Page 37 - MidWeek - Oct 13, 2021

I ’m good friends with an ex. She’s a great person, but we just don’t work
THE SCIENCE ADVICE GODDESS Amy Alkon
Choosing Between Your Girl And Your Ex
romantically. For two years, I’ve been seeing a woman I love and want a future with. She initially said she was fine with my friendship with my ex. Two months ago, she said she was uncomfortable with it and it might even be a deal breaker. How is it fair for her to decide this now? – Don’t Wanna Dump A Friend
Our guesses about how we’ll eventually feel are col- ored by our circumstances and preferences at the time we’re making a prediction. For ex- ample, before your girlfriend was very attached to you, she might’ve believed your friend- ship with your ex was (and would keep being) no biggie. As her love for you grew, the stakes of losing you loomed large in a way they didn’t back in the cool light of “Mmmkay, let’s see where things go with Mr. (Possibly) Right.”
Assuming you continue to give hooking up the thumbs down, you might shop for potential partners off-cam- pus (at events or via dating sites), where male-female ra- tios are less imbalanced. This should keep you from needing to make certain sacrifices to compete for men — like offer- ing really great sex and throw- ing in a kidney.
Two years ago, your girl- friend did say she was OK with your friendship with your ex. So, the feeling like you’ve been played is understandable, but probably driven by the (very common!) tendency to over- estimate our ability to engage in reliable “affective forecast- ing.” “Affect” is researcher-ese for emotion, and affective forecasting involves predict- ing how some future event will make us feel. Research by psychologists Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson suggests we’re pretty bad at foreseeing what we’ll ultimately want and
Tell her you want to un- derstand her feelings — and do something few people do when they have a goal of their own in mind: Listen fully and open-mindedly. Hearing her fears could help you empathize with her — which should make her feel understood. Explain why she has nothing to wor- ry about (assuming that’s the case). You might also active- ly reassure her: regularly do stuff to show how much you love her. Ultimately, howev-
Sexual “economics” work like the monetary kind. An oversupply of women to men gives men the upper hand: transforming the mating “mar- ket” into one where men’s
how happy or unhappy it will make us down the road.
er, you might have a big ugly choice to make if you can’t get your girlfriend to stop seeing your friendship with your ex as something along the lines of Wile E. Coyote getting the night watchman gig at KFC.
I’m a female college fresh- man. I was told that college was the ideal place to find a partner. Disappointingly, there are more women than men in my year. I want to date a guy and get to know him before having sex, but most women hook up right away. I worry that I can’t compete with them, as I’ m not comfortable with that behavior. – Old-Fashioned
Your body is your tem- ple! Unfortunately, much of your female competition on campus sees theirs that way, too. Colleges have become degree-granting hookup-ate- rias. There are a number of reasons for this, but you point to a biggie: Over the past 40 years, there’s been a growing imbalance of women to men on campus. At the end of the 2020-21 academic year, wom- en made up 59.5% of college students — “an all-time high” — to men’s 40.5% (per The Wall Street Journal). That’s almost three women for every two men ... on average. Some campuses have an even worse guy-girl gap.
Though we’re all walking around with pocket supercom- puters (which women can use to click their way to home de- livery of reliable birth control), our psychology is still tuned for an ancestral world. For ances- tral men, hooking up was evo- lutionarily optimal in a way it was not for our prehistoric lady ancestors. The ancestral Adonis with all the notches in his spear handle would likely have left more surviving de- scendants to pass on his genes.
evolved preferences rule. In short, women respond to the campus man famine (or more technically, the biased “sex ra- tio”) “by offering sex without requiring high levels of com- mitment,” explain evolution- ary social psychologists Justin Moss and Jon Maner.
OCTOBER 13, 2021 MIDWEEK 37
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