Another day...
Morning time got wasted on the "trust premium" of relationships. Everyone knows relationships work on trust. However in understanding why relationships are so few and far between in India as compared to the West I made up this thing. My theory goes like this: In the West, the trust premium (or the faith premium) requisite for a relationship is much less than in India. So once two consenting adults measure each other up (gauge their trustpremiums, as well as other things) they take the plunge. What probably helps is the social acceptability of suchrelationships as well as the homogeinity of the population.
The first stumbling block here is the constraints to social acceptability. That demands a higher trust premium. If the society doesn't approve, the adults involved will demand a higher trust premium - since in case the relationshipflounders at a later date, it will be difficult for them to go back to their respective social networks. And since cross-cultural relationships (inter-racial, inter-caste, inter-religion etc) invite a relatively higher social disapproval, the corresponding trust premium required is even higher.
That explains why relationships are a rare thing in India (on an average I'd argue most Indian males and females have had only two/three relationships before marraige) and why it is even rarer to find cross-culturalrelationships.
Summming up, the incidence of relationships is linked with the trust premiums required, and the trust premium isinfluenced by the social acceptability of relationships.
However, this theory falls flat in explaining the relationships of the adolescents. In such cases, the socialacceptability is very low, leading to requirement of higher trust premiums and hence fewer relationships. But (again a hypothesis based on anecdotal evidence) I'd argue the prevalence of relationships in adolescents arehigher than in adults.
This hypothesis (the last one involving the adults) can be easily attacked upon. First thing is that at a specific point of time, adolescents, belonging to a different generation, will have a different social network as well as different worldviews as compared to an adult of that specific period. The adult may have peers and parents of a more traditional outlook. Hence we have higher social disapproval leading to higher trust premiums.
Interestingly, seen from a different angle, when the adolescent grows up to an adult, social disapprovals fall, as a consequence of changing values as well as for the fact that parents will be more comfortable with their sonsand daughters in relationships once they cross an age threshold. So it would follow that adults should be more willing to be in a relationship (and also more willing to be in a cross-cultural one) than adolescents. That is something I find hard to believe and anecdotal evidence is also contrary.
So what could be the key to the puzzle? One thing could be the peer angle. Social networks are not just parents,family friends, relatives and neighbors. Among peers, one feels cool to be in a relationship and also be radical- basically in a cross-cultural relationship. This suggests that trust premium is based on a complex measure of social approval, where ambiguous influences emanate from different sources.
Further, adults probably have much more to lose from social approval than an adolescent. An adolescent can rest on the assumption that any of his/her supposed misdemeanour may be interpreted as an "immature" act and hencewont be disowned or cut off from the inheritance or the network. But once you grow up, one has to own up to theirdecisions and can't claim to be "immature". Hence decisions are interpreted seriously and there's clear and presentdanger of being cut off. And not just relationships, this factor can explain why people are more radical when they're younger, be it in politics, substance use and so on.
In essence, social approvals have different bearings on age and so people, when considering relationships, get influenced by the factor of social approval differently based on their age.
