The marriage supermarket (2)

Virtue, where it exists, is always a quality of human lives as opposed to individual actions. That puts it at odds with current values. Or, at least, it makes it impolite to acknowledge the virtue issue too directly. Because if virtue is quality of a life, then some lives are better than others and since different people live different lives then some people are better than others.

We all know this, we just don't like to talk about it. It's a dirty secret. So let's take our hats off to Jayne Dallas of the University of North Carolina. Because she is the one person interviewed by the New York Times in their article about gender imbalance on college campuses who comes right out and says it:

Jayne Dallas, a senior studying advertising who was seated across the table, grumbled that the population of male undergraduates was even smaller when you looked at it as a dating pool. “Out of that 40 percent, there are maybe 20 percent that we would consider, and out of those 20, 10 have girlfriends, so all the girls are fighting over that other 10 percent,” she said.

Yes, exactly.

And thus the cruel truth about single people in any group. The men and women who have the virtues necessary to make a relationship and then a marriage work in any group tend to pair off pretty reliably. And that leaves the others in trouble.

The pragmatic lesson here is that you really want to be one of those virtuous people if you want to flourish in life. It's amazing, though, how many people refuse to accept this.

BTW: The math applies going the other way too.:

But it’s not as if the imbalance leads to ceaseless bed-hopping, said Austin Ivey, who graduated from North Carolina last year but was hanging out in a bar near campus last week. “Guys tend to overshoot themselves and find a really beautiful girlfriend they couldn’t date otherwise, but can, thanks to the ratio,” he said.

Mr. Ivey himself said that his own college relationship lasted three years. “She didn’t think she would meet another guy, I didn’t think I would meet another girl as attractive as her,” he said.

I did that once (and did it back when we boys weren't supposed be at such an advantage because there were more men than women at my college). Her name was Heather and she paid her way through university modeling. Unbelievably attractive but disappointing in other ways so I let her go when she started to show signs of restlessness. You can find the same story in the 197os, 1960s and 1950s. It probably happened before that too, only people didn't write about it so much. Which raises an obvious question: Is it really the ratio of girls to boys that is the problem here or are there other things these women are doing wrong?