NEXT Tuesday is Valentine鈥檚 Day. Where should you look if you are alone and in search of romance? Well, maybe not the Lonely Heart鈥檚 columns. Within them, it seems, a far more Machiavellian mating game is going on than the innocent eye might discern.
Robin Dunbar, professor of psychology at the University of Liverpool, has been trawling through hundreds of 鈥淏oy needs girl 鈥︹�� ads in American newspapers (see 鈥淎re You Lonesome Tonight?鈥�). What they found makes depressing reading for true romantics. The 鈥渂ids鈥� for partners pLaced in these columns fit all too neatly the expectations of evolutionary biology and the conventional wisdom of centuries.
In the Lonely Hearts world, men are seeking women of the age and shape that signal high fertility 鈥� just the right women to help them maximise their reproductive success. And women turn out to be looking for partners with money and status 鈥� the resources they need for maximising their reproductive success. And people who don鈥檛 have everything prove adept at knowing just how much to lower their sights. As rich men age, they gradually stop looking for Venuses who are quite so youthful.
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Is the mating game really so cruel and competitive? Isn鈥檛 love supposed to be blind rather than calculating? Don鈥檛 despair 鈥� true lovers can take heart from statistics on what people do, rather what they say they want.
Take the age gap between the partners, for example. On evolutionary grounds, women should be seeking the older men who have accumulated wealth, and men the younger partners at peak fertility. Women鈥檚 magazines agree. Readers鈥� surveys regularly record that women want partners several years older than themselves.
Out in the real world, however, the recent pattern of marriage suggests that life contains much more diversity. Many women marry men younger than themselves. In 1992, for example, 48 per cent of women aged between 35 and 39, who were marrying for the first time, married men who were under 34 years old. Over 4 per cent married men who were at least 10 years younger than themselves. And O.3 per cent of women in that 35 to 39 age group married men who were not yet 21.
So, romantics take heart, whatever evolutionary biology may decree, or society approve, there is room to do something different. Indeed, even within the Lonely Hearts columns there are plenty of people out on a limb. 鈥淪ingle woman, 21, 5鈥�10鈥�, likes cigarettes, coffee, alcohol, tattoos and sarcasm seeks man with fast motorbike鈥� reads one recent ad in a Chicago newspaper. Not much chance of maximising reproductive success there.