Letters to the Editor

• This should be a no-brainer.

  [Read the article: Is "marrying up" going down?]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  I can't see how it would be harder for highly educated women to find mates, in a world where:

  - men are well aware that being the sole breadwinner of their family is cripplingly stressful unless they are very lucky, in today's era of random downsizing

  - women interact with men in the workplace all the time

  - educated women aren't looking for a man as a meal ticket, but as a partner, and there are a lot more available men to be partners to highly educated women than there are to be meal tickets

  I mean, if I were a man, I'd want a smart *and* educated woman (they're different things, but it's hard to prove the smart without the educated being there), because this is the person who's going to contribute genes to my kids, and do a great deal of work raising them, and help me carry the ball of providing for my family so if I get downsized I have time to find a new job before my family ends up out on the street and I don't have to take the first crappy thing I can get. Plus, it would make conversation a lot more pleasant. If a man is smart, he wants smart kids, and he's smart enough to know better than to try to father them on a stupid woman, and if he's self-confident he's going to enjoy the company of an equal more than someone he feels superior to. If he's not smart, then who cares? Let a dumb woman have him.

  As for what women want, as a woman, I want a man who's smart and can prove it (thus a certain amount of education is required), but he doesn't have to be rich or successful. What he has to have is self-confidence and ambition. If he wanted to be an artist, he would have to be willing to work hard to perfect his art -- money doesn't enter into it because almost no artists are rich. If he wanted to change the world he would have to be willing to volunteer with nonprofits or do political work, most of which doesn't pay. Whatever he wants to do with his life, it has to be a worthy cause (wanting to have the biggest bottlecap collection ever or memorizing every episode of Seinfeld doesn't count) and it has to be something he's passionate about and driven to achieve, whether it makes any money or not.

  As it happens, my husband is five years younger than me, and a college dropout, but his grand passion in life is to be a great programmer and secondarily to make a lot of money. The fact that most of the time, including when I met him, he was poor doesn't change that he has a goal, he's ambitious, and he takes risks to achieve it. If I was looking for a meal ticket I would have found a corporate drone, not an entrepreneur; *my* job was to be the corporate drone and provide the family security and be the provider, his job was to try to become filthy rich. On occasion, it's worked, which is why I no longer have $20,000 of credit card debt hanging over my head. On other occasions, I have had to turn in aluminum cans to get money for bread.

  He's not as well educated as me (except that he knows vastly more than I do about computers, but as far as the world sees, I have a degree and he doesn't), he's younger, he's not wealthy, his family comes from less money than mine does, he's only intermittently successful -- but he has ambition, the drive to achieve his ambition and confidence in himself. *That*, I think, is far more important to an educated woman than being rich or having as many Ph D's as she does. We do want men who seem capable of achieving success (most of the time, when we marry in our twenties, we marry others in their twenties and very few twenty-somethings are successful), but they don't have to be there yet and the success doesn't have to be financial -- otherwise why are women attracted to garage band rockers, starving artists and would-be novelists?

  There is no shortage of men for educated women. Women don't need men who are *more* successful than they are, they need men who are equally successful, and those men could be equally successful in a completely different area, and they don't even need to be equally successful so much as they need to have the potential to be. Maybe fifty-year-olds with an education and a career are having a hard time because their pool largely consists of other fifty-year-olds and over, and maybe people born before the second wave of feminism hit *do* discriminate against educated women, but I'm thirty-six and I don't know anyone my age or younger who had a hard time finding a guy just because she went to college, or had a well-paid career.

  Permalink Thursday, January 5, 2006 01:33 PM