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Settling
The Atlantic Monthly had an interesting story on why women should settle for "Mr. Good Enough." Eugene Volokh had some insightful comments. I am sympathetic to the idea of modest expectations but I don't favor cheerleading for settling. More precisely I worry about The Paradox of the Underrated (is Shawn Marion still underrated? Nope, and by the way Phoenix had nothing to lose from that deal). If this article talks you into the prospect of settling, settling will start to seem pretty good to you. If your expectations were too high in the first place you'll keep your old set of unrealistic expectations (personalities and pathologies don't change so quickly) and simply apply them to a new option, namely a marriage to a dullard. "Settling" works best when you are stuck on a desert island and you do not expect so much from your surrender to the inevitable. The AM article would do more good if it tried to convince people how terrible settling would be. You just have to plant the idea in people's minds, as they'll make their own decisions anyway.
In other words, "have modest expectations -- it will be great for you!!!" can't really be winning advice.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on February 10, 2008 at 02:24 PM in Philosophy | Permalink
Comments
To somewhat the same effect are the comments Trudie made when I channeled her.
Posted by: James Grimmelmann at Feb 10, 2008 3:03:24 PM
Something I rarely see discussed is that clearly, one's preferences change over the life-cycle, and an optimal mate is only optimal for a given set of preferences. Two questions arise: (1) what kind of optimum is most robust over the life-cycle, and (2) should you just choose a mate by optimizing for a particular period of your life-cycle? I would assume the 50+ age period, when kids have left the house, is particularly important, but then again you'd have to make it through without getting divorced during the difficult "2 jobs + kids" period.
Posted by: Jack at Feb 10, 2008 3:17:18 PM
This sports economist thinks that Phoenix lost quite a bit in that trade.
Posted by: Chris at Feb 10, 2008 3:27:40 PM
Tyler writes: "In other words, "have modest expectations -- it will be great for you!!!" can't really be winning advice."
Unless it was winning advice, which could not be revealed as such. I suspect Raymond Smullyan has a logic island in which the winning advice cannot be truthfully revealed.
Posted by: michael webster at Feb 10, 2008 4:17:30 PM
I'm not sure the article is about how wonderful settling is. It's more about how terrible the alternative is. I think that allows the author to argue in favor of settling without raising expectations.
Posted by: FXKLM at Feb 10, 2008 4:39:53 PM
Why is the option the article discusses limitted to one partner? Seems to me that the argument boils down to the unlikeliness of finding "the one". Why then isn't "the many" a better alternative than "the unideal one"?
Seems to me that maybe, if the hypothesis that marriage is almost a business contract is to be accepted, then why is the business contract so restrictive?
In other words: why settle for a poor substitute of an institution, when you can negotiate a more mutually acceptable institution?
Posted by: Mike at Feb 10, 2008 4:47:21 PM
One day I really need to write a "Modern Love" essay about the weirdness of seeing the entire Internet debate over whether your ex-girlfriend is correct in thinking that she should have settled. I like Amber's take.
Posted by: Ted at Feb 10, 2008 5:21:47 PM
I think the right paradigm is satisficing over optimizing: Try to get someone who's pretty good; don't bother to wait for Mr. Perfect. (This advice goes for MEN too!) Sure, settling for whoever's warming the neighboring bar stool is sad, but we've got to give up on the soul mate idea. More important -- as others have said -- is the idea of one person for life. That's nice for some people but probably not the majority. If you are not worried about a lifetime with the person ("is this going to become a bad back? how are his dad's genes? etc") then the whole "mate-strategy" becomes intractable. "Love the one you're with" -- for as long a you can.
Posted by: David Zetland at Feb 10, 2008 5:31:03 PM
One issue that is not typically discussed is the fact that these expectations and preferences are defined over a multiple attributes. Maybe the problem is not that people are settling the expectations at the wrong level, but that they are giving more weight to the wrong attribute (e.g. education over charm, looks over humor, etc.). So maybe settling means being able to accept the tradeoffs. Accepting that one has to lower the expectation over one dimension to be able to have the required level over the other dimension.
Posted by: londenio at Feb 10, 2008 6:47:29 PM
I believe in a thing called love. Just listen to the rhythm of the heart.
I feel sorry for the author of that article. I wonder if she's ever been someone's sweetie pie, a complete mush.
Posted by: Rue Des Quatre Vents at Feb 10, 2008 7:40:07 PM
I must cynically note that it is women who are being told to settle in the realm of marriage. Do you ever hear of men being advised (on a wholesale basis) to "settle" as far as their careers are concerned?
Posted by: archer at Feb 10, 2008 8:53:36 PM
I must cynically note that it is women who are being told to settle in the realm of marriage. Do you ever hear of men being advised (on a wholesale basis) to "settle" as far as their careers are concerned?
Posted by: archer at Feb 10, 2008 8:54:04 PM
The original article is a bit over the top: By 40, if you get a cold shiver down your spine at the thought of embracing a certain guy, but you enjoy his company more than anyone else’s, is that settling or making an adult compromise?
Sorry, but outright physical revulsion is a dealbreaker. People whose company you enjoy but wouldn't dream of getting physical with are called "friends".
She also displays remarkably little insight or interest in a man's point of view on any of this. It's as if she's sitting down with some chatty female friends on the set of The View and unilaterally coming up with a five-point plan for revolutionizing relationships, which will then be presented to the male half of the population as a fait accompli.
Posted by: at Feb 10, 2008 8:59:30 PM
archer, when it comes to careers men settle all the time. Instead of pursuing the impossible dream of becoming musicians or actors or astronauts or professional athletes, they buckle down and become chartered accountants, rather than waiting till 40 to start their careers.
Posted by: at Feb 10, 2008 9:04:06 PM
The author seems thinks that Rachel might have been happier marrying Barry in the opening episode of "Friends", but seems to forget that it was revealed later in the first season that he had been cheating on her with her best friend for quite a while. I know these aren't real people, but sometimes a repulsion against "settling" with someone is an indicator of other more serious problems, even if you're not consciously aware of them yet.
Posted by: Jacqueline at Feb 10, 2008 9:21:02 PM
This problem has a mathematical solution:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem
If say the possible number of people you can date is 100, then the optimal stopping point is about 37 to have the best chance of finding the best candidate, and 10 to find a pretty good candidate.
Posted by: JPC at Feb 10, 2008 11:21:46 PM
I read the Atlantic article. My main problem with it was that the author was shallow and self-centered.
An earlier author covered the subject more effectively: Jane Austen. Remember why Charlotte marries the hideously self-satisfied and stupid Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice? She was poor. She had to settle. (If you don't want to read it, PBS is televising a version of Pride and Prejudice.)
Posted by: Mae at Feb 10, 2008 11:28:04 PM
I think the Heat will settle for 15 points and 14 rebounds on a first date against the Lakers! And how does this settling work if the sum/team ("marriage") over time is greater/more rewarding than the individual at first appraisal. Synergy happens.
Well if you listen to Amir Azcel in his book, Chance, on page 86: "You will maximize your probability of finding the best spouse if you date about 37% of the available candidates in your life, and then choose to stay with the next candidate who is better than all the previous ones." If you must settle and avoid romantic serendipity at least do it scientifically.
Posted by: Pitt at Feb 10, 2008 11:36:57 PM
The same author wrote a previous article in 2005 in The Atlantic, about having a child as a single mother by artificial insemination. Some of it is sadly poignant, especially the part near the end where she speculates that she might someday change her current point of view and eventually adopt a "Mr. Good Enough" point of view (as she now evidently has).
Amusingly, she was even neurotically picky in selecting a sperm donor, for instance rejecting a religious Republican "in case those traits were stealthily genetic".
Posted by: at Feb 10, 2008 11:52:35 PM
JPC,
As the comments at volokh.com indicate, the secretary problem might not apply because it assumes that the candidate you select will necessarily accept -- which is not true for dating.
Also, it takes weeks or even months to thoroughly evaluate each potential mate, so you may not have the luxury of time on your side. In my case, the pool of candidates is defined by "two X chromosomes and a pulse", which means the secretary problem approach is unlikely to find me a match before the heat death of the universe.
Posted by: at Feb 11, 2008 12:07:02 AM
Men do settle for careers that match their abilities all the time. But, as archer said, do you ever hear them being advised to settle? No. They need to be, to have a realistic view of the world, but they aren't. The closest anyone will come is giving you a psych test and asking whether you will be a good "match" for a field, or sending you brochures for community college.
I'm not sure if this would be good for kids in a world full of optimists, but it seems like they should be raised to know that they're not going to become President and they're not going to marry Mrs. Right, so that they know they'll have to work for what they can get.
Posted by: Noumenon at Feb 11, 2008 4:48:45 AM
Many women find it difficult to accept the fact that their values in the dating market drop quite rapidly with age. At 25 or 30 the typical woman is in a fairly strong position. She's likely to attract swarms of men at a nightclub and should she place a personals ad in Craigslist she'll get hundreds or even thousands of replies. It can quite understandably be hard for her to realize that at 35 or 40 things won't be quite so rosy.
Posted by: Peter at Feb 11, 2008 9:15:33 AM
Two forty year old woman Austrian economists walk into a bar. The first one said, "I really want a husband." The second one said, "I can prove that you are lying."
Posted by: mobile at Feb 11, 2008 9:18:32 AM
Clearly she's never seen older-dating modeled mathematically!
http://xkcd.com/314/
Posted by: Finance Monk at Feb 11, 2008 10:34:29 AM
One reader, Kay, asks that I post the following comment for her (she was receiving an error message for some reason): "Lori Gottlieb’s article in the Atlantic brings an interesting perspective to your recent post: “is divorce bad for children?” Gottlieb was searching for what Stevenson and Wolfers might describe as hedonic marriage. When she didn’t find a man to fit her ideal of a hedonic partner, she had a child on her own. Now she concludes that she - and, one presumes, her child - might have been better off if she had thought less in terms of a hedonic ideal, and more in terms of “a partnership formed to run a very small, mundane, and often boring nonprofit business." That suggests that the question is not simply whether divorce is bad for children, but whether unrealistic expectations promote unhappy marriages, divorce, and, as in Gottlieb’s case, nonmarriage.
You are probably right that Gottlieb herself might have been unable to escape her expectations for Mr. Perfect even had she tried. But that doesn’t address the broader point that a dysfunctional social norm - soulmate marriage, hedonic marriage, or whatever you want to call it – itself can add to unhappiness, either because, as in Gottleib’s case, no partner is good enough, or as in the case of many divorcing couples and their children, because it asks more of marriage – alas! – than marriage usually provides. This expectation trap would help explain why second marriages are even more likely than the first to end in divorce (people who expect too much will find a second spouse as unsatisfying as the first), why children of divorce are themselves at greater risk of divorce, (kids learn about marriage largely from heir parents), and why there is so little evidence that marital happiness has increased (see Amato et.al Alone Together) despite the prevalence of divorce."
Posted by: Tyler Cowen at Feb 11, 2008 10:59:39 AM
