A 40ish friend he told me about life with his twentysomething girlfriend:
- “I plan the dinner, shop for all the ingredients, choose and buy the wine, cook and clean up.”
- “We were staying at a friend’s house. When it came time to leave she was relaxing while I cleaned up and put the sheets and towels in the washing machine.”
- “We earn about the same amount of money and yet I pay for everything.”
- “She seems to think equality means doing less than half the work so she won’t ever have to feel mid-twentieth century housewifelike.”
At the same time we know a huge number of women who seem to be good at everything except holding onto a guy long enough to get married, something that they claim to want. Could it be the case that in the old days mothers sat their daughters down and explained to them how selfish and spoiled most men are and what they needed to do to keep the guy happy? Whereas now young women are exposed to wisdom from Jada Pinkett Smith, a popular actress:
“Women, you can have it all—a loving man, devoted husband, loving children, a fabulous career,” she said. “They say you gotta choose. Nah, nah, nah. We are a new generation of women. We got to set a new standard of rules around here. You can do whatever it is you want. All you have to do is want it.” (speaking at Harvard, a talk that got her into hot water for being too “heteronormative”)
The implication of Pinkett Smith’s remarks was that a Harvard girl, in virtue of being bright, well-educated, and ambitious, was entitled to these things without doing too much work except maybe on the career part. She never added “if you’re willing to do the laundry, plan and pay for half the evenings out, straighten up the house in between visits from the cleaners.”
Some of our women friends do seem to have figured out what compromises and efforts are entailed but they suffer through many inexplicable (to them) dumpings and are into their late 30s by the time insight is acquired. This wouldn’t be a problem except that by this age they are past their best reproductive years and are often rather embittered toward men.
A potential solution: Find couples where the man is satisfied and not thinking about walking out. Do time-and-motion studies of the female partner in these couples and figure out how much effort they are putting forth. Report the results so that single women can decide if it is worth the bother. Perhaps when they see the data they will come to agree with Isabel Archer in Portrait of a Lady, who, when all around her were trying to marry her off, thought
“she held that a woman ought to be able to make up her life in singleness, and that it was perfectly possible to be happy without the society of a more or less coarse-minded person of another sex.”
[Update: Some (married) friends pointed out that there are quite a few books targeted at women who want to get married, offering advice. However this advice is anecdotal and not based on hard numbers gleaned from surveys. A friend in her 40s pointed out that perhaps by coddling our kids we’ve produced an entire generation too selfish to make a marriage succeed. This afflicts both young men and women equally with the difference that men have the biological luxury to wait until they are 40 or 50 to figure it out.]
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