Sex in the Age of Negotiation

Call it the negotiator's tango.

It's the mating dance of choice these days, the perfect step for a pragmatic and businesslike era, and it goes something like this: Boy approaches girl (or vice versa) and the ritual begins. As the music heats up, the pair lock eyes, exchange come-hither glancess and proceed to state their terms as they glide across the floor. Commitment? she purrs,warm but inaccessible until she has her answer.So soon? he replies, sidling nearer. For now, let's call it serious intent. His partner pouts, considers, moves on to other issues. What about privacy? What about fidelity? Andwhat about separate vacations? And when will you be ready to leave this city and really lay down roots somewhere?

And so it tends to go when men and women try to get together in this age of negotiation. They talk and then they do it or they talk and then they don't—but either way, they talk. They haggle over ground rules before the game begins. They spell out needs and limits, rules and taboos. They make notes, weigh the upside and the downside. These days, people seem not so much to fall in love or into bed as to arrive there, in the sense that you arrive at a solution after a long series of calculations or consultations.

Not that the current style of intergender bargaining has been evolving in a vacuum. The tango is, in fact, just one of many dances that people are doing during this negotiator's heyday. Have you looked at the paperback best-seller list lately? The hottest attractions in that traveling medicine show are tomes elucidating the fine art of getting to yes. Negotiation is the last word in helping us poor, suffering mortals get control of our lives; it transcends and supersedes all previous last words on the subject, from the golden rule right up to Winning Through Intimidation. Armed with good negotiating skills, none of us need ever again be cringing schlemiels capitulating to threats or high-pressure tactics. The shining ideal of "win-win" bargaining—that miraculous system whereby parties with diametrically opposed interests both get what they want and come out loving each other besides—is within the grasp of anyone with $3.95 to spend and a little spare reading time in the john.

Which is all well and good if the negotiations in question pertain to convincing your tightfisted boss that you are due for a raise or persuading members of a terrorist organization that they really should let the women and children leave the airport. But are those same techniques—which are, let's face it, a species of manipulation—really applicable to the way people run their love lives? Tessa Albert Warschaw, author of Winning by Negotiation, does not blush to tell us that they are. "If you approached negotiations for sex, love and romance as you approach a business negotiation," she writes, "you would soon find yourself making better `deals.' "

Deals? Pardon my sordid interpretation, but that word has always suggested to me the exchange of a certain amount of cash for certain services rendered. I'd thought that courtship and seduction, not to mention love, called for a somewhat tenderer or at least more tactful vocabulary. But you can't fight the paperback best-seller list. Irrespective of how much wisdom or passion or even humanity resides in the negotiator's approach to matters of the heart and the glands, the fact remains that it is a strategy more and more in favor. Someday soon, you may need an agent to negotiate your sex life.

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"I've been feeling like I'm at a goddamn job interview" is the way a buddy of mine describes a couple of dates he's been on lately. "Why did I bother with the dinners, the show tickets, all the schlepping and expense? I could just as easily have stopped by their offices and dropped off résumés. Those women didn't want to gaze into my eyes, make witty chatter and see if bells would ring. No, they wanted to get right down to my qualifications. Was I truly available? Could I deal with a woman who had a demanding career? I hardly knew those women. I hadn't been to bed with them; I'd barely kissed them. So how the hell should I know if I could deal with them at all?"

Well, I don't know how he should know, but something tells me that both of us had better find out, because with the recently changed rhythms of the mating dance, questions like that are getting asked up front with greater and greater frequency.

"Your real world is a giant negotiating table," says Herb Cohen, author of You Can Negotiate Anything, "and like it or not, you're a participant." It would behoove us all, then, to be adept participants, because, says Cohen, "how you handle these encounters can determine not only whether you prosper but whether you can enjoy a full, pleasurable, satisfying life."

Has it always been that way? Back in the days when courtship moved slower, getting to know each other and getting to bed were both somewhat subtler processes—less a matter of debate than of accruing intuition and eroding resistance. Then, in the Sixties, people started taking short cuts to the boudoir; if the sex was good, they'd get to know each other eventually; if the sex was bad, what did it matter, anyway? These days, with life (and, especially, women's lives) busier than ever, people are again looking for short cuts—but this time, what they're looking for short cuts to is reassurance, clarity. The implicit question dangling over every conversation is, What's the deal here? We're too harried to let the mysteries unfold in their own sweet time; we've grown too cautious to proceed with the mysteries still intact. So we resort to that most efficient but least romantic form of conversation, the negotiator's Q. and A.

I recently spoke with a woman friend about where this drive to be so businesslike was really coming from. I suggested that it could, in fact, be seen as a sort of neoprudishness, a sly new socially sanctioned way for women to say no. This pissed her off just enough that I knew it was at least partly right. But only partly.

"Look," she told me, "I'm 29 years old and I've had my share of recreational sex. I have no regrets about that, but I don't have a hell of a lot to show for it, either. What I do have to feel good about are the things I've worked out for myself. I have a career that takes 50 or 60 hours of my week. I have a gym I go to and friends I hang out with. I have a nice routine, and if I'm gonna disrupt it to take a lover, I want some assurance that it's going to count for something.

"I'll let you in on a little secret: It is different for women. I'm not saying my hormones go haywire every time I take someone to my bed, but it does rile me; my feelings do get yanked around in certain ways. And I'm not willing to put myself through that unless there's the chance of something happening that's appropriate to my 29-year-old self—and if you think I'm talking about marriage or, at least, living together, you're right. So I have no qualms about asking a guy where he stands. If it's someone I'm really interested in, I'll even argue with him about where he should stand. And if I don't get the answers I need to hear, I'll walk away. Not without regret, mind you. It's just that I'm at the point where I feel I'd be a jerk if I didn't do what I could to minimize the risk of being disappointed."

But that raises a ticklish, unbeggable question: How far can that risk be minimized? Seduction and romance have always been a dicey business. Define the game as you will, there's no such thing as an airtight set of rules. Roger Fisher and William Ury, authors of Getting to Yes, define their game as "principled negotiation." It is, they claim, an approach that allows you "to decide issues on their merits rather than through a haggling process" and "to obtain what you are entitled to and still he decent." A worthy ideal, to be sure, and one at dramatic variance with human behavior through the ages. The thing is, negotiations between men and women did not begin when people started calling them that; the "haggling process" actually predates the trendy vocabulary by around 40,000 years.

Picture, for example, a young couple scrabbling around in the back seat of a 1953 De Soto. What is going on may appear to be a wrestling match but is really a species of negotiation: getting to yes in the Eisenhower years. The young lady has her knees pressed staunchly together and she is telling her partner, with tearful sincerity, that the only way she could possibly open them would be if he really loved her and would take her for his wife. That is a negotiating technique known as blackmail, and men became very adept at parrying it with a negotiating technique known as lying. He'd offer some mealymouthed promise, she'd relent and—boom!—there went another reputation and another set of velvet-plush upholstery.

Thus it was hack in the days when being a successful seducer/negotiator consisted (concluded on page 100)Age of Negotiation(continued from page 86) largely of knowing what the right answers were and having the sang-froid to pronounce them with a straight face. I can't help wondering whether our supposedly new style of negotiation isn't carrying us back toward that dubious ideal. "Ask no questions, hear no lies" goes the bromide, and it's just possible that the current emphasis on asking every question is pulling us back toward a naive belief in promises made under duress, ushering in a second golden age of the irresistibly reassuring fib.

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Sad to say, the negotiator's tango does not wind to a passionate resolution as soon as a man and a woman hit the sack. Not by a long shot. In fact, that's when the dance really starts cooking. One takes a woman to bed, novelist Ford Madox Ford observed, for the privilege of finishing a conversation with her. And in the age of negotiation, what consummation signals is the privilege of moving ahead to even subtler, more multifaceted forms of bargaining.

Those later stages of negotiation have some pretty compelling reasons behind them—reasons like the full-scale emergence of women in the market place, like the unignorable ticking of the biological clock, like the baffling array of options available to couples who can see each other exclusively or not, live together monogamously or otherwise, or marry, eternally or in the meantime. And on top of those large social issues are the many smaller personal problems, the ones that needle the hell out of you from day to day. If she has her place and you have yours, what kind of shuttle diplomacy do you work out so that both partners can hang on to a sense of home and access to fresh socks? If working schedules conflict, how do you finagle time for socializing and lovemaking without one or both partners' breaking down from sleep deprivation?

The answer, broadly, is that you negotiate. If you are a mature and compassionate individual, you negotiate calmly, judiciously, with a generous eye toward the other person's prerogatives; if you're like the rest of us, you negotiate in fits and sulks, driven by spasms of frustration and rage, pondering the mystery of why you're feeling so lousy about something that ought to feel so good. At odd moments, you break through to flashes of what passes for progress.

"Sometimes I picture us as a pair of crazed Persians at a bazaar," says a guy I know of his dealings with his live-in lover. "We haggle over everything; it's second nature by now. I'll give you an example. She gets up for work an hour earlier than I do, and we used to have a really dreary time deciding how late we should stay up making love. I'd he looking at her ass; she'd be looking at the clock. What we ended up deciding was that it really wasn't any good for either of us to go without, but if the festivities went beyond a certain hour, then I'd take care of shopping and dinner the next day, so she could just kick back after work. Was it a perfect solution? No. There are still times when she lets me know she's just too zonked or when I feel, frankly, that the trade-off isn't worth the bother just then. But there's something I've learned about these negotiated settlements: It doesn't matter so much what you're getting so long as you feel you're getting something. You can put up with a lot as long as you preserve your sense of fair play."

Now, far be it from me to come out in favor of unfair play, but I can't help freling that this emphasis on quid pro quo is a rather gray priority. Negotiated whoopee time? Negotiated privacy? Negotiated boundaries on intimacy and desire? Whatever happened to lust and impulse, to the ecstatic third-reel yielding of a man and a woman to something bigger than both of them? Whatever happened, in a word, to spontaneity?

I asked my aforementioned friend that question. In response, he said one of the most stinging, abashing things that one human being can say to another: He told me that my sentiments were out of fashion. The obsession with spontaneity, he informed me, was a historical aberration of the Sixties and the Seventies; all but the most unreconstructed children of those decades had outgrown it.

Perhaps he's right. But I remember a time not so long ago when what was meant by negotiations between men and women were the discussions about who claimed the dining-room set and who retained the Breuer chairs in an impending divorce. Back then, disasters were negotiated, and anything short of disaster was muddled through, possibly even enjoyed. Maybe too little was talked about then; maybe too many grievances were left to fester. But at least a greater trust was placed in intuition; a greater delicacy obtained that prevented lovers from confronting each other like attorneys in a court of law.

I have a confession to make, however. At least part of my skepticism about this whole negotiating business probably hasto do with the fact that I'm so bad at it. That was made painfully clear to me recently on the occasion of a date I had with a certain young woman, a 30-year-old lawyer who is nobody's fool.

We were out for dinner, and it seemed to me that things were going swimmingly. Conversation was animated; we laughed a lot. It was so damn pleasant sipping wine and sitting there across the table from her face that I didn't realize I was being quizzed. I thought we were just talking. At some point, the conversation came around to how we felt about living in Manhattan. My companion said she didn't really like it much and looked forward to the day when she could buy a little house in Connecticut and commute; I didn't hold that against her in the least, but I did tell her that I would personally prefer a slow, painful death. Later, in some well-masked context, she found a way to mention children and, hoping to charm her with my wry insouciance, I admitted that I couldn't stand them. Later still, in a way that deftly avoided being crass, she inquired as to the advancement opportunities in my field; I responded simply with a self-derisive snort.

But here's the thing: I still thought everything was going great. We were looking into each other's eyes and grinning; I was blowing it, yes, but who knew? As the after-dinner snifters were being drained, it seemed the most natural thing in the world to ask her to go home with me. But there I made my biggest blunder of all by not asking her for more than that, not tying it in to a package deal. I could've mentioned that maybe I'd reconsider commuting from Connecticut; I could have hinted that my feelings about babies might change if I were with a woman I truly loved; I could've suggested that, having taken on the responsibilities of a family man and homeowner, I might find my way into a more reliable line of work. I had all sorts of bargaining chips, and I didn't play a single one. I pissed away my chance to offer up a deal that might be acceptable to her.

She turned me down, of course. Gallant if not suave, I took her home in a taxi. At her door, she kissed me on the cheek. The kiss said not now, not ever: negotiations suspended indefinitely.

I walked home, playing the evening back in my mind, asking myself the age-old question: Was it something I said? No, it was everything I said. Not since the Allies ceded the Sudetenland had a negotiation been more thoroughly bungled. But, OK, live and learn. I'd improve. I'd already bought the books. I'd even looked them over in the john. Now all I had to do was bone up on my cold-bloodedness in order to put their wisdom, principled or otherwise, into practice.

Or maybe I'd save myself the trouble and, next time, just take my agent along.

" 'I t doesn't matter so much what you're getting so long as you feel you're getting something.' "