Sixteen Volts

In an interview, a member of some popular musical group was recounting his band's rise to success. He said something along the lines of how he could tell the band was doing better from year to year because the band members kept showing up with progressively better-looking girlfriends.

The process of assortative mating ensures that people typically end up with spouses who are roughly in the same level of overall desirability to the opposite sex. If you know that somebody is a loser, you can pretty safely guess that if they are married, their spouse is a loser too. Similarly for winners. In real life, the stereotypical sitcom pairing of a fat husband and hot slender wife is extremely rare, since hot women can have their pick of better men. Of course, occasionally somebody can get lucky, but the vast majority of people won't.

Even for those who get lucky, the disparity of attractiveness will eventually spell trouble. The problems begin especially when the market value of one partner drastically increases during the relationship, creating such disparity. This higher-ranking partner realizes that s/he "could do a lot better", which basically gives him/her all power in the relationship. The lower-ranking partner tries to desperately cling to the relationship, but s/he can only powerlessly watch as the higher-ranking partner mingles with other people at the same level and eventually yields to the temptation to trade up... oh, sorry, how very silly me to use such a crude term. Of course I meant to say that "she now knows better what she wants out of her life" or "has grown as a person and wants his life to reflect this change", which seem to be common euphemisms for trading up.

If the higher-ranking partner is a man, he has to tread carefully, since he is not allowed to be too explicit about the fact that he is leaving his dumpy wife for something better. Otherwise he will be socially ostracized as a heartless pig who abuses his poor wife, and he is probably a rapist and a pedophile too. Women have it much better, since if a woman is stuck with a husband who is way below her league, her friends and pretty much all of society will be explicitly encouraging her to "dump that loser", and she will not face any ostracism when she finally does this. Really, is it any wonder that many men feel insecure for their wives' success?

Of course, you know me so you should know that I can't help but take a gratuitous swipe against feminism at this point. For decades now, feminists have been advocating the idea that there is nothing sacred or binding in marriage, so that marriage should be easy to dissolve with a straightforward no-fault divorce for no reason other that one partner wants to get out. Apparently they had some adorably naive belief that only women will ever use this possibility. So when a man decides that it is time to dump the fat and ugly wife and go for something better, the feminists squealing and demanding that this is wrong and that the dumped wife should get everything in divorce is a truly hilarious sight, because for some curious reason, feminists don't seem to react the same way at all when a higher-ranking woman dumps her lower-ranking husband! Could this be because instead of wanting equality, feminists are actually women-firsters and thus make demands of "equality" only in cases where it would currently benefit women? Nah. Perish the thought.

End of gratuitous swipe. To get back on the original topic, I would like to nominate the famous horror writer Stephen King for some kind of sainthood. His career certainly peaked somewhere in the eighties --- can you even name any of the last three books he has written? But during his heyday, he was so popular and powerful that despite his gradual decline, I am sure he is still a multiple decamillionaire, perhaps even a hundredmillionaire. Despite this, he has solidly remained married to the woman he could attract and marry when he was a financially struggling nobody English teacher in some remote third-rate university.

During his rise to fame, King certainly would have had opportunities to trade up several times, each time significantly better than the previous. But he didn't, but stuck with his wife. This gets even more admirable when we remember that King, despite his working-class background and general worldview, holds many trendy leftist positions that he probably acquired in the university to distinguish himself from the proles. (He isn't exactly subtle about this in his earlier novels.) So he certainly wouldn't have any annoying hindrances about marriage being "sacred" or "for life", but could happily move on to indulge his desires if he wanted to. But he never did. Say what you will about the quality of the books that he writes, you certainly have to respect that. That man knows what true love is and has found it, as is more than vividly demonstrated by his actions.

In this sense, Stephen King is a pretty rare bird. Other than him and certain religious nutcases such as Mel Gibson, I don't think that there are very many men who have similarly started out as nobodies and gradually risen to equally high levels of success, and who didn't along the way leave behing a long string of serious girlfriends and wives who were each eventually traded for a better model. There are occasional counterexamples of highly successful men who remain married to relatively dumpy wives (although not their first wives), but it isn't exactly a surprise when these men then turn out to keep a hot mistress or two on the side.

Since Christians often end their arguments and sermons in Bible verses, to end this post, let me also repeat a few of The Danimal's observations about this whole topic:

In some ways, being in a relationship makes it easier to "trade up." Since you already have someone to fall back on, you can handle rejection better. That makes it easier to take bigger risks, i.e., ask out people who are farther up your attractiveness scale. Also, if you get attention you don't like, you have the built-in excuse of already seeing somebody. That is, you can honestly say "I'm seeing someone" if you don't want to date some guy who is hitting on you, or if you want to back out of something you started on the side but realize was a bad idea. (I have actually known women who dated men other than their steady partners when they wanted to, while simultaneously rejecting other men with the "I'm seeing someone" excuse. And of course, there are guys who cheat on their wives, but then use the excuse of keeping their family together to avoid marrying their mistresses! E.g., Bill Clinton. I'm always impressed by human resourcefulness.)

It's odd that women generally admire ambition in a man, when an ambitious man is the most likely to want to trade up.

A woman has the advantage that she doesn't have to "look around" to "find someone better." All she has to do is go out, and men will approach her, if she is attractive and she acts somewhat friendly. She maintains plausible deniability, because she's only talking to them.

What's a woman going to do, hold up a sign that says "Stay away from me, guys; I have a boyfriend"? I don't think so. She will talk to all sorts of guys, some of whom are hitting on her. If she likes one of them better than she likes her current boyfriend, she will probably trade up. She can rationalize her actions because she did not plan to go out and find someone else. She doesn't talk to men with the intent of doing anything besides just talk to them. She doesn't need to have ulterior motives, because the guys take care of that for her.

It's like going out to the mall with no intention of buying anything, but you happen to see something you like on sale.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Tuesday, June 06, 2006 at 8:02 AM