Modern Romance (15 page)

Complete misery! (Read in a scary Aziz whisper voice.)
*

If you are in a big city or on an online dating site, you are flooded with options. Seeing all these options, like the people in the job example, are we now comparing our potential partners not to other potential partners but rather to an idealized person whom no one could measure up to?

And what if you’re not looking for your soul mate yet but just want to date someone and commit to a girlfriend or boyfriend? How does our increase in options affect our ability to commit? To be honest, even picking lunch in Seattle was pretty tough.

If we, like the people in the job study, are creating a “fantasy” person full of all our desired qualities, doesn’t the vast potential of the Internet and all our other romantic pools give us the illusion that this fantasy person does, in fact, exist? Why settle for anything less?

When we brought these ideas up in focus groups, people responded to these notions immediately. In the city with arguably the most options, New York City, people discussed how it was hard to settle down because every corner you turned revealed more potential opportunities.

I’ve felt it myself. For much of the past few years, I split my time between New York and L.A. When I first started dating my current girlfriend, when I was in New York, I’d see people everywhere and feel like,
Shit, should I
ever
take myself out of the single
world? There’s so many people!
Then I got back to L.A., where instead of walking in streets and subway stations full of potential options, I would be alone in my Prius filled with shitty gasoline, listening to a dumb podcast. I couldn’t wait to get home and hold my girlfriend.

 • • • 

But the surge of options is not limited to people in New York.
As Schwartz told me, “Where did people meet alternatives thirty years ago? It was in the workplace. How many shots did you have? Two or three people, maybe, who you found attractive, who were the right age, or you meet somebody who your friend works with, and your friend fixes you up. So the set of romantic possibilities that you actually confront is going to be pretty small.

“And that, it seems to me, is like feeding in an environment where the food is relatively scarce. You find somebody who seems simpatico. And you do as much as you can to cultivate that person because there may be a long drought after that person. That’s what it used to be like. But now,” he said, “in principle, the world is available to you.”

The world is available to us, but that may be the problem.

The Columbia professor Sheena Iyengar, whom we’ve met, was one of Barry Schwartz’s coauthors on the job-hunting study, and she also knows a shit ton about choice. Through a series of experiments, Iyengar has demonstrated that an excess of options can lead to indecision and paralysis. In one of her most influential studies, she and another researcher set up a table at a luxury food store and offered shoppers samples of jams.
2
Sometimes the researchers offered six types of jam, but other times they offered twenty-four. When they offered twenty-four, people were more likely to stop in and have a taste. But, strangely, they were far less likely to actually
buy
any jam. People who stopped to taste the smaller number of jams were almost
ten times
more likely to buy jam than people who stopped to taste the larger number.

Don’t you see what’s happening to us? There’s just too much jam out there. If you’re on a date with a certain jam, you can’t even focus, ’cause as soon as you go to the bathroom, three other jams have texted you. You go online, you see more jam there. You put in filters to find the perfect jam. There are iPhone apps that literally tell you if there is jam nearby that wants to get eaten at that particular moment!

LIMITED OPTIONS:

JOURNEYS TO WICHITA AND MONROE

Would forcing us to select from fewer options, as older generations did, actually make us happier?
Should we all just follow my dad’s example and find someone of an ideal height and lock it down? I decided to get out of New York City and explore some places with limited options. My two stops: Monroe, New York, and Wichita, Kansas.

Monroe is about sixty miles outside of New York City. It’s home to approximately eight thousand people. It’s a small community where most everyone knows one another. There’s nothing but strip malls and second-tier grocery chains you never see elsewhere.

If you click on the “Attractions” tab on TripAdvisor’s Monroe page, it brings up a message that says, “I’m sorry, you must have clicked here by mistake. No one could possibly be planning a trip to Monroe to see its ‘Attractions.’ I have a feeling about why you’d want to go to Monroe. Here, let me redirect you to a suicide-prevention site.”

Basically, not much is going on.

Wichita is much, much bigger than Monroe. Its population is about 385,000. A quick Google search will show you many articles saying Wichita is one of the worst dating cities in the country. Granted, there isn’t any scientific merit to these surveys, but the conditions used to gain this ranking make sense. There is a low proportion of single people and strikingly few venues where single people can gather, places like bars and coffee shops. The town is quite isolated and doesn’t get much traffic from nearby towns.

One thing to note about people who live in places with limited options is that they get married young. Whereas in places like New York City and Los Angeles the average age at first marriage is now around thirty, in smaller towns and less populated states the typical age of first marriage for women is as low as twenty-three (Utah), twenty-four (Idaho and Wyoming), or twenty-five (a whole bunch of states, including Arkansas, Oklahoma, Alaska, and Kansas). Men in these states tend to marry just a year or two later than women.

Could the lack of options be forcing these people to commit earlier and get into serious relationships? Perhaps, but this doesn’t always work out either. In recent decades the divorce rate in small towns and rural areas has skyrocketed, catching up to the levels commonly found in large cities.
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So many of the people I met in Wichita told me about friends of theirs who’d married before the age of twenty-five and then divorced soon after. Heather, for instance, was only twenty-four, but she could already report that “a lot of my sorority pledge sisters got married and divorced within a year.” Within a year. Damn.

Let’s hope things don’t end like that for me and the carefully researched electric juicer I just purchased.

 • • • 

Before our interviews I had romanticized the dating
cities with fewer options and envisioned a happier, smaller community
where people really got to know one another,
and
instead
of hopping around trying to find the best party, they
all just went to their one local spot and had
a good time.

I imagined every guy had a girl next door. They grew up together. Got to know each other their whole lives and had a really deep bond. One day they just started boning and then they got married. I’m basing that on nothing, but it seems correct, right?

But talking with so many single people in Monroe and Wichita quickly demolished my fantasy that things were simpler and nicer in small towns. They generally hated their lack of options and the troubles that came with it.

Despite the difference in size, the problems of dating in Wichita and Monroe overlapped quite a bit. All our singles in both cities felt pressure to lock it down and definitely felt like outliers by being single in their late twenties. This stigma of being unmarried in your late twenties was never expressed in any of the focus groups in bigger cities.

A huge problem is that everyone already knows all of his or her options pretty well. Josh, twenty-two, said his main pool of dating options is generally limited to a set of folks that he and his friends have known since high school. “If I see a girl at a bar and I don’t know her, within thirty seconds to a minute, I’ll find out who that person is by just asking around,” he explained. “Her life story. Who she’s dated. You basically know everything about the person.”

And from talking to these folks, it appears when you don’t know someone already, usually the “everything” is not “Oh he/she’s the best. Brilliant, hilarious, and without any baggage or complicated past to speak of. Strange you never met!” No, it’s probably closer to “Oh, him? He steals tires and then sells them on eBay to buy corn chips.”

In Wichita I met Miguel, who had moved from Chicago. He mourned the fact that he never met new people anymore. In Chicago he would meet all kinds of people: friends of friends, coworkers, friends of coworkers, and strangers whom he talked up in bars, in cafés, and even on public transit. In Wichita, though, Miguel said he mainly saw the few folks he worked with and spent his evenings with the same group of friends.

This cliquish mentality was reported in both Monroe and Wichita. One guy in Wichita described it like the gangs in
The Warriors.
People have their cliques and they rarely stray outside of them to meet new people. This leads to a lot of people dating their way through the same small groups, and after they’ve dated everyone, they’re left in a bad spot. Finding new people isn’t easy when no one new is coming to town.

Sometimes people think they’ve discovered a new person, only to discover that they share more connections than they realized. In both Monroe and Wichita we heard stories of people meeting someone they thought was a new person but then going on Facebook and seeing forty-eight mutual friends.

A girl named Heather told me that one time she met a great guy she’d never seen before and was really excited about the possibilities, only to discover that he’d once slept with a girl she totally despised. This soured the whole thing.

The girl? Actress Gwyneth Paltrow.

Not really, but can you imagine?

Soon afterward, a guy named Greg recounted a story of going out with a girl: On the date they started sharing the stories of how they’d lost their virginity. He soon figured out that the guy she’d lost her virginity to was a close friend and coworker of his.

That coworker? Football star O. J. Simpson.

Not really, but again, could you imagine? How weird would that be? To sleep with someone who lost her virginity to O. J. Simpson?! WEIRD!

“It’s like a cesspool,” said Michelle, a twenty-six-year-old from Monroe. “Everybody has slept with each other.”

Also, when you’re going out with people in such a limited pool of options, issues I’d never thought of came up.

One: When you go out on a date, you will run into everyone you know, so sometimes singles travel for a little privacy. “I went on a date last night, but it was in a totally different town,” a twenty-one-year-old Monroe resident named Emily told us. “I would never go on a first date somewhere in my town because I know all the waiters. I know all the bartenders. I know everybody.”

Two: You lose the initial discovery period of getting to know someone because you are so connected and familiar already. This can be an advantage and a disadvantage. The advantage is you get to prescreen everyone through friends of friends, but the downside is that you lose that fun of getting to know someone. In Monroe, Emily reported, “You already know their life story, so you don’t even have to go on a first date. You have already prejudged them before you’ve even gone out.”

And finally, if you do go out with someone and it goes badly, you have to deal with the fact that you’re going to see that person all the time. Compare this with a place like Los Angeles, where Ryan, twenty-three, said that he could go out with someone and, if it went badly, be fairly confident he would never see them again. “It was almost like they were dead. Like, in a way, you murdered them in your mind,” he said. Damn, Ryan, let’s chill on the mind murders! But I understand his sentiment.

What about expanding the pool of options with the Internet and other social media? Were any of these singles using online dating? Smartphone swipe apps?

In Wichita people were shier about online dating. There was still a stigma, and with such a small pool there was a worry that people would see your profile and judge you.

Josh, from Monroe, decided to give Tinder a try: “I set [the range] for ten miles at first because I want to make this quick. Two people pop up, and I’m like, no [he swiped his finger to the left], no [he swiped again], and then . . . it was done. And I was like,
Damn, I thought there’d be more. Can I get those back?
”

Others had more luck. Margaret, one of the few Wichita singles who had tried online dating, said, “I think that the online dating thing, what I’m finding is that there’s so much choice, I’m like,
Oh my god. All these guys could be great
.”

Another dater also tried Tinder. “I started in Wichita but ran out of people after just a week or so. I then went to Pennsylvania, near Penn State University, for a few days and decided to test it out there. I felt like I could swipe through people for years. This just showed me how limited options were in Kansas.”

Of course, not everyone was disappointed by the lack of options in these small towns.

One gentleman in the Monroe group, Jimmy, age twenty-four, had a more positive attitude. Whenever someone expressed frustration with the lack of options in the dating scene, Jimmy would insist that you simply needed to invest time in people to really get to know them.

“If you’re patient and you know what you like, you’ll find what you like in another person. There’s going to be things you don’t like about them. They don’t clip their toenails. They don’t wash their socks.”

I told Jimmy I felt like he could find someone with clean socks and trimmed toenails, and maybe the bar was set a bit too low.

“The point is there’s always going to be something that bothers you, you know? But it’s up to you,” he said.

This positive attitude was echoed in Wichita as well. “I feel optimistic about Wichita,” said Greg, twenty-six. “I know that there’s people here that would surprise me. You have to put a little bit more effort into the relationship. But it’s still there somewhere.”