Game theory and the shidduch crisis

Shomer Shekalim has a great post about the shidduch crisis and game theory on which I commented, but thought I’d continue writing here. He asks: “To be honest though, if we could figure out what really is behind the shiduch crisis, it probably would save people thousands of dollars in what is currently spent in the matchmaking world.” I think I know what’s behind it:

Women look for men who are of high status and psycho-social dominance. In the rest of the world, the main way to get status is to have a lot of money. In the Jewish community, status is additionally conferred to young men who are good learners and who are punctilious in their personal observance of the mitzvot.

Unfortunately, things have gotten confused in modern times; men have become more like women and women have become more like men (some of these changes are great and some are not so great). Men are still looking for women who are young, pretty and feminine, but many women now believe that men want women who have the qualities that they look for in men. So women delay marriage to establish their careers. By the time they get to earning some decent money, they are older and significantly less pretty; and, depending on the career and the education it requires, their femininity tends to have been diminished. And by that time, the men of their cohort have been adult bachelors for long enough that it’s hard to convince them to start families.

The main way to end this issue is to get the girls to be more receptive to marriage when they’re 20-24. The early 20s is a great age for a girl to get married, and it doesn’t mean her education and career have to stop immediately either. What does it mean for a girl to be more receptive to marriage at that age? It simply means being able to look with a critical and understanding eye at the reality of the situation that’s unfolding around her: she is at her peak, beautiful and young, mostly uncorrupted. But the boys she meets haven’t done much with themselves. They haven’t yet grown into the men that they will eventually be. She needs to stop asking herself which guys are the best and start asking herself which guys will be the best. Because the peak of a man’s attractiveness to a woman comes much later than a woman’s attractiveness to a man, all it takes is a discerning eye.

Though I was never actually “religious” and consequently none of the “shidduch” issue applies to me directly, I can say that in my mid 20s, when I was closed to conventional religious observance, almost all my friends were religious and I spent much of my time in the religious community, I would have been very happy to meet a special girl my own age and settle down with her. Now that I’m in my late 20s and conspicuously more attractive to girls in their mid 20s than I was then, I can’t see a single good reason to get married.