The Only Winning Move

One of the cliches about men and women is that men are better at separating emotions from sex than women. That may or may not be true - and if true, it may or may not have to do with biology (directly) - but I understand that the bulk of the research today confirms it, and even implicates certain hormones in the effect.

For my part, I get a kind of annecdotal confirmation of it from reading about people’s attitudes toward “friends with benefits.” With very few exceptions, women I talk to about “friends with benefits” (aka “fuck buddies”) are suspicious, whereas men seem pretty indifferent. You often talk to a guy who says something like “not for me, but hey, if that’s what people wanna do, more power to ‘em.” But girls tend to say things like “yeah, I mean, I can see how that would be nice, but I think once you’re involved it’s hard to separate those things, no matter what you say going in.” In other words, it never happens, not really, that there are “friends with benefits.”

So it was, of course, inevitable that someone would do a survey on it, and here it is.

Some things that are not surprising:

• Men report more experiences with it than women - which might mean that they’re all sleeping with the same women, but I’m more inclined to think it’s the result of some misunderstandings. The women involved in these pairs may have thought they were more committed than they were.
• People who are focused on sexual pleasure are more likely to do this - …and chocolate makes you fat, yeah.
• More common among non-romantics - again, duh.

However, the reason we test obvious things is because sometimes you get surprises:

• Black people - are apparently more likely to do the friends with benefits thing. Who knew?
• People who like money - that is, people focused on financial security, are more likely to be in a friends with benefits relationship.
• Jealous people - are - and this is kind of a stunner - significantly more likely than non-jealous people to be in a friends with benefits relationship. Huh?

Nothing is interesting if it never tells you anything counterintuitive, and so I take this as a clue why Psychology is the most popular undergraduate major in the US, I guess.

Purely intuitively, I guess we would expect people who have fuck buddies to be less worried about money and not all that jealous. After all, marriage tends to be described as a long-term stability pact, so people who are focused on financial stability should, one thinks, be looking for a stable marriage, preferably with an economically capable partner. And of course if you’re really jealous by nature it hardly makes sense to enter into a relationship where you know you’re not your lover’s only lover!

But I think if you take a second look both of these things make perfect sense.

Let’s take money. The problem with marriage as a security mechanism is that if things go terribly wrong there’s no easy out. Indeed, with divorce as common as it is these days, there’s a kind of perverse disincentive to marry if you think you’re going to be financially successful at some point. There are also issues of future health problems, spousal unemployment, etc. What I’m getting at is that I think if the researchers who handed out this survey look more closely at their “financial security” category they’ll find it’s a proxy for self-reliance. It’s the “security” more than the “financial” that’s important, in other words, and it makes sense that in an affluent society one would be more worried that a partner would drag them down eventually than they would that they would find themselves in need of a partner to get by. Not to mention, in a friends with benefits relationship you never have to pay for the sex. People have glibly described dating as a euphemism for prostitution for centuries, and there’s some truth to that. Friends with benefits, if I can put it crudely, is a way of bidding down the payment.

“Jealousy” works the same way, I suspect. Being more “jealous” than average entails one of two things - and perhaps both of them: you are more easily hurt by cheating than most people, or you are more suspicious of cheating than most people. In either case, “allowing” cheating is a way of gaining some control over a situation that scares you.

Both of these - financial security and jealousy - were interesting to me because I think I probably fit both descriptions, albeit with some qualifications.

In terms of financial security, I’m pretty insistent, even if I get married, that bank accounts and tax forms stay separate. I could say that this is partly ideological - I’m a capitalist ideologue, what’s been called a “free market fundamentalist” - but of course ideology is ultimately tied in with our emotional makeup, so it’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. But financial security is important to me - one of the reasons I’m less enthusiastic about running up debts than some of my gradschool colleagues - no doubt about it, and I also happen to be completely open to “friends with benefits” relationships. So I fit this one of their stereotypes.

As for the other one - jealousy is an interesting issue for me. I started off massively jealous and massively romantic, and I’ve since evolved into something roughly the opposite of that. I stress that it was an “evolution” because it’s born of bad experiences. So of the two “jealousy” considerations above, I’m decidedly more in the second category than the first: that is, more suspicious of cheating than most people, but much less easily hurt by it. Being cheated on has happened so often that it’s hardly surprising or hurtful anymore. When it happens to you more than once, one of the interesting things that you learn about it is that it’s more about your reaction than it is about the fact of it having happened anyway. If you find out someone is cheating on you, you instantly have an impression about whether they “really mean it” or not. I think if the person you’re with feels more intense feelings for the person she’s cheating on you with, then the relationship is doomed and you might as well give it up. If, however, it’s just a momentary fascination, or a one-time thing, or yes, there’s something about him she likes and doesn’t like about you, but there are more such things about you relative to him, then forgiving it and moving on is the easiest thing in the world. There’s cheating, and there’s cheating, in other words. If it’s just cheating, then I take it as almost polite and/or touching that she tried to cover it up and hold on to the relationship, and my main concern is that I feel swindled in that there were girls I saw and wanted to sleep with and didn’t pursue because I understood that the ground rules forbade it. At that point the decision isn’t so much whether to end the relationship (it will continue), it’s hammering out what the groundrules now are. But even that is pretty easy, since I have done a fair amount of cheating myself, and so it’s hypocritical for me to hold anyone too accountable for cheating on me. It’s usually a matter of getting her to agree that the most important thing is that there are no double standards - I’m happy to stay committed on a promise that it never happens again, and I’m happy to have an open relationship on the promise that she can handle it. But of course there’s no forgiving cheating - that case where it’s clear that you come in second to the other guy, and that the only reason that she’s not with him is because something makes it impossible - he’s married, he’s with another woman, he isn’t really in to her, whatever. It’s simply impossible to repair a relationship from that, and my advice is not to try.

With all that said, I think the thing about friends with benefits is that almost everyone prefers an honest relationship. Friends with benefits is always a holding pattern - something that you’re doing while waiting on someone more special. And all things considered, I think a sleeping around culture is probably healthier. Because honestly, despite the way people talk, there’s not that much to sex on the technique end. Everyone is naturally good at it in their way, and most of how enjoyable it is has to do with physical compatibility and emotional connection. There may be some people who are standout superstars in bed no matter who they’re with (as Scott Baio claims of Heather Locklear - and I hope to God it’s true), but they’re rare and probably not good relationship material anyway. The point being, there isn’t much of a point to friends with benefits, as I don’t really believe in the “growing to appreciate each other” crap anyway. You’re compatible in bed or not, which one it is is pretty clear early on, and sexual compatibility tends to imply emotional compatibility of some kind, so why not pursue a more honest relationship at that point? Friends with benefits just sort of commits you to mediocre sex periodically with someone who you’re always a bit suspicious of in the back of your mind anyway. I don’t mean suspicious that she’s “cheating” on you, since you can’t “cheat” in an open relationship - but I always have the suspicion that I’m being manipulated somehow - like she’s still looking for something from me that I haven’t given her. It’s an uncomfortable feeling.

So all things considered count me a “friends with benefits” skeptic. I have no moral judgments of it - it happens, it’s fun. But in general, one-nighters and honest relationships are better.

As for whether men are better able to separate sex and emotion than women - I really don’t know. I’ve read the studies that implicate oxytocin, claiming that women relase oxytocin after sex and thus feel closer to their partners while men don’t and generally just want to leave after sex, and I have no reason to doubt that they’re true. But I am suspicious that the effects here are overstated. The reason I say so is because it’s abundantly clear, from my experiences, from my friends experiences, from research, and from annecdotal evidence in movies and on television, that women cheat as often as men do. So whatever this supposed “chemical bonding effect,” it either isn’t all that long-lived, or it’s well compensated for by the fact that women constantly get offers to cheat (since it’s (still) up to the man to do the asking), or it only makes women want the man to stay around, but doesn’t really obligate her in any way to reciprocate by staying with him. My personal theory is this latter. For all the talk about how men are better able to compartmentalize their feelings, I think (and this isn’t scientific, just based on impression I have from talking to girls) that girls are much better at rationalizing than men. So, they cheat, fine, but they find ways not to really see it as cheating - usually by telling themselves that their main boyfriend isn’t “there for them” like he should be, so really it’s his fault.

I’ve said clearly before that I don’t think friendship and love are at all the same thing. It would be convenient if they were, but they’re not. And it seems obvious to me that they shouldn’t be. After all, if love were just friendship set on fire then there would be a lot more homosexuality about than there is. As an undergrad professor of mine once said, “if sex were just an instinct, it would be about as exciting as taking a piss.” Right. We’d just partner up and do it, no complications necessary. But there ARE complications. So count me a “friends with benefits” skeptic. Men and women can be friends, and men and women can be lovers, and friendship can grow into love, but I think it’s unlikely that there’s such a thing as a stable “friendship” that involves sex. You pretty much gotta choose one route or the other there.

One of my favorite public policy tricks is “controlling” for effects that are actually relevant. Like, for example, when people are puzzled that we’re facing inflation risks in the wake of the ethanol subsidy that they can’t measure because inflation indices “control for” volatile things like food prices. The following isn’t exactly a public policy example, but that doesn’t keep it from being amusing.

New Scientist reports on evidence that polygamy is the key to long life for males. Want to live longer? Apparently the answer is to marry several women. This increases your lifespan by about 12% - nontrivial, really.

It makes intuitive sense. Men are biologically programmed to mate rather than nurture, so a system of marriage that sanctions this kind of behavior is probably less stressful on them. Not to mention, over time polygamous societies will tend to select for long-lived men anyway (since these will have more opportunities to mate). Further, the existence of lots of dependants may cause such men to take more care of themselves. And finally (and most convincingly), in such societies where the social status of the wives depends on the husband, wives have a greater incentive to care for him in old age, and there are more wives around to do the caring more efficiently besides.

So why is it that I can’t think of any first-world countries that are polygamous?

Which is, of course, the punchline. In their own words:

Using data from the World Health Organization, Lummaa and Russell scored 189 countries on a monogamy scale of one to four - totally monogamous to mostly polygamous. They also took into account a country’s gross domestic product and average income to minimise the effect of better nutrition and healthcare in monogamous Western nations.

In other words, controlling for economic factors that cause longevity, polygamy seems to be the way to go. No one seems to have considered that monogamy (rejection of polygamy, if you prefer) might itself be implicated in the economic success of a country (thus indirectly causing an increase in longevity for both males and females). I have to confess I’m not sure what the mechanism would be, but it’s pretty clear to me that we can’t just ignore the fact that every first-world nation out there is pretty exclusively monogamous. It’s striking, when you consider it: I can’t think of a single (properly) industrialized nation where polygamy is the norm.

This isn’t, of course, to come down against conrtolling for variables in statistics to isolate the effects of the variable we’re interested in. It’s more to caution against relying overly much on statistical methods in your interpretation. This polygamy effect was a useful fact until popular press journals like New Scientist got hold of it, probably. And I mean that in the following sense. Yes, probably these researchers have proven that polygamy is more advantageous for men all other things being equal. But of course, all other things are virtually never equal out there in the real world - so if you are giving practical advice to men in general on how to live longer, your advice would be “promote a monogamous society!” It will cause the longevity gap between men and women to widen - that is, women will live even longer relative to you than they already do naturally - but you yourself will also live longer than you would have, so you both gain.

It rather reminds me of the tradeoff between progress and equality. One of the things that annoys me most about left-wing politics is the undue focus on equality. They talk about equality as though it were the primary goal of the political process, when it isn’t at all obvious to me that it should be. Paul Krugman, for example, likes to write columns lamenting the fact that “income inequality” is increasing. That is, middle class wealth is growing steadily, but upper class wealth is growing rapidly. What he almost never mentions is that this trend starts around the end of the 70s, when the nation was facing a serious economic crisis due in no small part to policies designed to keep income inequality low. Since then, since getting rid of a lot of those policies, the nation has been growing fast - meaning that everyone is much richer than they were in the 1970s. Some people have had runaway success, but we’ve all benefited. The relevant question to me - the one Mr. Krugman and his ilk never answer - is “what was the alternative?” Would middle class people be absolutely better off today than they are now if we had continued throwing up constraints on economic growth in order to keep people more equal? It’s pretty clear that they would not be - and that, as a middle class person myself, is all I need to know to sign up for the current approach and ditch the socialism of the 70s. I would rather be better off in real terms than relative terms, thank you very much.

So, I suspect, it is with monogamy. Men would be relatively better off in polygamous societies, but I’m not sure they would be absolutely better off. And for anyone with common sense, it’s the absolute terms that matter. If the relative lifespan of women and men in a polygamous but underdeveloped society is 45 and 40 respectively, but it’s 90 and 75 in a monogamous and developed society, then obviously everyone is better off in the monogamous society, even if the longevity gap between men and women is greater. Given a choice of which society to grow up male in, obviously it’s smarter to choose the one where you get to live to 75, even if that means giving the girls a bit more of an age advantage over you.

Now, to be fair, New Scientist isn’t quite as blinkered as I’m painting them.

Rather than a call to polygamy, the research might solve a long-standing puzzle in human biology: Why do men live so long?

This question only makes sense after asking the same for women, who - unlike nearly all other animals - live long past the menopause.

So they’re kind enough to admit that the researchers aren’t advocating polygamy - rather, the motivation for the research is to solve a puzzle in biology. Biologically speaking, organisms shouldn’t really live much past their ability to mate. This makes humans an odd sort of creature - because male humans, who are fertile well into old age, don’t live as long as female humans, who aren’t. The grandmother hypothesis seems to be doing a good job explaining the female half of the equation, but no one has come up with a good explanation for the boys. This research reports on groundwork for future attempts to solve this puzzle.

Now - a couple of disclaimers. First, I haven’t done any number crunching of my own in this area and therefore have no idea whether economic development and monogamy really are correlated in any meaningful way. I suspect they are, but I really don’t have the data to prove it. Further, if they are indeed correlated in a meaningful way, this says little to nothing about the direction of causation. It may be that economic development causes monogamy, rather than the other way around. It may even be that neither causes the other, but that they are both correlated with some unseen factor. And certainly if monogamy does turn out have some causal effect on economic development, I haven’t really got a clue what the mechanism would be. Finally, it should be added that even if monogamy has a causal effect on economic development, that is no reason to assume that effect applies at all stages of development. It may be that it is a spur to development that can be productively discarded once a certain level of wealth is achieved - at which point other arrangements may be even more advantageous.

I think the most interesting way to shed some light on this would be to investigate the reproductive fitness of serial monogamists. Many anthropolgists have observed that monogamy seems unnatural and probably survives only as an illusion, really. 60-70% of all couples cheat at some point, which is probably a result of instinct rebelling against convention. The hitch is that convention often does prevent reproduction, even if it can’t do much against reproductive behavior. Hence serial monogamy - the practice of staying faithful to your partner, but not “forever.” So I would just like to express the hope that these researchers (who have done a lot of interesting work in this and related areas) will test the age effect for men who are married multiple times in life. My guess is these men live longer relative to those with fewer lifetime reproductive partners, and that there is no similar effect for females.

I’ve never seen Sex and the City, and I have no plans to see the movie. But it’s a cultural phenomenon, and so I have been reading articles about it here and there. In one by Kathryn Lopez, I stumbled across what may be one of the best, most concise statements of my complaints with the current dating culture.

The movie, like the series, is an important cultural contribution. It’s a mirror. And you don’t have to be promiscuous or crass like Carrie and Samantha and Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) and Charlotte (Kristin Davis) tend to be to see a reflection. There is a real focus on men, and on what women do to men: Women don’t forgive men. Women don’t think about men and their feelings. For as sensitive as the modern man is supposed to be to a women’s feelings and as sensitive as a man is supposed to look, he’s not really supposed to register an opinion. Or slip up. Or be honest.

Indeed. That’s a nice summary of frustrations I’ve had in a large number of my relationships. In particular, I think, the bit about forgiveness. People screw up - and that means the woman as well as the man. When I forgive a girlfriend, even for “major” violations like cheating, she gets a clean slate. There may be some teasing here and there afterward, granted, but “I forgive you” means “we’re starting over.” It means she doesn’t have any hoops to jump through; it means there are no grudges; it means that I don’t emotionally blackmail her by constant petty reminders of things she’s done. I agree to share some of the burden and do some of the work, even though it’s not technically my fault or responsibility. That’s what forgiveness is.

Another supposed “girls’ show” (though I’m starting to have my doubts just how feminist it really is) - Buffy the Vampire Slayer - comes to mind here. In particular, the episode I Only Have Eyes for You - a second season bit which deals with forgiveness. If you haven’t seen it I won’t ruin it, only to say that the plot is a contrivance by which the character having difficulty understanding forgiveness ends up in the shoes of someone who needs it. Notable dialogue is Giles, explaining the concept to Buffy:

To forgive is an act of compassion, Buffy. It’s not done because people deserve it, it’s done because they need it.

Right. Forgiveness is not fair or just, and it’s most emphatically not about evening the score. There’s forgiveness for the same reason there’s charity. Yes, ideally everyone carries their own weight and is never a burden on anyone else. But here in the real world, people frequently make mistakes, get things wrong, and end up relying on others for things they have no right to ask for. We keep the whole messy thing going by occasionally “writing off debts,” if I may speak that way about relationships. If you go into a relationship honestly, with open eyes, then you know that your partner is going to screw up eventually - because everyone always does. If you really care about the person, you accept that, and you accept the mistake, and you move on.

Naturally, there are limits. You can’t forgive someone who has no serious desire to reform, for example. People screw up once, twice, maybe even three times if they’re weak (and we’re all weak in our ways). If you find yourself forgiving too often in short time span, however, it may be that the other person isn’t really devoted to you, or is starting to take you for granted - and in that case it’s time to seriously consider leaving, naturally. Relationships can’t be carried by only one partner.

And that’s exactly my complaint with a lot of the women I’ve dated. By this definition of forgiveness, I really wonder whether any woman has ever actually forgiven me for the times I’ve screwed up. When I think back to my dating history, I can think of one genunine example. That’s not a very good track record for the fairer sex.

I’ve frequently been in situations where I’ve been told I’m forgiven, of course. But it never seems to be actually true. First, to even get to the point where you’re (nominally) “forgiven,” you have to go through the whole weepy confessional conversation, which doesn’t seem to serve any real purpose except to have you repeat endlessly that you’re the one in the wrong. What generally comes next is rarely a simple “I forgive you.” Instead, we have to plan out how we’re going to build our relationship back up, which invariably includes enumerating all the things that are going to be different now that trust has been injured, or whatever. And then, forever after, whenever there’s an opportunity to bring it up in a not-so-veiled hint, that opportunity is virtually never wasted. Calling this kind of behavior “forgiveness” is Orwellian, really, as it’s nothing of the kind.

I’ve never understood the point of all this. It’s damaging, it’s NOT “commitment,” and it’s certainly not a path to happiness - for either partner. More than that, it’s simply unrealistic. People are not perfect, and I think the danger of shows like Sex in the City is that they teach people to make a sport out of finding fault. Things have improved from times past, to be sure. Girls these days know that Prince Charming isn’t coming to make everything better for them, and that’s a step. But they still act as though they deserve Prince Charming, and that’s a problem.

Giving up on finding the perfect mate isn’t selling yourself short - because there’s still plenty of room to be choosy from among the pool that’s available. And let’s be clear about this - people SHOULD be choosy. No self-respecting person wants less for themselves than the best they can get. It’s demeaning both for you and your partner if you settle. But the “best you can get” - that goal that you strive for - should still be something that actually exists.

Fantasy can be useful if channeled properly. Indeed, the human ability to imagine - to see things not as they are but as they should be - is probably one of our greater adaptive assets. But like anything, too much of a good thing can really come back to bite you in the ass. Forgiveness is a constructive channeling of fantasy, I think. Once the dastardly deed, whatever it may be, is done, it’s done; there’s no way to undo it or to completely forget it. So we do the next best thing: we summon an act of will and pretend it never happened. I don’t mean “pretend” in the sense of rewriting the facts in our memories, of course, but in the sense that we choose to act as if it never happened, to hold expectations as though it never happened, to carry on as though it never happened, etc. A destructive channelling of fantasy is when you endlessly blame people for not being exactly what you wish they were, or what you’d hoped they would be, or what you were imagining they’d be. If someone isn’t what you want, then leave them and go find someone else. If someone is what you want but made a mistake, forgive them. And if you only want things you know you’ll never find, then I’m sorry for you.