Optionality and the Relationship crisis
How optionality is not ideal in relationships, and disastrous in love.
What is happening?
The birth rate decline is a known global phenomenon. We became a richer society, and started to see the median number of kids per family drop below 2.1, which is the replacement rate. As a consequence we will be shrinking quite fast if we stay on this track.
I do think these effects self-correct eventually, and we will see an inversion of the trend at some point; evolution is too strong of an incentive over the long term, and those who do not reproduce self-select those who do, so a trend inversion is inevitable.
It is interesting to see that a big part of this trend is due to individuals who identify as liberals or non-conservative. We can then expect that when conservatives (and the minority of liberals who reproduce) outpace liberals who do not reproduce, the memetic effect of having a family will gain traction again in society. I think a vibe inversion has already happened, however, it will take years to propagate, and most likely have more effect on the younger and more neuroplastic generations (Gen alpha etc).
It is also important to say that the concept of “rich” always changes. We are richer as a society than our past ancestors, and it would make no sense to our grandparents that we have less kids in a way, they would consider us “rich”. But “rich” has always been a relative concept. When you have options, when you are not trying to survive anymore but to thrive instead, having a kid becomes something you decide versus something that happens, and the bar to bring a new human to life rises. Suddenly you want to focus on quality, not quantity, and the bar for quality keeps increasing with society’s standards, which have lately accelerated to very high levels if you look at averages instead of medians. In addition, you are bombarded with outlier content on only the top 1% lives (because after all, who wants average content?). You can think this does not affect you, but unconsciously it does, and once the majority of the world is affected by it, you, even as a minority, register in your mind a top benchmark as the norm.
It is also true that a path to home buying is out of reach, and that seems to be a catalyst for a sense of stability that gives the confidence to start a family. Economic constraints should not be underestimated. Housing affordability, childcare costs, job insecurity, and the structure of modern careers create real barriers to family formation. A young couple today often faces a different risk calculation than previous generations: not only “can we afford children?” but also “can we maintain the lifestyle and stability we associate with being good parents?”
But if you think about it, as a richer society, some of us could always decide to somehow arbitrage our way out, and live in a low cost part of the world or low cost State or city, with a good salary. It is now much easier to do it than before (for example move to Austin from NYC or to Bali, Europe with remote jobs).
So fertility decline is clearly associated with many factors such as increased education, urbanization, delayed marriage, the housing crisis, lower child mortality, economic development, and access to contraception. The role of technology, social media, and changing relationship dynamics is more complex: they may amplify existing incentives and perceptions, but they are not necessarily the single root cause.
Nonetheless, I will speculate that there is a common theme to what seems to be quite multivariate. We have not thought about it because it’s not an event or some easily measurable metric (such as house prices, or social media usage), rather a more abstract concept. I think that behind what we are seeing, connecting most of these dots, lies a simple concept: optionality.
Options, options, options
Before talking about birth rate decline, one should focus on couple formation. I do think couple formation is where right now the biggest bottleneck is, much more than at the birth rate level.
At the heart of the many explanations given for a birth rate decline, I see that the core of it is an increase in actual and perceived optionality that humans inherited from these times. We can live wherever we want, travel, have sex just for pleasure, pick any career that we like, and so on. We both can, and we think we can, because signals from everywhere in the “network” tell us so. But do we know how to deal with all these options? With the freedom to be our own bosses?
Optionality is in general great, don’t get me wrong. As a libertarian, freedom is my north star, and more optionality means a better outcome for an individual and a society in general. You want to gain from having more options, reducing risk and getting better prices, better services, better careers. Taleb’s famous barbell strategy of protecting your downside while hunting for outsized upside is only possible because of optionality, which helps you live more antifragile lives overall. The problem, though, arises when optionality emerges in the domain of love.
When your time is freed up so much and the world opens to you, you start to explore it more. But it’s hard to explore a vast piece of land. Where do you start? Where do you go?
Once others started new paths that were previously locked up by more rigid societal norms and frameworks, a plethora of options was made available to you. Opportunities seem evident and abundant, so you look at people who explored them before you, and follow them.
You ingest unconscious data on what seems valuable, but it is polluted with what society thinks is valuable, and you copy that desire. It seems much easier to copy a desire and try it out when there are so many to choose from, instead of navigating this landscape alone.
Optionality opened new paths. The search became so vast that the need for selection took over, and a silently packaged selection made by AI, algorithms and other people replaced the pain and patience of searching on your own what is your unique path.
Love is not an option
We now want to analyze 3 big effects on relationships, impacting couple formation/duration with this lens of optionality:
The birth control pill: one of the biggest changes in optionality, allowed females (and couples) to control birth and when it happens to better plan their lives.
Cheaper and easier to move/fly elsewhere: This caused disruption in circles of friends (usually a way to meet your partner), as well as formation of a relationship which needs consistent time together with stable frequency. It gave arbitrage to search for better options, which concentrated the mating markets (and career markets too).
Dating apps, social media and internet: This is the machine designed to make people feel that they are missing out and that they have more options than they actually have. These platforms convince people to want things they might not even care about, and can seduce them into thinking they are in a non-optimal position.
All these effects remove friction/risk and increase optionality. It is like waiving a big flat tariff of 90% on all goods and making true free trade at 0% tariff. The mating market becomes more dynamic, and starts to question sticking to one forever supplier. Whenever optionality shows you other, difficult to resist, cost/benefit ratios, the pressure of being in a suboptimal position becomes stronger, especially if you see others moving out of their positions.
Of course love should not be purely thought as a market nor transactional, but it is delusional to think that those forces are not at play in the mating dynamics (especially at the beginning of couple formation), nor affecting us unconsciously, especially some pressure on female’s hypergamous nature, given the asymmetry in choice in mating. So even if in love you don’t want to swap the Lindy for the shiny, that is exactly where we are finding ourselves today, with a greater audience than ever treating mating as a pure market.
We only realize now how Pareto distributed the mating market is because we removed a lot of friction. But in the mating market, you cannot ask a few males to produce all the babies with all the women on Earth. Even after removing all friction, the monogamous constraint is a natural barrier between the natural hypergamous desires and reality, which you don’t find in the supply chain analogy, where countries with better economics for production just win.
If you believe monogamy is a societal construct, then a free mating market will produce more babies once we remove the norm of monogamy. The difference is just that now a few males will produce more babies with more women.
But if you are less delusional and don’t believe those lies, and understand that monogamy is baked in our brains, you understand that this hypergamous pressure on females, released in a world with a ‘free mating market’ with basically 0 friction, will eventually clash and push against monogamy somehow.
Indeed, we might see an increase in promiscuity in the sense of more serial monogamous experiences per person; this maintains the monogamous constraint, but tries to express somewhere else the strong desire coming from this release of optionality in the mating market.
As this optionality increases, there is a boom of polyamorous tendencies and more frequent, less durable monogamous experiences. For example, many more sequential 1-year long couples and fewer 5-year long ones. Men have very low incentives to stop an increase in promiscuity, so the mechanism is hard to self correct, if not slowly and by seeing examples of less promiscuous behaviors being rewarded again.
What can we do?
All this new optionality started being explored in the last century and after the internet and social media boom, this reinforced others to do so mimetically. Reality is full of feedback loops, a lot more gets self-reinforced or self-cancelled than we imagine. Although we started to see inversions of some of these optionality trends, one would need a critical mass before memetic effects quickly start to spread behaviors in the opposite direction.
Females are more sensitive to optionality; they FOMO more easily on the fun life they could have had. They constantly scan the market for better options, and they are now bombarded by examples of a better life on a platform that is primarily female: Instagram. Many also gain status by showing their fun life full of travel and activities to other females. It is then close to impossible for a female to ignore what is already the natural instinct of asking “Did I make the right choice?” when every friend and example around reminds her of running a comparison, and compute the opportunity cost.
Giving the God-like gift of optionality to a woman places her at an increased risk of choice paralysis, promiscuity, constantly hedging decisions and treating a problem of love as a problem of strategy.
Males instead, are constantly distracted with bodies and other girls, with free porn and a cheap replacement of true love. This loops males into accepting the less real experiences, going out less, trying less to ask a girl out, withdrawing from the race and picking other ‘cheap’ options, and as a consequence delaying growing up, remaining immature for longer, and not having confronted taking responsibility or commitments. Necessity is the mother of all inventions after all; a male with cheap options won’t be in a position to be forced to deal with the courage to get what they want if a ‘good enough’ version (which is not) can be supplied more easily.
The conundrum of the modern female is real. She tries to maximize both optionality and family. If she gives in to the crave for optionality in having many partners, then later decides to settle for family, she still carries the pressure of high economic optionality — the independent life and lifestyle she can now provide on her own, but which often damages family formation. At the same time, if she desires to maintain that high level of optionality in the Instagram sense, there are very few men today able to offer the economic stability and life she considers normal without her sacrificing some of that optionality.
We are over-indexing on options, and giving up much more easily on people, their growth potential and fair benchmarks free of contamination by social media content. Love is that acknowledgment that we cannot maintain high expectations with any human really, because humans are imperfect creatures, or at minimum, if we have a high bar, we should arrive there slowly and together. It is not to say that standards need to be dropped to 0, but that the expectations right now are severely inflated and cause a delusion that cost everyone time and joy and is blocking couple formation, we are just avoiding the slow and dirty job of making it work. Love does not show at a nice restaurant or on a vacation, it shows with the willingness to continue a life together after the brutal realization that expectations cannot be met on both sides, and still deciding to love the other in his/her imperfection. This problem can be stopped at any time: to truly experience love, options must be shut down, one should burn the boats and go all-in with conviction and courage without thinking at all about optionality nor comparisons.
In other words, if love is not optional for you, your only option is to drop your options.
Lorenzo