{"id":5477,"date":"2015-09-07T12:54:45","date_gmt":"2015-09-07T17:54:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/?p=5477"},"modified":"2015-10-13T13:12:44","modified_gmt":"2015-10-13T18:12:44","slug":"math-and-the-mating-game","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/2015\/09\/07\/math-and-the-mating-game\/","title":{"rendered":"Math and the Mating Game"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Tinder's<\/a>
Tinder’s promise.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In Vanity Fair<\/em>, a piece by Nancy Jo Sales<\/a> discusses \u201chook up culture\u201d and its potential causes, including the infamous app Tinder. Sales\u2019 accounts of dating in New portray a \u201cdating apocalypse,\u201d wherein some of her interviewees see men, in particular, moving away from \u201crelationships\u201d altogether. To them, Tinder has forever changed how people date and how they perceive<\/em> dating. As explained by John Birger in The Washington Post<\/em><\/a>, however, Tinder and its ilk may be better understood of symptoms<\/em> of \u201chookup culture\u201d rather than causes. The real problem, Birger asserts, is plain old math.<\/p>\n

Birger describes how today\u2019s college-educated demographics mean three men for every four<\/em> available women. For him, the surplus of women is shaping the narrative of non-committal \u201chook up culture\u201d detailed in Vanity Fair<\/em>. And it wouldn\u2019t matter so much if people were more likely to date across socioeconomic or educational lines. Birger uses research from UCLA sociologists Christine Swartz<\/a> and Robert Mare<\/a> to show that marriage between individuals of unequal education at its lowest point in fifty years. Since college-educated women outnumber college-educated men, the former inevitably exclude a greater population of potential partners if they overlook men with different educational trajectories—and they replicate the idea that relationships are harder to come by for female college grads. Those interviewed in Sales\u2019 article provide testimonials of the ways Tinder can affect interpersonal communication and relationships, but as Birger shows, demographics and mathematics paint a more accurate picture of how \u201chook up culture\u201d lasts beyond college.<\/p>\n

For more on marriage across class and education lines, see Jessi Strieb’s “Marrying Across Class Lines.<\/a>” For more on “hook up culture,” see Elizabeth Armstrong, Laura Hamilton, and Paula England’s “Is Hooking Up Bad for Young Women<\/a>?”<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Vanity Fair, a piece by Nancy Jo Sales discusses \u201chook up culture\u201d and its potential causes, including the infamous app Tinder. Sales\u2019 accounts of dating in New portray a \u201cdating apocalypse,\u201d wherein some of her interviewees see men, in particular, moving away from \u201crelationships\u201d altogether. To them, Tinder has forever changed how people date […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2027,"featured_media":5478,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,55],"tags":[387,34,26922,39114,20801,27447,99,19021],"class_list":["post-5477","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture","category-gender","tag-dating","tag-education","tag-educational-achievement","tag-gender","tag-hooking-up","tag-hookup-culture","tag-relationships","tag-socioeconomic-status"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/files\/2015\/09\/Screen-Shot-2015-09-07-at-12.51.00-PM.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5477","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2027"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5477"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5477\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5479,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5477\/revisions\/5479"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5478"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}