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"DIAMONDS may be a girl's best friend, but scientists are telling their boyfriends to avoid giving expensive gifts and take them to swim with dolphins or out for a nice meal instead.
Mathematicians and evolutionary biologists at University College London said men should adopt a strategy of giving gifts which are "costly but worthless" so they can not be resold.
Such tokens are a sign to the woman that the man will be committed to the relationship, but do not carry the risk associated with lavish gifts - such as a car or a diamond necklace - of attracting a "gold-digger" who will later run off with someone else.
The research, which was published yesterday in a Royal Society paper, coincided with a survey showing women often want to go through life- changing experiences before having a baby. Swimming with dolphins, making a parachute jump and bungee jumping all appear on the wish-list.
In early hunter-gatherer societies, it is thought men gave shiny beads as gifts when courting a woman, but the development of a market economy now means giving diamonds and other jewellery risks attracting the wrong sort of woman.
Professor Robert Seymour, of University College London's mathematics department, and Dr Peter Sozou, of the university's Centre for Mathematics and Physics in Life Sciences and Experimental Biology, studied gift-giving during courtship and developed a mathematical formula showing the best strategy for both sides.
"The essential point we are trying to study is how you can make a courtship contract that has no real enforceability but still works," Prof Seymour said.
"It's breach of promise that is the essential issue. The female can agree to mate, but there's no reason why the male should stick to his promise to bring up the children.
"How can the female gain assurance that the male will stick around? One thing she can do is make him pay the cost of a courtship gift. She's trying to get him to tell her that his intentions are honest.
"But what he has to avoid is paying the cost of a gift and then having the female refuse to mate with him. What that female is doing is what we call 'gold-digging'.
"The male has to deter the woman from gold-digging. That's the point about giving gifts that are essentially worthless to the female, so she cannot pocket the goods and rush off."
Prof Seymour said this method of gift-giving had evolved since hunter-gatherer times, but added there was still evidence that modern men acted in a similar way to their ancestors.
Surveys have found British men spend about twice as much as women on gifts for their partner.
"Men give women flowers, a lavishly wrapped box of chocolates and take them to dinner - those are all examples of costly but worthless gifts," Prof Seymour said. "Women are presumably geared up to be flattered by this. The most efficient gift you could give is money. But unless you are buying sex from a prostitute, you don't do that. You are likely to get a slap in the face."
Denise Knowles, a therapist with relationship counselling service Relate, said:
"I think often women - apart from those who are gold-diggers - measure the suitability of their man by the value of the gift they receive.
"Most women are looking for someone who's willing to provide for them and their family. If they've got a man who will lavish gifts on them and take care of them, then he seems to be a reasonably good bet."
However, writer AL Kennedy, said gifts could sometime be used as a substitute for real emotions. "I think effusive giving is quite ambivalent - 'I can't be bothered having a feeling so here's a bag of stuff,'" she said.
Dorothy McMillan, a Glasgow University academic and editor of the Canongate Anthology of Modern Scottish Women Poets, made her suggestion for the ideal present. "There is something that is not financially costly, but is costly in other ways and is completely useless - a that's a poem," she said." (Courtesy of News.Scotsman.com)
Written by: Ian Johnston |
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