What Do Women Want

about by SSRIs, there is, for most, an inevitable flight of eros. Desire can become dim, imperceptible. And this can be worsened by the fact that excesses of serotonin disrupt the physical mechanics of orgasm, impeding contractions, so that climax feels farther and farther off, until it is unattainable. For women on SSRIs, each tablet of Lybridos, with its temporary blocking of serotonin, would grant eros a reprieve.
    But above all, if Tuiten’s thinking was right, if the data he already held, from small sets of women in provisional studies, were borne out in his larger trials, then he had conjured a pair of drugs that were an antidote to monogamy. His medicine promised to rescind years.
    Lust, in its most powerful moments, can propel us outside ourselves, outside the world, outside time. We are offered this oblivion. How wonderful the trance is—or was, if such moments have been sacrificed, lost in the quest for another kind of escape: for safety, for constancy, for a fortification against growing old alone, against enduring the terrors of time by ourselves. Could Tuiten’s pills perform a type of magic, allowing the trance to coexist with the comfort? Permitting both kinds of escape? Could Tuiten’s chemicals execute that trick?
    Wendy prayed that her first round of EB tablets had been placebos. But if, for her, Tuiten’s drugs didn’t succeed, she said, “There’s got to be something else. They’ve got all these meds for all these other psychiatric issues. Something’s got to pop up that can help with this. Right? Right? Right?”
    All she was asking was that the round of pills she was now bringing home would stop and reverse what she called “the dwindling.” All she was asking was that the medicine would drive her to take her husband’s hand at the base of the stairs and draw them together to the top. All she wanted was this: to leave time inconsequential, to turn time into nothing at all.

Chapter Ten
    A Beginning
    L ifting her arm and ringing a little bell, the monitor calls out, “Men rotate! Men rotate!” In the cocktail lounge that’s been rented for the evening, each man rises from a small square table, turns from the woman he’s been talking with, and steps toward his next assignment. The women wait. They sit along a low, L-shaped banquette. In a pink blouse with a ruffled neckline, in a tight, black cardigan, in a dress with sleeves of gauze, they stay where they are, folded into the maroon upholstery, gazing upward to find out who will appear before them. For a few seconds, the men stride through the soft glow.
    This is speed dating. The dates last four minutes, marked by the high-pitched bell. At the session’s end, all the women and men submit their decisions privately to the speed-dating company—a yes or no on each of the ten people they met, an expression of interest or an expression of none. Any pair who said yes to each other is put in contact.
    The setting isn’t always a lounge. The bell is sometimes a playful gong, sometimes just a command. Four minutes is sometimes eight, sometimes three. But one aspect rarely varies: the men move, step near, before taking the seat opposite; the women remain still. The companies explain the convention by observing that women have handbags and that switching spots for them would take more time. Or they note expectations: that men should make the symbolic gesture of chivalry, getting up from their chairs and taking the initiative, while the women need only perch comfortably. This is just the way it is.
    And since speed dating caught on in America and Europe after its invention in the late nineties by a Los Angeles rabbi desperate to make Jewish matches, researchers have used the form to examine patterns of desire. They’ve studied the statistics of a company named Hurrydate, tallying the choices of ten thousand clients. They’ve created evenings of their own, following all the speed-dating traditions and compiling their own numbers. And again and again, a contrast has emerged: when it comes to wanting a second date, a real date, women are far more selective than men, far less likely to say yes.
    For evolutionary psychologists, this has added confirmation to certainties already established. Men are programmed to pursue and inseminate, pursue and inseminate, women to choose the just-right mate. Genetically, men are designed to lust wildly, women to desire in distinct moderation.
    But two psychologists, Eli Finkel at Northwestern University