Attack of the listless lads

What about that kind of noncommittal, ambivalent relationship? Is it the type of youthful union you find often in New York?

Probably more in New York than elsewhere. All sorts of people I know in New York have noted that when they go home, their friends from high school tend to be married. I think people in New York postpone mating longer than anywhere else.

Why?

For one thing, they can. If you lived in Cleveland you might feel really immature, as your 20s waned and your 30s began, to still be a single person going out on dates. But in New York it feels perfectly normal and legitimate to be doing those things.

There is also an idea that is not really expressed in the book, but is in an upcoming issue of n+1. The idea is that dating should lead toward mating, and spread out before us is this array of choices that should lead toward a choice you can feel secure in. But I think the opposite happens. You become familiar with disposable relationships. So though they seem to be conducting you toward permanence and mating, in fact they're just inculcating a habit of serial monogamy.

Can you break down the behaviors that you've just described along gender lines?

Sure. Though to tell you the truth, I don't have too much experience with this. My life as a serial monogamist has involved a few long-term relationships so I haven't accumulated the data that some young male daters have.

But you have friends.

I have friends.

As far as I can tell, it will take some ingenuity for a man to retain his freedom past a certain age. And even if the man is not disposed toward doing that, then this becomes a structural feature of the relationship. Almost as if because a woman is wearing one jersey and a man is wearing the jersey of the different team, they are expected to relate to each other in these ways.

I have a sense that particularly in New York -- though I'm sure it exists this way in Boston and in San Francisco -- there is a super-abundance of attractive, intelligent young women whom a man is very unlikely to be worthy of, who nevertheless set a higher value on him than he sets on them. This makes any sort of decision very difficult. Because to constantly be exposed to people whom you are unworthy of to begin with, yet who want you more than you want them, is confusing.

That assumption, that generally young men are unworthy of their female counterparts, is certainly in your book. I would get hanged for saying it, but there's an uncomfortable truth there.

Yes. As far as I can tell.

So you're a guy. Tell me what makes these men unworthy?

Men are unworthy in the sense of being more unfinished as people [and] in the sense of being, as romantic partners, bumbling and dishonest in a way that women are maybe not as often. The ideal of a couple that we subscribe to is one that I think is likelier to satisfy women on the whole more than it is men ... So rather than men claiming that for a deal to be made they are going to insist upon certain rights or options that would sound sleazy -- mainly some mild sort of institutionalized promiscuity -- rather than insisting on such terms as a fundamental aspect of whatever contract is being worked out, the man basically [winds up] feel[ing] as if his desires aren't quite the right ones.

So if women have a slightly harder time than they would like finding men that would like to sign up for mating it's in part because men are presumed -- correctly most of the time -- to have these desires that they're not willing to actually make a stand on, but which they'll have to deal with at some point.

Do you think that these dynamics are particular to our generation?

I think they've been intensified by certain conditions of our generation. The fact that both women and men can, and are expected, to support themselves changes the situation. But so does the fact that while well-educated people can support themselves, they can't support themselves in very high style, particularly when it comes to their residence. You're going to have to have a roommate. And it's going to be a roommate of your sex, which you're not going to enjoy terribly, or it's going to be a roommate of the opposite sex, somebody who you're sexually scouting out as a spouse. Most people would rather have a roommate, if they're heterosexual, of the opposite sex. So I think economic independence has tended to prolong the period of decision making, but the near impossibility of living in any kind of style as a single person has tended to make that decision seem all the more pressing.

Next page: "Women as a whole should go on sexual strike"