? ? ?
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.3 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.