The Christopher Jencks Study

     Love-shyness and, indeed, the very fact of being without the companionship of a
woman has been found to be related to a large host of negative outcomes.  For
example, Harvard University sociologist Christopher Jencks followed up a large
sample of Indiana high school students for ten years--until they were 28 years of age.  
Among many other things, he compared men and women who had not dated at all
while they were in high school with those who had dated.  And his findings revealed
that the non-daters were far less successful than the daters (1) financially, (2) career-
wise, and (3) adjustment-wise, ten years after their high school graduation.  Indeed, the
more socially active a person had been during his/her high school years, the more
successful and happy he/she was likely to be ten years later.  Moreover, those young
people who had been involved in steady dating relationships while in high school
tended to be best off ten years later in terms of economic and career success.
     Not surprisingly, these findings were all much stronger for the men than they were
for the women.  The socially active women were also better off ten years later than
were the women who had been socially inactive while in high school.  However, the
differences between the socially active and inactive individuals were far greater for the
males than for the females.  In other words, the 28-year old men who had not dated at
all in high school were found by Jencks and his associates to be the least successful, 
least happy, least well adjusted individuals.
     Informal boy-girl interaction tends to be a highly effective facilitator for the
development of interpersonal skills and social self-confidence--attributes which are
extremely valuable from the standpoint of career success in today's business world.
The frequent daters, for example, had all been actively involved in same-sexed peer
networks.  Simply put, high school dating both (1) reflects reasonably effective 
interpersonal skills, and (2) helps to build increasingly higher levels of interpersonal
competence and self-confidence.  And interpersonal competence is the single, most
important correlate of occupational and career success today.  In fact, we are
beginning to learn that interpersonal skills together with friendship networks represent
the single, most effective ticket towards the initial winning and keeping of the best job
opportunities.