A Few More Thoughts On Online Dating

Her is another installment in my series on online dating.  First, why do people do it?  Efficiency.  You can contact way more single people spending two hours on dating sites than you can by going to a bar to meet them.  Plus, you can drill down to get someone with characteristics that are closer to what you would like. 

Female friends of mine complain that 1) online dating takes a lot of time, and 2) they meet a lot of undesireables.  As to the first objection, every kind of dating/meeting people takes a lot of time.  If you have very little time available go to a speed dating event.  But these events aren’t as common, outside the very biggest cities. 

As for the second objection, meeting a lot of undesireable guys, my friends have a point.  If they’re at a bar they see the guys and can just give the undesireable ones the cold shoulder, but some manage to slip through online.  They might lie about their height or articulateness.   Or their less-than-stellar grooming might not come through in their online pic. 

But the women can just set up brief “coffee meetings” to evaluate the guys.  I blogged several days about about these meetings and how much they resembled job interviews.

And in any event, the drawbacks of online dating are vastly outweighed by its benefits.   There is no other place where you can inspect so many people, and drill down for exactly what you want.  If the woman wants a 6′2″ guy with an athletic build, brown hair, blue eyes, and who works in a particular field, and who makes above a certain threshold of income, she can search and turn some of these guys up in minutes.

My next installment on online dating will come next week.

The US government should never have prosecuted Deborah Jeane Palfrey

The US goverment undertook a three-year investigation and prosecution of Deborah Jeane Palfrey, no doubt costing millions of taxpayer dollars.  She was the Washington, DC madam who was convicted of setting up sex for men in the DC area, including one Senator and several high government officials. 

She was convicted, not of prostitution, because that is a state crime rather than a federal crime, but of financial reporting and various other violations.  Facing years in prison, she committed suicide.

Even in ordinary circumstances, it seems odd that the federal government would devote its supposedly scarce crime-fighting resources into a massive investigation of this woman who hooked up escorts with guys who were willing to pay for sex.  But for the past seven years I’m told that the federal government has been going full-tilt to investigate people who are keen to explode bombs in our crowded cities, killing thousands of us at a time.

Given these other, and vastly higher, priorities for federal investigative resources, it bogles my mind that so much federal time and money was spent investigating and prosecuting this woman for arranging consensual sex for money.

I’m positive my conclusions on this matter are not shared by the following groups: bluenose prudes, hard-core law and order types whose mantra is “it’s a crime, prosecute it, end of story”, and most wives (who have a strong interest in being their husbands’ sole outlet for sex, and don’t mind one bit if any government agency expends vast resources to keep it that way).

Some of you will no doubt say prostitution is a crime.  If you want that changed, go to the legislature.  But that’s not the point.  The point is the federal government shouldn’t be expending these vast resources to punish what is really a minor violation of state laws.

And another thing that should worry those few of us left who worry about the increasing power of the federal government, the strict financial reporting requirements faced by banks and credit card issuers, and the draconian new laws, have made it much easier for a powerful federal government to prosecute people. 

This is pretty much how Elliot Spitzer, until recently Governor of New York, was caught. 

I wouldn’t mind these reporting requirements and laws as much if they were reserved for use against those people who seem likely to kill lots of us, i.e., terrorists.  But the government has demonstrated that when it gets powers such as these, it will use them indiscriminately.    

Boobonomics

Here is a good description of how agents create value for their clients’ nude pics.  It’s written by Janice Turner of the Times online:

A friend who spends his life negotiating with the agents of glamour models explained to me the principles of “boobonomics”. Let’s assume a pretty girl, who has been snapped in her bikini for a local newspaper, seeks a big-time career. Her agent phones a men’s magazine and proposes for a given sum, say £3,000 [ed: that's $5,800 USD or 3,800 Euros], that she pose in lingerie.

If she’s a hit with the readers, her agent will then suggest that for a greater sum, say £5,000 [ed: that's $9,700 USD or 6,300 Euros], she will pose topless, but with her nipples concealed by her cupped fingers (“hand bra”). Subsequently her fee will rise for each coy permutation: “hair bra” or “girl-on-girl bra” (two models face to face shielding each other’s breasts). Eventually, once this dance of the seven thongs has been exhausted and readers are believed to be slavering with anticipation, the agent will propose that for a huge sum say £50,000 [ed: $97,000 USD or 63,000 Euros] the girl will finally reveal all.

But the harshest principle of boobonomics is that after this shoot, the value of the girl’s assets which is what they are in a technical, business sense collapses. From this point she will only receive £20K for full topless, a sum she only recently received for showing far less. Her product life cycle is reaching an end. Now, however, agents have a new strategy for reviving the brand, rather as when Kit Kat launched peanut or orange-flavoured variants. He proposes that his client have a breast enlargement: would the magazine be interested in the first pictures, you know, when the scars have healed? The going rate for new knockers will never match her initial “reveal”, but raises her value momentarily to, say, £35,000. Jordan, the Milton Friedman of boobonomics, has amassed a great fortune increasing her breast size by increments in three operations.

 

Hat tip: http://arandomwalk.blogspot.com/2008_01_01_archive.html

I had never heard the term “hand bra”. 

As a bonus, the article alerted me to a website I have never heard of: Assess My Breasts.  It’s sort of like the “are you hot or not” website, only for topless pics.  Women send in topless pics and people rate them.

Good-looking women bring in more money soliciting for donations

I’ve blogged before on how important appearance is.  I regularly encounter research that shows appearance is important even in activities in which most people don’t think it is important.  Here’s today’s installment of this idea:

In a narrow but very compelling piece of research, John List argued that if you are trying to solicit donations door-to-door, the single best thing you can do to get large donations is to be an attractive blond woman.

Hat tip: http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/13/how-pure-is-your-altruism/#more-2615

It always amazes me that so many people strong resist the notion that appearance plays such a powerful role in so many activities.  They will accept the idea that appearance plays a big role in dating (although even here many people underestimate the impact of good looks), but will stoutly resist the idea that good looks has an impact in other areas.

Sales and marketing people are, on average, way more attractive than accountants or engineers.  That can’t be accidental.  They’re hired at least partly based on appearance.  Pharmaceutical sales reps are a famous example of this.  The vast majority of them are in the top 5% of attractiveness. 

In coming weeks I’ll write about other examples of appearance playing a big role in areas in which most people wouldn’t think so. 

Online Dating Is Like Applying For A Job

Some time ago it occurred to me that online dating was very much like applying for a job.  You create a profile in an attempt to sell yourself.  Your profile is like your resume.  You proofread your profile to make absolutely sure it conveys the best impression possible and contains no misspellings or typos.  Potential dates, like potential employers, will discard it if it contains any errors.

The next step is sending an email to potential dates.  You look at their profile and write an email that you hope will catch their interest and cause them to read your profile.  This email serves the same purpose as a cover letter that goes with your resume.  Your goal in writing the cover letter is to catch the employer’s interest and make him read  your resume.

Your next goal is to get a return email.  If things go well with the potential match, you will get to talk by phone.  This is like a telephone interview for a job.  It enables the interviewer to decide whether he wants to bring you in for a face-to-face interview.  In some cases potential dates insert a further level of review: the extended instant message interview.  This enables them to dispense with some people without expending the time for an actual meeting.

If this goes well, you get the all-important meeting with the date.  This is usually a half hour at the coffee shop.  At this meeting, which is very much like a job interview, you need to sell  yourself and convince the person that you are a good candidate, deserving of further consideration. 

You might get a second date, an evening date at a restaurant.  This corresponds to a call-back interview for a job.  This gives you another chance to demonstrate your suitability.  But instead of the experience, skills, and aptitude you need to show an potential employer, you must show your date a much broader array of things to convince her you are suitable.  She already knows from your profile your height, income, race, hair color, religion, smoking and drinking habits, and lots of other information about you. But now you must show her that you want the same things in life that she does, that you are compatible, that you have the level of ambition she considers suitable, etc.  Plus, you have to excite her. 

At this point about the only thing the job interview has that the dating process lacks is a list of references.  And I don’t think the day is too far off when women will want guys to submit a list of three references from girls you have previously dated. 

This process concludes by your getting the job (date) or not.  And even here there are similarities in letting you know the decision.  The polite employer will send you a letter indicating he is not hiring you.   Of course, lots of employers just don’t bother with this step.  Similarly, some dates send you a cordial email saying they don’t think the two of you are a good match.  But most just don’t pick up the phone when you call and don’t return your call.

And there’s another way that online dating is like applying for a job.  It takes a long time and it’s a great deal of work.  In fact, several job search experts tell us that looking for a job is like a part-time job itself.

Palimony for a girlfriend a guy didn’t even live with?

You’re all no doubt familiar with the concept of alimony.  For those readers outside the US and Western Europe, alimony consists of regular monthly payments to one’s ex-wife, usually for a period of years (while divorce courts can make women make alimony payments to their ex-husbands, it’s rare).  

A clever divorce lawyer in California invented the concept of “palimony” when a woman came to him to try to get money from her long-time live-in boyfriend, the actor Lee Marvin.  Mr. Marvin did not get married to his girlfriend, possibly because he was aware of the huge financial hit he would take in divorce court.  After they broke up, the girlfriend, Michelle Triola, sued Marvin to obtain half of his assets. 

Although the California Supreme Court did not give her half of Marvin’s assets, it decided that it could treat unmarried couples like married couples in certain circumstances, thus inventing the concept of palimony.   And, as often happens, a terrible concept established in California finds its way to other states.  The following article contains a discussion of a New Jersey lawyer who is trying to get the state Supreme Court to agree that palimony can be awarded even to an ex-girlfriend who never lived with the target:

Through the rise of palimony law, courts in New Jersey have laid out a bright line against its being awarded in cases where a couple did not live together. Now, however, the state’s high court is being urged to overturn that rule and open the door to claims for compensation by a broader class of romantic partners (Michael Booth, “N.J. High Court Hears Pitch for Palimony Sans Cohabitation”, New Jersey Law Journal, Jan. 23).

Hat tip: http://www.overlawyered.com/2008/02/palimony-without-cohabitation.html

The New Jersey courts have previously held that they would award palimony only if the unmarried man and woman lived together as a couple.    I’d like to think the New Jersey Supreme Court would reject this absurd extension of a disgusting legal concept, but I’ll wait for the court’s decision.  Ultimately, if state courts get packed with judges who fully buy into the redistributionist mindset embodied by the palimony concept, we will see even more of this nonsense.

For years people advised guys not to get married if they were worried about possibly paying alimony.  That advice is no longer so good, at least in the states whose courts have enacted palimony.  In those states guys were advised to maintain separate residences from their girlfriends.  If palimony is extended, a guy might become a fat financial target when he has a long-term sexual relationship with a woman.

I love one of the arguments used by this woman’s lawyer.  She said  the girlfriend “was drawn into economic dependency.”  That means this guy paid for her upkeep for years, so of course under the alimony/palimony concept he has to keep on paying for years to come.

And women wonder why guys won’t commit.  Why would you commit when doing so is potentially so financially ruinous.

Reasons for Divorce

Bryan Caplan categorizes the reasons people get divorced.  This is an interesting piece for divorced people.  They can determine which category of reason they fit into.  It’s interesting for unhappily married people.  They can use it as a tool to analyze their marriage.  And it’s also a bit useful to single people.  They can use it to figure out whether they want to marry the person they’re dating. 

For those of you who aren’t married and aren’t dating anyone, take a look at the rest of this blog.  There’s plenty of material on dating. 

1. Initial mismatch. Some divorces arise because they were a bad idea from the start. If people only stay married for six months, they were probably incompatible all along.

2. Emergent mismatch - or in plain English, “We grew apart.” Some divorces arise because a marriage was a good idea for a while, but eventually ceased to be in the interests of either party.

3. Defection due to expected divergence in mate value. As evolutionary psychologists will tell you, female mate value peaks and starts to decline at a much earlier age than male mate value: It’s a lot easier for a 45-year-old man to remarry than a 45-year-old woman. This creates a big incentive for men to promise lifetime fidelity, then jump ship.

4. Defection due to unexpected non-culpable divergence in mate value. Remember the part of the contract that says “for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health”? When one partner experiences an unexpected rise in mate value (e.g. one becomes a successful novelist) or experiences an unexpected fall (e.g. develops a horrible disease), one of the parties has a temptation to back out - and some do.

5. Punishment for clear-cut breach of contract. Adultery’s the obvious example, but I’m sure you can think of more.

6. Punishment for unexpected and culpable decline in mate value - or in plain English, “You let yourself go!” The marriage contract may not explicitly say that you can’t become a bum or morbidly obese or perpetually bitter. But you’ve heard about incomplete contracts, right? When one party falls far short of expected mate value due to deliberate action or inaction, divorce is not only likely, but easy for neutral outside observers to understand.

(Just to make a men’s rights aside, it strikes me that people are a lot more forgiving when a women divorces her husband for becoming a bum than when a man divorces his wife for gaining a hundred pounds. When I see a man whose wife has let herself go, I often think “Poor guy - how could she do this to him?!”)

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2008/03/the_root_causes.html

I’ll focus on number six: unexpected and culpable (blameworthy) decline in mate value.  It always amazes me when people get married, then completely let themselves go, or become consistently nasty to their spouses, etc., and are shocked when their spouse considers divorce.

When you get married you have a number of obligations.  I like Bryan’s examples: you should avoid being perpetually bitter and becoming morbidly obese.  And you should do your part to support the family.

He is spot on when he remarks that most people are more understanding when a wife divorces her husband for becoming a bum than they are when a husband divorces his wife for becoming hugely obese.  If you doubt this, gently raise the topic with your married friends.  Very gently. 

Lots of people will respond that the guy married his wife for better or worse.  But it seems that each spouse owes the other a fair degree of effort not to let themselves go.  And if they do let themselves go, they should bear quite a bit of the blame when their spouse files for divorce.

Why Most Married Women in NYC Don’t Work

I came across an interesting analysis entitled “Why Don’t Married Women in New York Work”.  New York City was the only city in the US in which most married women didn’t hold down jobs. 

If you’re a married woman living in the New York City area, there’s a better than 50 percent chance that you don’t work, according to a recent analysis of Census data by economists affiliated with the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank.

More specifically, only 49 percent of white high school-educated married women in their prime working ages were holding down jobs in the New York area as of the 2000 Census. To put that in perspective, there are roughly 2 million woman over 15-years-old who are married in the New York area.

The national average for this particular demographic is 67 percent. At the other end of the spectrum is Minneapolis where almost 80 percent of these married women are employed — that’s larger than the percentage of working men aged 25 and older in the U.S.

http://www.portfolio.com/views/blogs/odd-numbers/2008/05/08/why-dont-married-women-in-new-york-work

Hat tip: www.marginalrevolution.com

The fascinating question is why.  The author suggests several possibilities.  First, traffic congestion.  If you click on the link above to see the full article you will find a list of cities with the percentages of married women who work.  Almost all of them are cities with famously bad traffic.  The explanation would be it’s more time-consuming and stressful to face rush-hour traffic, so more married women decide not to work. 

This sounds plausible, but I’m not convinced.  I suspect there has to be more to the explanation than just bad traffic.  Another suggestion made is there are lots of well-off guys who live in NYC, so their wives can afford not to work.  That’s probably a good part of the explanation.  But I’m curious why there is no great correlation between income and non-working wives in all the other cities. 

Any thoughts?   

Online dating: money, job, and education make a big difference

Well, money, job and education make a difference for women.  Not so much for guys. 

Last week I wrote my second installment in a series about online dating.  This series is based on material I found in an excellent research project addressing online dating.  This project looked at preferences of Match.com members in the San Diego and Boston areas.  The researchers were able to take a deep dive into Match.com’s computers in order to see what qualities men and women were attracted to, who they looked at, emailed with, etc.

If you’re interested in reading part or all of the study, it can be found here:

http://designogselvfremstillelse.files.wordpress.com/2007/10/dating1.pdf

Here are some more interesting conclusions.  Keep in mind these conclusions do not hold for every person:

Guys who earn more money do considerably better than women who earn more money.  p.22

Higher levels of education increase guys’ success, but not womens’.  To the contrary, women with a post-graduate degree incur a slight penalty. p. 22.

Men’s occupations make a difference, but women’s do not.   The following jobs are associated with the most success: law (77% premium), military (49% premium), and firemen (45% premium).  p. 22.  I’m surprised that doctors don’t command a greater premium here.  And I’m guessing that investment banking, while astonishingly lucrative, is not a well-enough-known profession to be on the radar screen of most of these women.

Another interesting finding is that women seem to have a strong preference for men with equivalent education levels or slightly above.  But they seem reluctant to go for guys with a great deal more education.  Men with a masters degree received far fewer first-contact emails from women with high-school degrees.  These women would go for guys with college degrees, but less so for guys with additional education.

Interestingly, this doesn’t work in reverse.  A man with a college or graduate degree does not seem to base his choices on a woman’s education.  p. 23. I’m guessing that’s because guys are so focused on looks that they largely relegate other attributes to the back seat.

Trying to figure out why these conclusions hold is fascinating.  Figuring out the guys’ motivations seems fairly easy.  Figuring out the women’s motivations for these preferences is more difficult.  Ladies, would any of you venture a guess as to the reason behind any of these preferences?

I’ll return with another installment soon.

Will Massachusetts make it a crime to lie to get sex?

If this bill becomes a law in Massachusetts, it might be a crime to inflate your income on your online dating profile.  If you put your income in the “over $150,000″ category when actually make 125,000, a woman searches for guys who make over 150,000, the two of you meet, date, have sex, and she eventually discovers you make less than 150,000, will she be able to get the District Attorney to send you to prison for life?

Cheating on One’s Lover = Future Felony in Massachusetts?

That’s what would happen under a proposed statute that’s being promoted by Massachusetts state representative Peter Koutoujian…

I suspect that this isn’t the goal of the drafters, but that’s what the language would call for, when (as I’m pretty sure happens quite often) the cheater has sex afterwards with the regular lover without disclosing the cheating. Here’s what the proposed law says:

Whoever has sexual intercourse or unnatural sexual intercourse with a person having obtained that person’s consent by the use of fraud, concealment or artifice, and who thereby intentionally deceived such person so that a reasonable person would not have consented but for the deception, shall be punished by imprisonment in the state prison for life or any term of years. As used in this statute, ‘fraud’ or ‘artifice’ shall not be construed to mean a promise of future consideration.

hat tip: http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2008_05_04-2008_05_10.shtml#1210012100