 2010 Nobel Prize for economics went to Peter Diamond, Dale Mortensen and Christopher Pissarides (DMP) for modeling ‘search and matching’, more precisely, explaining how workers and employers find each other. And for showing why even in a market in equilibrium, where each worker would have a matching job, there is unemployment.

Looks like their findings teach us something about dating and marriage – in fact the laureates have sometimes pointed this out themselves.

Take ten hot tips from both their assumptions and conclusions:

1.       Finding Mr. / Mrs Right takes time. Always. You have to spend time, effort, hard thinking and maybe money on finding the right person. Just wishing it and being ready is not enough; matchmaking, by its nature, does not happen instantly.

2.      Shit happens. Relationships do break apart, sometimes occasioned by reasons outside the couple. A match that once was ‘productive’ for both can lose its productivity, sending both partners out on the search again.

3.      In a world where there is a match for everyone, there will still be singlehood.  This is because finding Mr/s Right takes time and Shit happens. When a good match breaks apart through external shxt, both partners will have to search for a while until they find their new match.

4.      For a couple to form, both must be better off than when single. And for a couple to remain, both must be better off than with the next best alternative. A good match usually generates a ‘surplus’ for both, i.e. good stuff, happiness – for example freed up time cause the other one chipped in with the chores. The division of those parts of the happiness that are divisible must be such that neither has the incentive to keep searching.

5.      Sometimes, people settle because they are tired of waiting. Don’t! These are unstable matches, and dissolve when something better comes along. Which is likely if you settled.

6.      The search effort pays off more if there are many competing partners. E.g. it pays off more for women if there are many men relative to women. The opposite is also true: you don’t want to be in competition for a partner. How to arrange for a beneficial gender ratio you can read here.

7.      Dating agencies bring people together more quickly and reduce the incidence of singlehood – if the agencies compete with each other.

8.      The couples that form are best for the partners that make the proposal. These are the employers in the labor market and – traditionally – men in the marriage market. This is because the proposers have the first shot at a choice and therefore set the agenda more than the responding party. In modern times, however, nothing should hold a lady back from proposing to her man. (I know two women who did that and both made excellent matches).

9.      Women have a better outcome in marriage if they find a way to sweeten their wait. If we assume that men propose and women respond, the woman’s role is best reflected by the worker in the Nobel model. In the labor market, job-seeking workers have sometimes access to unemployment benefits – which make their wait sweeter. Benefit recipients enter better paying jobs because they can afford to wait for them. If women find a way to afford a longer wait, say through socializing a lot against the loneliness, and keeping healthy against a ticking clock – they will enter better relationships.

10.               They also have a better outcome if they agree and enforce collectively what they expect. Workers that negotiate collectively through a trade union will ensure that a larger share of the “match surplus” (in the case of our interest “relationship happiness” or any benefits generated by the relationship) goes to the worker (woman).

The  biblical “Wives submit to your husbands” is often interpreted as wives being encouraged to obey their husbands, i.e. to voluntarily assume a less powerful role in the relationship. Whether or not St. Paul actually meant this (contemporary scholars think he did not), it has been a dominant model of thinking in much of the world until recently. What is more, straying from this rule is sometimes seen as a driver of divorce or unhappy relationships.

Few things could be further from the truth. It is usually not a good idea to give anyone, husband or wife,  more power than the other.  It is now scientific: Power is likely to turn you into a hypocrite, and a cheat. Especially if that power comes with an entitlement.

A recent experiment showed that people in powerful positions who thought they deserved them started to judge others by high standards of morality, while they allowed themselves lower standards. While people without power tended to apply the same standards to others and themselves.

Interestingly however, people in power who doubted they deserved it, applied higher moral standards to themselves than to others. 

Projecting this onto relationships, the most likely conclusion would be to give the power to the person without entitlement –  historically, the wife.

After Parker J and Burkley M: “Who is chasing whom? The impact of gender and relationship status on mate poaching”, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, May 2009)

Single women often complain that ‘all good men are taken’. Now, recent experimental evidence suggests that the logic seems to go the other way: single women think that ‘taken’ means ‘good’. When single women were asked to evaluate their likelihood to pursue  a certain man, based on a brief description of him, the same description was evaluated as ‘more pursuable’ when it included the information that the man was attached. In the symmetric experiment, men did not find attached women more pursuable. Also, women in committed relationships did not react positively to the information that the man was attached.

Oups. Single women like to poach attached men? Ladies, what happened. A variety of reasons may be behind the above finding. One, ‘taken’ signals ‘good’, as in, another sista evaluated him already and he passed. The authors of this comment seem to think so. Two, the single ladies in the study were not really ready to commit (that is why they are single) and therefore unconsciously looked for someone unavailable too. It is quite possible that the ladies in the study were indeed special and not very representative, because the overall sample did not pass 150 – this is extremely low; a no-go for empirical economists usually.

Dr de Bergerac actually favors the second reason. A number one rule of dating is therefore: examine yourself if you are truly ready. Ready for dating, ready for commitment, ready to face approval, and ready to face rejection. If you are not truly ready for any of these, maybe because of past hurts that need healing, then don’t date yet.

“Loss of initial levels of love and affection, rather than conflict, is the most salient predictor of distress and divorce…”

finds Ted Huston, Ph.D., a professor of human ecology and psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, who followed 168 couples from their wedding day through 13 years of marriage, starting in 1981. According to his research, the development of a marriage during its first two years is the most significant predictor of later happy marriage or divorce. The amount of conflict in a couple was little important. However, a strong loss of affectionate and loving feelings during the first two years of a marriage predicted a later divorce very well.

Huston concludes “This ought to change the way we think about the early roots of what goes wrong in marriage. The dominant approach has been to work with couples to resolve conflict, but it should focus on preserving the positive feelings. That’s a very important take-home lesson.”

For more details, consider reading http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200001/will-your-marriage-last.