"I would absolutely expect my man to leave me if he found someone 20% better who would take him. Or even 10% better. I just think the likelihood of that happening are low enough that I don't spend time stressing about it. Yes, there are people 20% better, but not many that are 20% better AND that would be interested in him. Same goes the…
"I would absolutely expect my man to leave me if he found someone 20% better who would take him. Or even 10% better. I just think the likelihood of that happening are low enough that I don't spend time stressing about it. Yes, there are people 20% better, but not many that are 20% better AND that would be interested in him. Same goes the other way around."
I sort of agree... but not entirely. I think it depends what you mean by "better". Over time obviously bonds between people strengthen, your history together has value, you come to love traits in the other person that are not objectively "high mate value" etc. And so I wouldn't expect to leave or be left because you met someone slightly higher in objective mate value who was interested in you... but if they met someone who was much better suited to *being their partner* even after taking into account all the shared history etc. then I think it's reasonable to leave... and I wouldn't want to keep someone I loved trapped in a less fulfilling relationship either. Also if you have kids with someone, that alone makes them a better partner for you in a way that's unique to you and not valued by anyone else in the dating market. So for all those reasons I think your point that "it's unlikely anyways" gets more true over time (supposing neither of you change in such a way that you're no longer good partners to one another, which of course also happens frequently, and I think breaking up in those situations is the right thing to do as well). And of course leaving for someone new has transaction costs and uncertainty since you don't know how well the new relationship will work until you leave the old one... all factors that promote stability. The fact that these transaction costs and uncertainty exist are the reason why its uncommon for people in happy relationships to leave their partner for someone else, normally you need to actually be unhappy to think this is worth doing, even if you do meet some people who could've been potentially better partners. (I don't know if you know the Agnes Callard story but she's one of the only people I've heard of who left what she felt was a very happy and functional marriage because she fell for someone else.) All this said, while I think there are many situations in which breaking up is reasonable, some which involve meeting someone who you didn't expect to meet, I certainly wouldn't want to feel that my partner is actively looking for those opportunities.
As for your point about feeling a little insecure in the relationship being healthy - I totally agree, but I phrase it slightly differently as: recognizing that the relationship is not unconditional is healthy. I think believing you're in an unconditional relationship incentivizes bad behavior, laziness etc. and in some sense can actually allow you to treat your partner *more* transactionally, since I think being treated non-transactionally is a condition for most people in their primary partnership (if that makes sense!)
Totally agree with all this. Unwinding a relationship....ESPECIALLY a marriage and REALLY DEFINITELY ESPECIALLY a marriage with children has huge costs. Which is why I think someone would really have to be quite a lot better...probably more than 20% even (though 20% better is actually quite a lot).
And to clarify, I didn't mean "better" on some objective criterion that is the same for everyone, because it most certainly is not. Some things are pretty universal -- i.e. most people prefer someone who enjoys humor to someone who does not, and most people prefer someone better looking than worse, etc. But people have all kinds of quirks that are highly attractive and/or critical to one person that would be considered an active disqualifier for someone else. Religiosity would be a pretty obvious one. But there are lots of things...interests, lifestyles, etc.
Most married couples really end up more alike to each other than they are to 90% or more of other people...there's a lot of matching that goes on. It's why when you see a mis-matched couple, it usually really stands out and people will comment on it, because it's so unusual, they always wonder how on earth did those two end up together??
Fully agree with you that "unconditional love" incentivizes terrible behavior and no one should want it or give it.
from above: "I think it depends what you mean by "better". Over time obviously bonds between people strengthen, your history together has value, you come to love traits in the other person that are not objectively "high mate value" etc. And so I wouldn't expect to leave or be left because you met someone slightly higher in objective mate value who was interested in you... but if they met someone who was much better suited to *being their partner* even after taking into account all the shared history etc. then I think it's reasonable to leave"
I agree with problematizing the concept of “better”, but your reply still accepts a concept of “objective mate value” which implies a quantitative ordinal ranking of human quality is possible, even if you don’t think it’s the sole determinant of relationship decisions and you leave room for subjectivity to grow over time. Whereas I would go much further and say the entire concept of “objective mate value” is silly.
I just mean the value set by the market, analogous to how prices are set as a function of demand and supply - this isn’t about deep moral value. But it’s pretty obvious that some people are considered broadly more desirable as romantic partners than other people - that’s what I’m referring to when I say “objective mate value”.
To elaborate a bit, I agree with you that in a relationship you grow to love idiosyncratic qualities in your partner that other people might not notice or care about. And you can draw a contrast between those qualities and other good qualities they possess that are more obvious or broadly appealing. I just think it’s misleading to try and mathematically formalize that distinction with conceptual tools like “market value” imported from economics. Since, as you write, relationships are not transactional, any attempt to gain insight into relationships with conceptual tools designed for transactional commercial exchanges is bound to fail.
I disagree, just because it’s not a perfect analogy of the price based market doesn’t make the concept of a “dating market” useless when analyzing relationships, dating norms etc.
I’m open to persuasion - what insights into relationships can we get from the concepts of “dating markets” and “objective mate value” that you don’t think we can get without them?
It’s really long and I only skimmed it so I might be missing something (although I am familiar with the blog and the writer), but all he really seems to be saying is that in social environments where there are significantly more of one sex than the other, heterosexual people of the minority sex have an easier time dating than people of the majority sex, because they have more potential partners and less competition. That’s a pretty obvious point and we don’t need the concept of a “dating market” to grasp it. I don’t deny competition for partners sometimes exists, but not all competition is market competition.
But that is precisely what an example of applying market dynamics to analyze dating looks like… it’s about supply and demand (competition) and how that affects incentives and norms… not sure what you’re looking for if that doesn’t “count”!
Disagree. They are an exchange of goods -- someone's time, attentions, efforts, and often labor. Not really that different from any other relationship. There's also a "price", as you give things up to be in a relationship.
People in relationships make exchanges with each other (I do the cooking, you do the dishes, etc). That doesn’t mean the relationship itself is an exchange. Romantic relationships (at least, healthy fulfilling ones) are not transactional, as Regan argued in her previous post.
Well, I think all relationships are transaction, but I also think this is just kind of a word game. Because things you likely would describe as not transactional I would describe as transactional, but we are probably talking about the same thing and using different words.
You probably do not ascribe emotions to transactions, whereas I would say that giving someone good feelings IS providing something of value and thus a transaction, and giving someone bad feelings is a cost. I understand most people have a strong aversion to thinking of intimate and emotional things as transactional so it's probably a silly argument to have because some of this is just comfort with certain words and the associations people have with them.
Nah, I think we disagree on something substantial. The question is whether Economics concepts like supply, demand, price, and market value, which were developed for studying impersonal business exchanges, can be meaningfully applied to relationships. I would argue no. The nature of your relationship with the “counter-party” is too different. For example, when you buy something in the store, you don’t typically care about the well-being of the shopkeeper. You want the best price for yourself, and in the exchange you are out for your own interest. Whereas, in a (healthy, loving) relationship, you are heavily invested in the well-being, interests, and happiness of your partner, perhaps even more than your own.
Similarly, in the business transaction you want something specific and quantifiable (if you’re buying, the product, and if you’re selling, money). Relationships aren’t like that. What you want from your partner is multi-faceted, irreducible, and unquantifiable - you want love, commitment, care, company, laughter, shared happiness, sexual intimacy, potentially a loving fellow parent for your children etc. You don’t just want something “from” them, in other worlds, you want the person themselves. It’s such a different dynamic from business that these Economics concepts are just radically misapplied.
Well I think the primary distinction here is that when you buy something in a shop, it’s a one-time transaction and you never see the person again. But there are plenty of business relationships that are NOT like that, such as partnerships, where business owners are together doing business for decades. And trust me, when those dissolve, it is exactly as emotionally traumatizing as a divorce.
I am in a business partnership with a firm where I have worked with the same people for 15 years, and it’s really not that different — you bargain, you laugh, you fight, you hate, you care, you cooperate. You of course will be emotionally invested with people you deal with every day for years on end with something as important as your livelihood or your home.
The hurt and years-long grief and animosity that occurs when a business partnership dissolves, the feelings of betrayal of loyalty etc. are often exactly as strong as in a marriage that dissolves.
20% of whatever mix of values and attributes one of the partners likes. Which will be different for everyone. But I can easily imagine exactly what type of woman my guy would think was significantly better than me. It's not some objective scale, it depends on whatever a person likes. For example I do not enjoy receiving poems (unless they're funny), so a guy who insists upon writing me serious poems is worse than a guy who does not, because then I have to pretend to be interested and amazed by said poems and I don't want to have to pretend that. But plenty of other women would love to receive love poems and think a guy who writes them is better.
Thanks for the reply. I think the unspoken assumption you’re making is that people have an ideal partner in mind and then choose the person they can find who is closest to that ideal. Then, if they find someone else who matches the ideal better, they are tempted to make the switch. I don’t think real relationships work that way though. People don’t have a fixed ideal. Thought and desire are dynamic. When you fall in love with someone, you come to want them, specifically, as a wholistic person rather than an amalgamation of traits. That includes their qualities and characteristics that weren’t part of what you previously thought you wanted but that you now find you just can’t do without.
I somewhat agree with you, but also I think there is a mix of traits people like, and that they DO switch if they find someone with a better mix. Now how willing they are to switch depends on how invested they are in the existing one and how painful or not it is to get out. If you’re just like dating in college or something, easy to jump ship because you perceive a better deal elsewhere. Not so much if you’re married with kids….someone would have to be really much significantly better, on at least one very important trait or a multiple traits. And I actually think 20% is quite a lot, by the way, like that’s a very big jump.
The reason I can’t fully go along with you is that I have just known way too many people — mostly men, though I don’t know why — who have a string of relationships where every woman is almost a clone of the one before. Like to the point where it’s weird and people comment and joke about it. And I don’t just mean a Leo DeCaprio type who keeps trading in for a new 22 year old model, I mean guys who clearly have a specific type because they’ve had 3 long-term girlfriends/wives over a 30 year span, and every one is a very weirdly specific type. So some people very clearly DO have ideals.
If all their partners are pretty similar, it doesn’t sound like these men are “trading up” each time for a new partner who better matches what they want. More likely their relationships just don’t last for whatever reason, and they tend to go for the same sort of person for each new one because that’s what they like and that’s what they’re used to.
To be fair, now that I think about it, in the cases of those men that I’m thinking of, they were the ones who were left by the women. And yes they sought to replace their ex who left them with someone who was about as perfectly similar as possible.
> Also if you have kids with someone, that alone makes them a better partner for you in a way that's unique to you and not valued by anyone else in the dating market.
Unless you have a reasonable chance to have more kids with someone else, leaving your former partners and their own future partners, if any, stuck raising _your_ kids.
"I would absolutely expect my man to leave me if he found someone 20% better who would take him. Or even 10% better. I just think the likelihood of that happening are low enough that I don't spend time stressing about it. Yes, there are people 20% better, but not many that are 20% better AND that would be interested in him. Same goes the other way around."
I sort of agree... but not entirely. I think it depends what you mean by "better". Over time obviously bonds between people strengthen, your history together has value, you come to love traits in the other person that are not objectively "high mate value" etc. And so I wouldn't expect to leave or be left because you met someone slightly higher in objective mate value who was interested in you... but if they met someone who was much better suited to *being their partner* even after taking into account all the shared history etc. then I think it's reasonable to leave... and I wouldn't want to keep someone I loved trapped in a less fulfilling relationship either. Also if you have kids with someone, that alone makes them a better partner for you in a way that's unique to you and not valued by anyone else in the dating market. So for all those reasons I think your point that "it's unlikely anyways" gets more true over time (supposing neither of you change in such a way that you're no longer good partners to one another, which of course also happens frequently, and I think breaking up in those situations is the right thing to do as well). And of course leaving for someone new has transaction costs and uncertainty since you don't know how well the new relationship will work until you leave the old one... all factors that promote stability. The fact that these transaction costs and uncertainty exist are the reason why its uncommon for people in happy relationships to leave their partner for someone else, normally you need to actually be unhappy to think this is worth doing, even if you do meet some people who could've been potentially better partners. (I don't know if you know the Agnes Callard story but she's one of the only people I've heard of who left what she felt was a very happy and functional marriage because she fell for someone else.) All this said, while I think there are many situations in which breaking up is reasonable, some which involve meeting someone who you didn't expect to meet, I certainly wouldn't want to feel that my partner is actively looking for those opportunities.
As for your point about feeling a little insecure in the relationship being healthy - I totally agree, but I phrase it slightly differently as: recognizing that the relationship is not unconditional is healthy. I think believing you're in an unconditional relationship incentivizes bad behavior, laziness etc. and in some sense can actually allow you to treat your partner *more* transactionally, since I think being treated non-transactionally is a condition for most people in their primary partnership (if that makes sense!)
Totally agree with all this. Unwinding a relationship....ESPECIALLY a marriage and REALLY DEFINITELY ESPECIALLY a marriage with children has huge costs. Which is why I think someone would really have to be quite a lot better...probably more than 20% even (though 20% better is actually quite a lot).
And to clarify, I didn't mean "better" on some objective criterion that is the same for everyone, because it most certainly is not. Some things are pretty universal -- i.e. most people prefer someone who enjoys humor to someone who does not, and most people prefer someone better looking than worse, etc. But people have all kinds of quirks that are highly attractive and/or critical to one person that would be considered an active disqualifier for someone else. Religiosity would be a pretty obvious one. But there are lots of things...interests, lifestyles, etc.
Most married couples really end up more alike to each other than they are to 90% or more of other people...there's a lot of matching that goes on. It's why when you see a mis-matched couple, it usually really stands out and people will comment on it, because it's so unusual, they always wonder how on earth did those two end up together??
Fully agree with you that "unconditional love" incentivizes terrible behavior and no one should want it or give it.
20% of what? There is no quantitative, ordinal ranking of “human quality”, so the statement doesn’t make sense.
from above: "I think it depends what you mean by "better". Over time obviously bonds between people strengthen, your history together has value, you come to love traits in the other person that are not objectively "high mate value" etc. And so I wouldn't expect to leave or be left because you met someone slightly higher in objective mate value who was interested in you... but if they met someone who was much better suited to *being their partner* even after taking into account all the shared history etc. then I think it's reasonable to leave"
I agree with problematizing the concept of “better”, but your reply still accepts a concept of “objective mate value” which implies a quantitative ordinal ranking of human quality is possible, even if you don’t think it’s the sole determinant of relationship decisions and you leave room for subjectivity to grow over time. Whereas I would go much further and say the entire concept of “objective mate value” is silly.
I just mean the value set by the market, analogous to how prices are set as a function of demand and supply - this isn’t about deep moral value. But it’s pretty obvious that some people are considered broadly more desirable as romantic partners than other people - that’s what I’m referring to when I say “objective mate value”.
To elaborate a bit, I agree with you that in a relationship you grow to love idiosyncratic qualities in your partner that other people might not notice or care about. And you can draw a contrast between those qualities and other good qualities they possess that are more obvious or broadly appealing. I just think it’s misleading to try and mathematically formalize that distinction with conceptual tools like “market value” imported from economics. Since, as you write, relationships are not transactional, any attempt to gain insight into relationships with conceptual tools designed for transactional commercial exchanges is bound to fail.
I disagree, just because it’s not a perfect analogy of the price based market doesn’t make the concept of a “dating market” useless when analyzing relationships, dating norms etc.
I’m open to persuasion - what insights into relationships can we get from the concepts of “dating markets” and “objective mate value” that you don’t think we can get without them?
Here’s a blog post that I think uses the concept of a mating market well: https://putanumonit.com/2020/01/26/skewed-and-the-screwed/
It’s really long and I only skimmed it so I might be missing something (although I am familiar with the blog and the writer), but all he really seems to be saying is that in social environments where there are significantly more of one sex than the other, heterosexual people of the minority sex have an easier time dating than people of the majority sex, because they have more potential partners and less competition. That’s a pretty obvious point and we don’t need the concept of a “dating market” to grasp it. I don’t deny competition for partners sometimes exists, but not all competition is market competition.
But that is precisely what an example of applying market dynamics to analyze dating looks like… it’s about supply and demand (competition) and how that affects incentives and norms… not sure what you’re looking for if that doesn’t “count”!
The “dating market” is another bad concept. There is no price mechanism, and relationships are not an exchange of one good for another.
Disagree. They are an exchange of goods -- someone's time, attentions, efforts, and often labor. Not really that different from any other relationship. There's also a "price", as you give things up to be in a relationship.
People in relationships make exchanges with each other (I do the cooking, you do the dishes, etc). That doesn’t mean the relationship itself is an exchange. Romantic relationships (at least, healthy fulfilling ones) are not transactional, as Regan argued in her previous post.
Well, I think all relationships are transaction, but I also think this is just kind of a word game. Because things you likely would describe as not transactional I would describe as transactional, but we are probably talking about the same thing and using different words.
You probably do not ascribe emotions to transactions, whereas I would say that giving someone good feelings IS providing something of value and thus a transaction, and giving someone bad feelings is a cost. I understand most people have a strong aversion to thinking of intimate and emotional things as transactional so it's probably a silly argument to have because some of this is just comfort with certain words and the associations people have with them.
Nah, I think we disagree on something substantial. The question is whether Economics concepts like supply, demand, price, and market value, which were developed for studying impersonal business exchanges, can be meaningfully applied to relationships. I would argue no. The nature of your relationship with the “counter-party” is too different. For example, when you buy something in the store, you don’t typically care about the well-being of the shopkeeper. You want the best price for yourself, and in the exchange you are out for your own interest. Whereas, in a (healthy, loving) relationship, you are heavily invested in the well-being, interests, and happiness of your partner, perhaps even more than your own.
Similarly, in the business transaction you want something specific and quantifiable (if you’re buying, the product, and if you’re selling, money). Relationships aren’t like that. What you want from your partner is multi-faceted, irreducible, and unquantifiable - you want love, commitment, care, company, laughter, shared happiness, sexual intimacy, potentially a loving fellow parent for your children etc. You don’t just want something “from” them, in other worlds, you want the person themselves. It’s such a different dynamic from business that these Economics concepts are just radically misapplied.
Well I think the primary distinction here is that when you buy something in a shop, it’s a one-time transaction and you never see the person again. But there are plenty of business relationships that are NOT like that, such as partnerships, where business owners are together doing business for decades. And trust me, when those dissolve, it is exactly as emotionally traumatizing as a divorce.
I am in a business partnership with a firm where I have worked with the same people for 15 years, and it’s really not that different — you bargain, you laugh, you fight, you hate, you care, you cooperate. You of course will be emotionally invested with people you deal with every day for years on end with something as important as your livelihood or your home.
The hurt and years-long grief and animosity that occurs when a business partnership dissolves, the feelings of betrayal of loyalty etc. are often exactly as strong as in a marriage that dissolves.
20% of whatever mix of values and attributes one of the partners likes. Which will be different for everyone. But I can easily imagine exactly what type of woman my guy would think was significantly better than me. It's not some objective scale, it depends on whatever a person likes. For example I do not enjoy receiving poems (unless they're funny), so a guy who insists upon writing me serious poems is worse than a guy who does not, because then I have to pretend to be interested and amazed by said poems and I don't want to have to pretend that. But plenty of other women would love to receive love poems and think a guy who writes them is better.
Thanks for the reply. I think the unspoken assumption you’re making is that people have an ideal partner in mind and then choose the person they can find who is closest to that ideal. Then, if they find someone else who matches the ideal better, they are tempted to make the switch. I don’t think real relationships work that way though. People don’t have a fixed ideal. Thought and desire are dynamic. When you fall in love with someone, you come to want them, specifically, as a wholistic person rather than an amalgamation of traits. That includes their qualities and characteristics that weren’t part of what you previously thought you wanted but that you now find you just can’t do without.
I somewhat agree with you, but also I think there is a mix of traits people like, and that they DO switch if they find someone with a better mix. Now how willing they are to switch depends on how invested they are in the existing one and how painful or not it is to get out. If you’re just like dating in college or something, easy to jump ship because you perceive a better deal elsewhere. Not so much if you’re married with kids….someone would have to be really much significantly better, on at least one very important trait or a multiple traits. And I actually think 20% is quite a lot, by the way, like that’s a very big jump.
The reason I can’t fully go along with you is that I have just known way too many people — mostly men, though I don’t know why — who have a string of relationships where every woman is almost a clone of the one before. Like to the point where it’s weird and people comment and joke about it. And I don’t just mean a Leo DeCaprio type who keeps trading in for a new 22 year old model, I mean guys who clearly have a specific type because they’ve had 3 long-term girlfriends/wives over a 30 year span, and every one is a very weirdly specific type. So some people very clearly DO have ideals.
If all their partners are pretty similar, it doesn’t sound like these men are “trading up” each time for a new partner who better matches what they want. More likely their relationships just don’t last for whatever reason, and they tend to go for the same sort of person for each new one because that’s what they like and that’s what they’re used to.
To be fair, now that I think about it, in the cases of those men that I’m thinking of, they were the ones who were left by the women. And yes they sought to replace their ex who left them with someone who was about as perfectly similar as possible.
> Also if you have kids with someone, that alone makes them a better partner for you in a way that's unique to you and not valued by anyone else in the dating market.
Unless you have a reasonable chance to have more kids with someone else, leaving your former partners and their own future partners, if any, stuck raising _your_ kids.