Marginal Revolution: The Year of Yes

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The Year of Yes

As a student at New York University in the late '90s, she [Maria Dahvana Headley] applied that advice to her love life, turning down most men who asked her out and dating only intellectual, literary types. Frustrated by those guys, she reversed course, resolving to spend one year responding positively to all flirting and saying yes to literally anyone who asked her out. The ensuing 150 dates included a homeless man, several non-English speakers, 10 taxi drivers, two lesbians and a mime.

Headley's memoir of the experience, "The Year of Yes," is now in bookstores, and Hollywood's already calling. She urges other people to say yes more often, despite some horrible dates. (One guy took her to a bar that, it became clear, was a strip club—and that's a tame example.) "Lots of women are pretty set in what they think they have to have in order to be happy, but it doesn't hurt to date people who are not that," she says. It worked for her: during her dating spree, she met a playwright who was divorced and 25 years older and had two children—baggage that would have ordinarily nixed his chances. They married in 2003; now 28, Headley lives in Seattle with two teenage stepchildren. "It's something I never would have picked, but it's turned out to be this kind of amazing experience," she says.

Here is the link, courtesy of http://kottke.org.

In general I favor approaches which shake us up, and force us to overcome our preconceptions and status quo biases. If you are at a very good restaurant, you often do best by ordering the course you think you are least likely to enjoy. I do not, however, recommend going to the restaurant you think you are least likely to enjoy. The trick is to keep part of your filter steady and strong, while, at the same time, inverting some portions of your expectations. I've never gardened, or wanted to garden, but the best book on gardening in Borders still might be worth my while. Or pick a genre of music you dislike -- the more rabidly the better -- and go buy what is supposed to be the best CD from that genre.

Here is a skeptical take on Maria's decision. Might this surfeit of choice make a suboptimal candidate look better than he ought to? If nothing else, marriage would allow you to bring the oppressive experiment to an end. Here is an informal interview with the author.

Microeconomists are encouraged to ponder what model is required to generate "don't ask anyone out but say yes to all who ask you" as optimum search behavior. And does Maria's decision impose negative or positive externalities on men? (On other women?) Imagine if all women always said "yes" to all proposed dates...

Posted by Tyler Cowen on January 19, 2006 at 06:30 AM in Books | Permalink

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» Taking More Risks in Life... from The Lone Elm
Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution talks about Maria Headley's experiment in accepting all male invites for a date during a year. She has written a book about her experience (which did result in marriage to a playwright) in The Year [Read More]

Tracked on Jan 19, 2006 8:17:54 AM

» Dating: The Year of Yes from The Crooked Links
"Frustrated by those guys, she reversed course, resolving to spend one year responding positively to all flirting and saying yes to literally anyone who asked her out. The ensuing 150 dates included a homeless man, several non-English speakers, 10 taxi... [Read More]

Tracked on Jan 19, 2006 1:12:56 PM

Comments

I believe, as guys, we should promote this book/movie as much as possible.

Posted by: odograph at Jan 19, 2006 9:05:51 AM

It is only guys who are bad at signaling who should wish to promote this idea, no?

Posted by: Tyler Cowen at Jan 19, 2006 9:24:18 AM

Thanks for the link to Leviathon, but I think I'll pass. That music is, indeed, something I dislike rabidly; fortunately, Amazon.com makes snippets available as samples, so I didn't have to buy it to try it.

Posted by: EclectEcon at Jan 19, 2006 10:07:03 AM

I drive a prius, is that bad signaling? ;-)

Posted by: odograph at Jan 19, 2006 10:17:30 AM

I totally endorse the best-of-worst-of search trick, at least for music. I did that for awhile, and every genre I tried had at least a few albums that were astoundingly good.

Posted by: Jeff Brown at Jan 19, 2006 12:55:01 PM

One news story I read not long ago said that Headley's new husband was still married when she started seeing him. Now the word is that he was already divorced when they first met. I wonder what the true story really is.

Posted by: Peter at Jan 19, 2006 1:14:41 PM

Re the best-of-worst-of, I agree with Jeff as regards to music especially, as well as many other things. However, as one of the world's pickiest eaters, I could never do it as Tyler suggests with food. When it comes to that, I just want my favorite meal at my favorite restaurant :)

Posted by: Joe at Jan 19, 2006 2:28:23 PM

For her strategy to be optimum search behavior, we must assume that men fail to signal their true quality (from first impressions.. signalling continues on the first date after all), or at least that our agent (Maria) is unable to translate quality signals into information about compatibility. If some potential partners are good at signalling and others bad, she would do best to say yes more often but also to ask people out herself based on the traditional dating criteria. (I think that, in reality, this is the best thing to do.) For Maria's strategy, we must assume a very high level of asymmetric information: that those asking know more about Maria's preferences than she does, so much so that she should not even waste her time trying to seperate the good from the bad from the outset. It seems to me implausible that Maria's strategy is at all good, for her. For the potential mates - its hard to say. Tyler contends that only guys who are bad at signalling should promote this idea; obviously they should promote this idea more, since at least they'll be able to get dates. But a great number of men who are not particularly bad or good at signalling would benefit - they may get dates now, but they'd get more if more women said yes. The key here is that it would be better for most men if the women they were attracted to were never single, and never chose to not go out rather than take a chance with a date with a guy who is on the margin. However, some average guys will also be hurt by this: girls they might have liked to go out with may already be booked to go out with a loser. But it still seems to me that most guys would benefit, and for this to be true we must just assume that guys more readily will go out with a wide variety of girls than vice versa, and this does not seem far-fetched to me. The only group of guys who should strongly, uniformly oppose this idea are ones that are extremely good at signalling, who could get a date with most girls just by asking.

Posted by: Zac at Jan 19, 2006 4:01:24 PM

"My name is George. I'm unemployed and I live with my parents".

-George Costanza

Posted by: J at Jan 19, 2006 4:19:51 PM

It depends on the bargaining game environment, so she should randomize
accordingly.
Girls are indirectly bargaining with each other for the limited supply of guys.
If they're hard bargainers, then the "yes" girl strategy makes sense.
She picks up all the good guys that other gals have
rejected, and of course the losers as well, but they can be weeded out on
the first date. So there's also the cost of this first date weed-out process.
Of course in the U.S. that's fairly well subsidized by guys picking up the
tab. So why do chicks still say "no"? It must be that they can't accurately
weed-out on the first date, and then they're stuck with a loser boyfriend
or husband. But there must be some useful info in the first date, so why
would they turn that down? It must be because it's easier (cheaper) to
say "no" to a stranger than to a more familiar date, boyfriend, or husband.
I think this is the case in the U.S. We move around more than other people,
so there are more strangers, less trust. Men take advantage and become
tricky scumbags, and women combat this by discounting men's signals and saying
"no" more often. This is less than a first best outcome for both men and
women, and hence the multitudes of unhappy singles. But "no" does serve to condition
men to be less scummy. Additionally, there may be a herd behavior or
cascade effect here, where there's a time lag in dispersing info about the
scumminess of guys. In that case, as in the bargaining game above, it pays
to buck the trend.

Posted by: will mcbride at Jan 19, 2006 7:30:15 PM

Who's paying for these dates? What about the opportunity costs? We also have to factor into the analysis the mens' expectations about the strategy she is playing... there something tricky about a player of zero mass saying yes to everyone, while the mass 1 of womankind is, presumably, doing some sort of screening. This sort of strategy might work well as a deviation, but the General Equilibrium will (likely) be extremely sub-optimal.

Posted by: patrick at Jan 20, 2006 9:29:06 AM

The sociobiologists would tell us that we (both men and women) are doing our initial screening based on a percieved genetic fitness. Now, do relationships break up because genetic "unfitness" is discovered, or because other issues rise to the fore?

LOL, maybe we are back to the central issue in economics, in deciding to what extent we are rational actors and to what extent we are looking at "animal behavior."

I'd suspect that with mating, you are closer to the animal than say ... determining an optimum stock/bond ratio.

Posted by: odograph at Jan 20, 2006 10:03:15 AM

LOL (again), it stikes me that 10,000 years ago "common interests" primariliy involved "finding food" and "staying alive."

Posted by: odograph at Jan 20, 2006 10:21:43 AM

It sounds like she simply prioritized filtering for the characteristic "he wants me" over all others.

I tried something similar in my own love life for a while -- trying to "yes" to almost all first date requests. (The guy who left me a long rambling message about what his psychiatrist thought of him and how he was going to convert me to his religion didn't get a call back, though.) But even just applying that policy to first date requests only and not for follow up dates, I still just didn't have the time to go out with everybody, even if I wanted to eat dinner for free every night for a month! She must not have posted a personal ad because women's ads frequently get 100+ responses, many of them spam-like form letters from guys who e-mail every single woman who posts an ad. It turned out that going out with guys who I wouldn't have normally gone out with was just a big waste of everybody's time, because they clearly weren't appropriate matches.

The tactic that was ultimately successful for me was making my set of filters very, very, very picky, but then advertising the hell out myself. Tens of thousands of people must have seen or heard about my ad in August, about 50 replied, and I narrowed that down to a choice between two great men who cleared all my filters. I'm living with one of them in Costa Rica right now, and if it doesn't work out I'll drop the other one a line.

I think a lot of the people who end up frustrated by the filtering approach are doing at least one of two things wrong: Using the wrong filters (getting hung up on the wrong characteristics, and not caring enough about others that are more important for a good match), or not marketing themselves widely enough. The internet is a powerful tool for connecting you to millions of singles, surely there is at least one in all the millions who is exactly what you want and wants you too?

(Side note: I'd actually considered buying ad space on Marginal Revolution and other blogs for my personal ad, but I ended up getting so much free publicity that it wasn't necessary. Maybe next time, if there's a next time. :))

Posted by: Jacqueline at Jan 20, 2006 10:40:01 AM

One thing is to say yes to all proposed dates and another thing is to say no to the same quantity of people when you understand that it's not your tipe. Once you say yes they begin to hope and may be hurt a lot when dismissed.

Posted by: Derby at Mar 18, 2006 6:59:07 AM

This book is similar to YES MAN OF DANNY WALLACE!

Posted by: carlotta at May 6, 2006 6:04:43 AM

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