Marry Smart: The Intelligent Woman's Guide to True Love
288
Marry Smart: The Intelligent Woman's Guide to True Love
288Paperback(Reprint)
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780743290401 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Simon & Schuster |
| Publication date: | 12/30/2008 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.54(w) x 8.36(h) x 0.63(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Overqualified for Love?
Imagine, as newspapers and magazines recently have, the "plight of the high-status woman." She is a well-educated young woman in her 30s, earns a good salary, and has a great social life — but she is single and is worried that her success might be the reason she has not met a man to marry. Any hint of bad news about the successful or talented has always made headlines, but media pessimism about the happiness and life balance of millions of young, career-oriented women has struck a chord nationwide.
The purported "news" was never good: Smart women are less likely to marry. Successful men are romantically interested only in their secretaries. And if a woman makes a lot of money, men will be intimidated. Conservative and liberal pundits alike mythologized the failure of feminism and the "waste" of these talented women who were searching for soul mates.
For a generation of SWANS — Strong Women Achievers, No Spouse — these myths have become conventional wisdom. If you attended a good school, have an impressive job, have career aspirations or dream of future success, men will find you less attractive. "I've been told by well-meaning relatives: 'Don't talk about work on a date, dumb it down, and it's bad to earn so much money because guys will be scared of you.' And I got the word 'intimidating' a lot," said Alexis, a 35-year-old lawyer in San Francisco.
She's not alone. Nearly half of single women believe their professional success is intimidating to the men they meet. Put another way, many high-achieving women think their success is not helping them find love. Some 66 percent of SWANS disagree with the statement "My career or educational success increases my chances of getting married."
Anne, a 30-year-old chief resident at a Boston hospital, said she doesn't think of herself as intimidating or uber-intelligent, but men seem to get that impression. "I was out with two friends from residency recently and I asked one of the married guys if he had any single friends to set me up with. He said, 'Oh, I get it, you're one of those super-smart superachievers that scare the men off.'"
"I didn't really know how to respond," Anne recalled of her colleague's character assessment, but other women have a strategy in place. They instinctually "dumb it down" or pretend to be someone they're not. When she was 35 and single, Julia, a lawyer in New York City, would play a game when she went to bars: "I told some guys I was an attorney and they ran away from me, and then other guys that I was a secretary at a law firm and at least for the short term they seemed more interested," she said. "There's the idea that high-achieving men don't like the competition, that they find us a little bit frightening, and get enough of that in the office. They want someone who is going to be at home."
This stunt became popular enough to inspire a Sex and the City episode. Miranda, the high-powered lawyer, tells a man she meets at a speed-dating event that she's a flight attendant. He tells her he's a doctor. Both of them are lying — she to diminish her status, and he to inflate it.
The stereotypes are powerful, and many high-achieving women have created similar strategies. When Zara, a 26-year-old business school student, was an undergraduate at an East Coast Ivy League school, she and her friends used to fabricate identities that they assumed would be more attractive to men. "Senior year I spent spring break in Jamaica. My friends and I pretended we were from Southern Mississippi State University — which doesn't exist as far as I know — and put on southern accents to top it all off. We met all sorts of guys. We thought they'd be intimidated if they found out where we really went to school. They'd think we were argumentative, pushy, feminazis. Really, we're traditional in a lot of ways and are afraid of being judged negatively like that."
Given this prevalent conventional wisdom, it perhaps comes as no surprise that the romantic lives of accomplished women make front-page headlines only to tout bad news. "Men Prefer to Wed Secretary" announced UPI newswires in late 2004. "Too Smart to Marry" read the headline in the Atlantic Monthly a few months later. Newspapers throughout England, France, and Australia jumped on the bad news bandwagon in 2005: "Here Dumbs the Bride," "Keep Young and Stupidful If You Want to Be Loved," and "Alpha Females Use Their Heads, but Lose Their Hearts."
Finally, these negative ideas hit a saturation point in 2005, when outspoken New York Times columnist and feminist Maureen Dowd embraced this well-worn myth. In a series of articles and columns in the Times, and then in a book, the Pulitzer prize-winning writer asked plaintively, "What's a Modern Girl to Do?"
Ironically, it's two successful women, a well-educated and influential economist in her 60s and a pioneering journalist in her 50s, both of whom accomplished so much ahead of their time, who have done the most to scare off younger ones from pursuing similar paths to success.
In 2002, Sylvia Ann Hewlett presented a study of high-achieving women who weren't marrying or having children at the same rates as other women. In her book Creating a Life, she stoked the flames of panic among successful women: "Nowadays, the rule of thumb seems to be that the more successful the woman, the less likely it is she will find a husband or bear a child." She argued that high-achieving women who were still single at age 30 had a less than 10 percent chance of ever marrying.
Three years later, Maureen Dowd blamed her own single life on her career success. In her 2005 book Are Men Necessary?, Dowd told readers that she came from a family of Irish maids and housekeepers. Now in her 50s, she has achieved more than her great-aunts and grandmothers would have dreamed: She was one of the first women to have a regular opinion column in America's newspaper of record, she's written several best-selling books, and she has won the highest award in journalism. Writes Dowd, "I was always so proud of achieving more — succeeding in a high-powered career that would have been closed to my great-aunts. How odd, then, to find out now that being a maid would have enhanced my chances with men."
These two books have had a profound effect on the way young, career-oriented women perceive their relationships.
Carolyn, 36, had recently ended a four-year relationship when the bad news books and articles began to garner large-scale media attention. She was getting anxious. "Should I be a little quieter? Should I listen more? Should I flatter more? Should I postpone talking about my stuff, should I put it off until he likes me for my personality? Should I laugh more? It feels fake, like a game, but I'm not sure what these studies are telling me to do."
Among single women in their 20s and 30s, the topics of marriage, career, and life balance are at center stage. Jill, Kim, Angela, and Star are members of a women's book club, and these bad news headlines were Topic #1 at a recent meeting. "I got that Maureen Dowd piece emailed to me by tons of people, including my mom, who wrote a header saying something like, 'According to this, you're never getting married.' Someone in the office emailed me as well. It was just amazing how one single article can have so much resonance," said Jill, 28, who works at a political nonprofit organization. "It was just depressing."
Kim chimed in: "I'm on the cusp of turning 30 and people are always complaining that smart women don't get married. You never hear about the relationships that are going well, the people who have found a great match. Instead, you hear about the single women who want to be married, as if that's the only story." Kim's own observations, however, are different: "It's a misconception that smart women don't get married. It's dated."
Star and Angela agreed that the media are on the wrong track: "The men I've dated like my career ambition," said Star. "They are looking for that. It's what they are most enamored with. And most of them have gotten graduate degrees themselves." But Angela, 31, added, "Getting those degrees delays the process. You tend to focus on school after a while. And that's when [women] freak out."
The deluge of dire findings about these women's chances at love don't help, either. In the years between Sylvia Ann Hewlett's research and Maureen Dowd's best-seller, two depressing studies garnered national attention.
In 2004, researchers at the University of Michigan published a study in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, which, loosely summarized, found that the men in their sample would prefer to marry a woman whom they considered to be a subordinate, rather than a woman they considered to be a superior or a peer.
The media went into a feeding frenzy: "Powerful Male Looking for Maid to Marry," "Glass Ceilings at the Altar as Well as the Boardroom," "They're Too Smart for These Guys" cried the news and editorial pages of major dailies nationwide. More than 100 newspaper and magazine articles, plus dozens of radio spots (aired multiple times each), plus TV commentaries — and, of course, countless Internet mentions — grew from the Michigan study.
Why question a real study, then, especially when many educated minds apparently had a chance to review it? Because the facts don't add up. This "news" was based on the opinions of 120 male undergraduates who were shown photos of a man and a woman, given a scenario about the person as either above or below them in an office hierarchy, and then asked a series of questions about that person.
So 120 guys just out of puberty said that they were more attracted to women who weren't that challenging to them. And this is national news?
To throw more fat into the fire, a multiuniversity English and Scottish study emerged a few weeks later, reporting that women with higher IQ scores were less likely to marry than women with lower IQ scores, whereas the opposite was true for men. This exhaustive study, well-researched and rigorous, followed nearly 900 men and women from age 11 through adulthood. With each up-tick in IQ scores, women were less likely to have married by midlife, but men were that much more likely to marry.
Once again, the researchers were reputable. Plus, in this case, the number of individuals researched and the range in their backgrounds gave the study additional validity. Finally, the study's methods withstood examination of solid social science research procedure. With apparent justification, worldwide media gave the study thorough coverage. Scores of stories appeared on TV, radio, and in print — again, not to mention the volume on the Internet.
Why, then, cast any doubt on the results, or on the media's exhaustive international coverage of the announcement?
Here's why: This study was conducted on men and women born in 1921 — men and women who would be 85 years old today. These women were born seven years before the UK granted equal voting rights to women. When these seniors were coming of age in the early 1940s, women had to resign their jobs upon marriage and top universities were still closed to female students. Not until these women reached their 50s would equal pay be implemented in the Civil Service. The results may be valid, but the idea that the gender norms of Grandma's generation are newsworthy and applicable to the lives of young, smart women today is laughable.
Clearly, these studies didn't merit the vast attention they received. So why do the news media and popular culture outlets so eagerly perpetuate destructive bad news for successful women? Harvard professor Russell Muirhead has suggested that the average Jane and Joe are comforted to think that unusually smart, successful people are living less happy lives, "that for all educated women know, they might not know enough to find love."
A magazine journalist, Eileen, age 34, said she understands the media craze for bad news. "There's a very powerful need to create a subcategory of people to feel superior to, so if you've chosen to give up your career to get married and have kids, you might feel like it's only fair that successful women shouldn't get married. You made your choice and they made theirs," she states bluntly.
But then Eileen pauses, and considers yet another option: that the quest for Mr. Right is long and full of tough moments along the way, and doom-and-gloom articles will always reflect the depression of young women after yet another bad blind date, another failed relationship, another guy who didn't call.
"The whole dating thing just feels hard, and sometimes we just want data that support the way we feel. Even if the news is great in the long run, it's still hard, and we like to wallow a bit," Eileen said.
Another reason these dire statistics have such resonance: They were true for our aunts and mothers and older mentors. In 1980, the median age of marriage nationwide for women was 22. But according to the 1980 Census, a woman with a graduate degree was twice as likely to still be single between the ages of 25 and 34 than a woman who had a college degree or less. In fact, 1 in 5 women with graduate degrees (20.5 percent) had not married by age 34, compared to 1 in 10 women without graduate degrees (9.6 percent).
So when newspapers report that women achievers find it difficult to find men, it resonates with a lot of ambitious SWANS who aren't getting what they want quite yet. And though we all need a good bitch session every now and then — and though it always seems worse for us than for anyone else — the news, girls, is good.
High-achieving women marry at the same rate as all other women; they just do so a bit later in life. Smart women do get married. Men do make passes at girls who wear glasses. And though some men are looking for women to play fetch for them, there's certainly no shortage of men who would much prefer to volley with an equal.
To get numbers to tell a story, it's necessary to pull out some particular groups to test. Most researchers use education and income as a substitute for achievement, which, let's face it, is hard to define and measure precisely, even if we all agree we know what it means. Others look at the sexiness of status (Is having a high-powered job related to sexual attraction?). And still others explore power and ambition.
The original research presented in this book defines high-achieving women as women with a graduate degree — a master's, doctoral, or professional degree in any field — and/or an income in the top 10 percent of women in their age group; that means women ages 24 to 34 who, in 2005, earned $50,000 per year or more, and women ages 35-40 who earned $60,000 per year or more.
Certainly there are many SWANS who don't fit this rigid national numerical definition. There are towns and cities where earning much less than $50,000 earns a woman a place in the top 10 percent of earners in her area. There are plenty of successful, talented, and ambitious women who have chosen not to go to grad school or who have taken prestigious but lower-paying jobs in public service, the arts, politics, or diplomacy. They are women who aspire to be outstanding at whatever profession or activity they choose. Success, and the aspiration to succeed, comes in many forms. Better still, success is sexy, and the new numbers show that higher income and education increases a woman's chances of marriage.
Sex and power are often linked, but most sociological theories (and media headlines) predict that it is women who will flock to high-powered men and find them the most attractive, whereas men will be drawn to docile and subordinate women. Yet a 2005 article in the American Journal of Sociology, overlooked by the media, reports just the opposite: High-status and powerful women are rated as more attractive. Based on a study of interpersonal relationships in 60 different communities nationwide, the author concludes that women in positions of power are sexier to men than are more subordinate women.
Research by Megan Sweeney, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, adds another data point to the good news plot: Higher-earning women marry at higher rates. Among white women, a $10,000-per-year increase in salary can mean a 7 percent increase in the likelihood that she will marry within a year. For black women, that same salary bump increases the likelihood of marriage by more than 8 percent.
And the trend only improves. Economist Elaina Rose at the University of Washington studies the relationship between marriage rates and education level, and how the two have affected each other over time. By looking at U.S. Census records going back several decades, Rose has tracked the diminishing marriage "success penalty." Twenty-five years ago, a woman with a graduate degree was 13.5 percent less likely to have ever married at age 40 to 44 than a woman with only a high school diploma. In percentage terms that's a big number. By the 2000 Census, that penalty had largely disappeared.
There's already plenty of data to anticipate more good news in the upcoming 2010 Census. The Current Population Survey (CPS), a yearly representative sample of 60,000 households nationwide, tracks education, income, and marriage data. Based on 2000 and 2001 CPS data, Heather Boushey at the Center for Economic Policy Research in Washington, DC, demonstrated that working women between the ages of 28 and 35 who earn more than $55,000 per year (well above the U.S. median) or have a graduate degree are just as likely to be married as other women who work full-time. According to the newest available data, the 2005 CPS, for women with an advanced degree and for women who earn in the top 10 percent of all female earners for their age group, there's no marriage penalty. High-achieving women marry at the same rates as all other women; they just do it a little later.
It's common for high-achieving women to marry for the first time at age 30, according to CPS data. So in that first wave of late-20s weddings, successful women may be feeling a little panicky. Some 55 percent of women with graduate degrees have married by age 29, compared to 61 percent of other women.
But then the tide turns: It's significantly more likely that a woman with a graduate degree will walk down the aisle in her 30s than a woman with a college degree or less. And SWANS' own experiences reflect this.
Jessica, a 35-year-old entrepreneur, has an explanation for the difference in timing: "The more successful woman, or the higher IQ woman, might be less likely to get married young because she has the intellect to see through the garbage that some other people might not care to see through. She has the awareness, and has been raised to ask the questions that will immediately be obstacles to getting married." Jessica has many smart friends who found their match and married in their 20s, but she is proud of her decision to continue to search for the right man for her, instead of settling. For women in their 30s, she added, "I would say that our education is helping us — we now have the balance, the yin and the yang, the softness and business success."
Kama, a consultant in Chicago, said she and her friends, all in their early 30s, have been doing some studies of their own to test whether their degrees are holding them back on the dating scene — and the results have been promising. "I had a friend who did speed dating with 28 guys. In half of those quick introductions she said she went to Harvard Business School and in half she didn't mention it. She got the same number of ask-outs from each pool. It's a small sample, but I hope that's a good sign."
For Julia, the New York lawyer who told men at bars that she was a secretary, things changed at 36. "Yeah, then I met Adam," she said with a shy smile, unconsciously playing with her wedding ring. The couple met at a friend's party, and Julia, who had all but given up on meeting someone special, said she could tell from the beginning he was different. So she told him she was a lawyer. "Adam finds my intelligence more of a turn-on. He can talk to me and I understand him. From the time we met, it was like a first date that never ended. We were engaged in four months and married in under a year. For the first time, I felt I didn't have to hide parts of myself."
Melissa and Kristen, both in their late 20s, don't understand why any woman would be concerned. They are both seriously dating men who value their intelligence, and they feel confident that their good experiences are the norm. "These studies are complete crap. Danny doesn't know anything about finance," said Kristen, who is starting a new job as an investment banker at a leading firm. "He runs a wine import business. I can think of so many examples where guys are sometimes attracted to beautiful, blond, popular girls when they are young, but when they are older, they are looking for girls who are brighter, and have more intellectual qualities."
"Most of my guy friends would say they have to be able to have a conversation with their wives," said Melissa, who has just finished her master's degree. "I think most of my [male] friends went to good schools and are surrounded by smart women. My brother has a JD/MBA and he's married to a woman who is a doctor, and they got married later. More so now than 50 years ago, men want women who are their equals or superiors."
Melissa's boyfriend, Michael, is proud of her successes. "When I meet one of Michael's friends, they'll say, 'I heard that you dogged him on the ski slopes and you're smarter than he is,' and you know, men want that, a girl who will challenge them and not say 'Yes, dear, here's your scotch and soda.' I mean, he was the one who told his friends that to begin with."
"What I think they are mixing up in those studies is that men do like to be taken care of, but taking care of a guy doesn't mean that you are subordinate. I would make a drink, but then I'd sit down and talk to him about any given issue," concluded Kristen.
Like more and more SWANS, these women's instincts are borne out by the current numbers. For instance, according to data from the 2005 Current Population Survey, an unmarried 30-year-old woman is more likely to have made it to the altar by age 40 if she has a graduate degree than if she doesn't. There's a two-thirds chance that a 30-year-old woman will marry if she has a college degree or less, but there's a three-quarters chance she'll be a bride if she has an advanced degree. By ages 35 to 39, a higher percentage of high-achieving women have walked down the aisle than their less accomplished sisters.
Geography doesn't matter either: In cities and suburbs, large cities and small cities, these data hold true. In Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, and San Diego — the largest U.S. population centers where SWANS flock — high-achieving women marry at the same rate as all other women in their area.
New data reveal that a high-achieving woman is more likely to marry just the kind of man conventional wisdom would suggest would be intimidated by her apparent success. More than half of married women with graduate degrees are married to men without graduate degrees. Clearly, men who aren't intimidated by SWANS do exist.
Having a higher income than one's significant other doesn't make much of a difference in women's marriage rates. So the idea that men are intimidated by a woman who might outearn them doesn't hold true, either. Yet the myth that successful women are overqualified for love seems to persist.
This myth has high costs for today's SWANS. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy that, although it doesn't affect SWANS' marriage rates, does cause pain and anxiety and may lead to some undesirable choices. Women who are panicked about their marriage prospects are more likely to give off negative or desperate vibes to men, and SWANS who believe that men will be intimidated by their education or success may find that it's really ego and attitude — not their success — that are getting in the way. For other women, the relentless pressure from relatives and bad news in the headlines makes them insecure enough to stay in bad relationships too long.
"I was ready to break up with [my ex-boyfriend] about four years ago — and I stayed two years too long — and part of the reason I stayed was what so many women are thinking: Do I want to go through it all again? Do I really want to date again? The whole mess of it, the uncertainty of it," said Carolyn, 36. "So you rationalize in your mind that you can stay, that you should keep doing this because it's your only shot."
Carolyn blames herself for the failure of the relationship. In the past few years, she founded her own advertising company and devoted a lot of time to building her client base. "Creating my business was my priority, so it probably overwhelmed my personal life," she said. Based on the many articles she has read about successful women destroying their relationships, men can't handle smart women. So part of her believes that her relationship failed because it was her fault: She is too bright.
Even though the aggregate data show that success doesn't hurt SWANS in the dating game, the suggestion alone makes many of these women angry. "Even if it's just the perception, it puts no pressure on men and lots of pressure on women. That pisses me off. It's unfair," said Laura, a strikingly beautiful lobbyist in Washington, DC. "The pressure makes otherwise totally cool women seem anxious, desperate, and 'crazy' to find a man. These women aren't crazy, but they are in their early to mid-30s and haven't found someone, and because they want kids, they do things perceived as desperate." Laura ended a one-year relationship a few months earlier and said she hasn't given herself time to heal because all this panic in the air is making her nervous. "I have to get back in the zone and date guys before it's too late."
John, 29, a professor at a prominent business school, noted that this effect is obvious on the male side of the market as well. "In recent years it feels like the balance of power in dating has totally shifted. It used to be women who were totally in control. Now it seems like the men hold all the cards. Women just seem really anxious to partner up and seem to put up with an astonishing amount of messing about from men. It's got to the point where I have started to look for the rare women who simply won't put up with my crap," he said.
But SWANS should relax and be themselves: Again, there is good news in newly released 2005 Current Population Survey data. Successful women in their 30s have options — and SWANS in their late 30s are significantly more likely to walk down the aisle than their less accomplished sisters. For 35-year-old women with graduate degrees, their chances of marrying by age 40 are 25 percent higher than for their sisters without the advanced degrees. Less educated women marry earlier; those brides gliding down the aisle in their 30s are more likely to be SWANS.
SWANS are leading ever-richer lives. Young women are pursuing education and dream careers and embarking on international adventures of their own. "Women who are successful aren't trying to just get married. They want to travel, be cultured. If we're single, it has a lot to do with our decisions," said Kim. Her book club partner Jill agreed: "We're not in a rush. A lot of women are going to graduate school, and it strains the relationship. My mom followed my dad everywhere. It's not for lack of opportunity that I'm single; it's because of a generational change of priorities. If you are successful, there's no big rush to have anyone take care of you."
There's some encouraging news that this strategy works. Up to a certain point, waiting a bit longer to get married, and pursuing higher education and career interests along the way, may increase the chances of marital bliss. Women without a college degree are almost twice as likely to divorce as their better-educated sisters. It's certainly true that more educated and successful women are less likely to remain in abusive marriages, and couples with more intellectual and monetary resources are more likely to seek marriage counseling when their relationship is in trouble.
"In my 20s, I focused [on] and prioritized my professional life and I didn't do the same thing with my personal life," said Patricia, a 32-year-old Washington attorney. "There are more opportunities for women, and we have the ability to make the same choices as men — so women aren't settling for a relationship they don't want or need. If it's just about want, it's a more difficult thing to achieve. When women needed a provider, the arrangement was clearer. Now it just takes a bit longer to find the right guy."
Copyright © 2006 by Christine B. Whelan
SWANS are women who want to control their love lives. SWANS believe they can be accomplished career women and loving, nurturing wives and mothers if they so choose. And while SWANS are certainly strong and beautiful, they often get a little worried about what the future will hold — and feel themselves cracking a bit under pressure from well-meaning family and friends.
Early on in my research, I met Christina, a twenty-nine-year-old public relations specialist, who had just moved to the city. Throughout her twenties, she dated her college boyfriend, but after five years the relationship fizzled. That's when the scrutiny began.
"When I was younger my mother said, 'Promise me you won't get married before you turn twenty-five,' and then after I turned twenty-five, I would hear, 'Well, I opened the life section of the newspaper and I didn't see your wedding announcement.'"
With her recent move and new job, Christina was excited but also nervous. Like many SWANS, she wondered whether her decision to pursue her career was hurting her chances to find personal happiness with a man. With the long hours of the new job, would she have time to meet a guy? Was she intimidating in her power suits? And when would her mom stop asking whether she'd met anyone "special"? The pressure was building.
It may seem to outside observers that SWANS have everything going for them — they're smart and do well in their careers — except for in their romantic lives. And if you are among the SWANS, you know that not everyone is rooting for you to complete this piece of life's puzzle.
For example, which do you think makes a better newspaper headline: "Smart Woman Lives Happily Ever After" or "Smart Woman Terrified She'll Never Find Happiness"?
Yes, the media like to scare SWANS into believing that they have to choose between career and family, between being smart and being feminine. Even successful feminists have gotten into the act — and if you've seen any of these media reports, the "information" is probably making you nervous, too.
Boiling down the headlines from the past several years, a casual reader might deduce that successful women are less likely to get married for a slew of seemingly logical reasons. One nationally publicized study found that men are intimidated by high-achieving women because men are fearful that these outgoing, ambitious women might leave them or cheat on them. The logic is that a woman who has her own money has more choices. And if she's not happy in her relationship, she can leave.
A corollary of this argument is that relationships don't last when the woman makes more money than the man. Evolutionary psychology dictates that men need to be the hunters: They need to be stronger, better, and more powerful than the woman to feel they have a place in the family. If a woman outearns her boyfriend or husband, she outmans him, and either he will feel so insecure that he withdraws from the relationship or she will lose interest in such a girly man.
In addition, conventional wisdom subscribes to the notion that ambitious women aren't motherly or nurturing: Success is a masculine characteristic. How could a woman who aggressively negotiates multimillion-dollar contracts breast-feed and diaper an infant? And if a woman prioritizes her career, that means that she won't prioritize her man. At best, a high-achieving woman is depicted as an ice princess: beautiful, powerful, and untouchable.
For those successful women who are seeking a man, there's the assumption that they are interested in only a small, elite group of men. So no wonder they are single: They're fishing in a very small pond. For generations, women have attempted to "marry up" and have sought out men who are wealthier, more educated, taller, and more ambitious. Men, in turn, have had little problem "marrying down": seeking wives who are less intelligent, petite, and financially dependent yet adoring. So what happens when more and more women themselves become wealthy, educated, tall, and ambitious? Is it lonely at the top?
Are you overqualified for love?
Absolutely not.
In the words of President John F. Kennedy, "The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie — deliberate, contrived and dishonest — but the myth — persistent, pervasive, and unrealistic."
It's time to shatter these outdated myths once and for all. The new large-scale survey data that I — and researchers at premier institutions nationwide — are collecting show that today's successful, well-educated young women will marry at the same rates as all other women. Indeed, the newest research suggests that more income and education may in fact increase a woman's chances of marriage.
• *
•
This negative talk doesn't just happen in newspapers and magazines.
You know that just because you are fairly confident in your own abilities to excel at work, meet the right guy, and build your dream future, not everyone else is so optimistic. How many times has a well-meaning friend asked you — with a look of pity or concern — if you are dating anyone? Are holidays with the family a string of questions about whether you've "met anyone special" and worried coos about whether you are too picky? Have your aunts started clucking about when you're going to "settle down"?
You know they mean well. You know they just want to help. But those persistent questions may irk you. You are pretty sure you're on the right track...so why is everyone so concerned?
There are all sorts of perky answers to these questions: "Not yet, Grandma, but when I meet him, I'll bring him over for you to get a good look." "No, Aunt Susie, no one special — but lots of potentials." "I've been a bit busy for dating for the last few months — I just finished my degree. But I'll get back to you with an update soon!"
Still, after a while, even the most self-assured SWANS will be asking herself whether everyone knows something she doesn't. There's that nagging fear that it is your career or education that is preventing you from meeting the right guy. Or that somehow you're acting too "intimidating" on dates. Or that you're too picky. Or that there's really something wrong with you.
As a proud member of the SWANS, it's time to break out of that negative cycle. You need tools to achieve your goals, catchy phrases to arm yourself for the next time cocktail party conversation turns to dating and marriage, and reassurance that the future is bright and hopeful.
First, you need to know what's true — and what's not. And since you're a smart woman, that means understanding how times are changing, using your keen SWANS instinct for recognizing — and rejecting — out-of-date stereotypes, and understanding why Grandma's dating advice may not be right for you. This book will take you through all three steps. Not only will you learn the facts you need, but you'll learn from SWANS nationwide how to maximize your chances of making the right match.
Step 1:
Knowledge Is Power
The first tool you need is the truth: There are more SWANS than ever before.
Women are excelling in the academic world and becoming the strong achievers previous generations dreamed their daughters could be. In 1970, there were only 68 women enrolled in college per 100 men. In 2005, 133 women graduated from college for every 100 men, and women made up the majority, 57 percent, of college classes. This trend is expected to continue: In 2010, projections estimate there will be 142 college degrees awarded to women for every 100 that go to men.
The gains for women in higher education are often even more impressive. More than three times as many women receive master's, doctoral, or professional degrees now than they did in 1970.
The majority of all associate, bachelor, and master's degrees awarded during the 2000-2010 decade will be conferred on women, and by 2010 women will earn 151 master's degrees for every 100 awarded to men.
In 1977, only 23 women received professional degrees, such as in law or medicine, for every 100 men. But today about 50 percent of law school and medical school classes are women, and the vast majority of graduate students in the social sciences and health services fields are women. Even in the traditionally male fields of business and finance, women are excelling: Today more than 33 percent of MBA graduates are women. By 2010, women are expected to earn almost as many professional degrees as men. The projections suggest that women will earn 91 professional degrees for every 100 degrees conferred on men by 2010.
This translates to major strides in the workplace. Women hold almost 50 percent of all corporate management positions, and an increasing number are attaining the top jobs and board seats. Almost half of all privately held businesses are at least 50 percent owned by women. And women hold twice as many senior management positions at large national companies as they did even in 1995.
Women's strides in the workforce make staying single economically feasible. In addition, changing social mores and the widespread availability of birth control pills and other forms of contraception have lessened the pressure on Americans of all backgrounds to marry young.
The implications of these changes are felt nationally: In 1970 only 6 percent of American women between the ages of thirty and thirty-four had never married. Now it's 24 percent, four times greater. The median age of marriage for all women is about twenty-five, but for women with a college degree it's closer to twenty-seven, and for those with a graduate degree it may be above thirty years old. For men, it's the same story: 32 percent of men aged thirty to thirty-four have never married, more than quadrupling the 1970 rate.
Today marriage is a choice, not an obligation. For a woman, a solid educational background and a good salary means she can be more selective: Instead of marrying a man for financial security or out of fear of being a spinster at thirty, women may choose to marry for compatibility, love, or companionship. For men, successful women represent an equal partner with whom to share life, not a constant drain on their hard-earned money.
Indeed, according to a nationally representative survey I conducted for this research, marriage is important for SWANS: 88 percent of single, successful women reported that they would like to get married, and 86 percent of both men and women in the sample said they wanted to get married. This is in keeping with the national data: The majority of men and women want to be married, and more than 90 percent of Americans do marry. In attitude surveys from the past several decades, three-quarters of men and women consistently report that a good marriage is "extremely important" to them — and an even higher percentage said they had positive feelings about being married.
For most SWANS, there have been long-term relationships, dozens of men who were interested, and at least several conscious choices to remain single. In some cases, SWANS chose not to marry men who are alcoholics, verbally abusive, or completely stuck on themselves, even though these men had great money, power, and prestige. Why? Because as strong women who can achieve in their own right, they know they deserve more. Sometimes SWANS won't give a guy the time of day because he's too short, has a spare tire around his waistline, or talks too loudly. These may be petty reasons, but still, it's their choice.
SWANS are accomplished, smart young women who realize that the goal isn't to get married — it's to have a good marriage and to lead a happy and fulfilled life. Finding Mr. Right takes time and patience.
Step 2:
Let Go of Stereotypes
Articles, movies, and television reinforce the stereotype that successful women are cold, calculating, and, well, bitchy. According to my national research, high-achievers most commonly perceive entertainment media portrayals of successful women as aggressive and ambitious. "I would say the stereotype of a high-achieving woman is driven, smart, savvy, goal-oriented, and someone who is not going to let things get in her way. It's a cold stereotype," said Bill, a thirty-two-year-old think tank researcher in Washington. Indeed, warmer characteristics such as kindness, creativity, and good parenting skills scratch the bottom of the list of qualities that pop to men's minds when they see successful women on TV .
Successful women suffer from a bad public image — and it's gone on for too long. For decades, we've read articles about the problems that ensue when a successful man marries a similarly successful woman, namely, how an accomplished wife "complicates" the male CEO's life as "schedules and interests collide."
According to some media watchdogs, women are more vulnerable to bad reporting. "Women's lifestyle choices are subjected to greater scrutiny," said Julie Hollar, the communications director of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. "These articles are more about sparking debate and being controversial than about getting at some real truth."
Still, these media caricatures reinforce the conventional wisdom that men are intimidated by successful, strong women. And SWANS are paying attention. Should women reinvent themselves to play down their strong side and play up the many other Ss of being a woman: soft, sweet, sexy women achievers? Evolutionary pyschology tells us that men are looking for youth and beauty in women: Make her pretty, docile, sweet, subordinate, and chaste, and she's the one. But these go-getter SWANS aren't docile or subordinate. Is it possible that both high-achieving men and women seek similar goals in life but are blinded by stereotypes?
Yes!
Step 3:
Don't Follow Grandma's Advice — Times Have Changed
Your grandmother was a smart woman. She offered you lots of good advice about sitting up straight, respecting your elders, and carrying yourself like a lady. But her dating advice just doesn't apply to you.
In Grandma's day, things were different for smart, successful women: Women were told to demur to their men. "No one likes a smarty-pants," mothers told their precocious daughters. Decades went by, times changed, yet the advice remained the same: Men don't like women who are too smart, so if you want to land the man, you've got to play up your softer, sexier side — and hide those smarts.
Today SWANS worry that this conventional wisdom is still true: that men are scared off, or turned off, by a woman's accomplishments. Indeed, nearly half of successful women believe their success is hurting their chances of getting married. Some 48 percent of single women ages thirty-five to forty said they believed a woman who has achieved career or educational success would be less likely to get married, and 41 percent of all women with graduate degrees disagreed that men were more attracted to women who are successful in their careers.
"I'm sexy, attractive, entertaining, and I have wonderful friends and an interesting job. But I'm worried that by being interesting I might be scary and intimidating to men," said Emily, a twenty-nine-year-old credit card company consultant. "It seems like at least half of the men I meet are intimidated by me," says Adrianna, a dentist in Tucson. And Amanda, a petite thirty-three-year-old museum curator, said there are days when she is terrified that she stayed in school too long and educated herself out of the marriage market.
Today's damaging myth represents the painful realities of recent generations: the grandmothers, and even the mothers, of today's young professional women. A woman who graduated from college in the 1920s had lifetime marriage probabilities that were fully 20 percentage points lower than those women of their generation who hadn't gone to college.
For women of the generation that has now risen to the highest ranks of most professions, women for whom graduate school became more common, higher education seemed to be the way to spinsterhood: In 1980 a woman with nineteen years of education — that's college plus graduate school — had approximately a 66 percent chance of being married at age forty to forty-four, compared to a woman with twelve years of education, who had an 83 percent likelihood of being married at that age.
Loosely translated, those statistics said, "Men don't make passes at girls who wear glasses." Sober statistics like these prompted Newsweek magazine in 1986 to famously declare that a single, college-educated forty-year-old woman had a better chance of being killed by a terrorist than of ever tying the knot.
In the 1970s and 1980s, sociology embraced the findings of evolutionary psychology as a way to explain the dating and marriage patterns of the time as somehow predetermined by nature. Academic articles routinely reported that women were more attracted to high-status men because such men were perceived as "providers," whereas men were attracted to pretty and docile women because they were perceived as "motherly" and fertile. Although feminism was making enormous legal strides, leading academic sociologists, buried in prehistoric eras, were oblivious to the major social changes going on all around them.
In real life, media reports and academic theories of the day notwithstanding, dating and marriage trends had already begun a historic shift. SWANS who are now approaching or are in their forties reflect happily on the differences between today and recent decades past. "It was very depressing in the 1980s to hear the stats," said Julia, a thirty-seven-year-old lawyer in New York City who once considered herself, a successful married woman, to be "a fluke." Said Elaine, forty-two, "Femininity and power don't necessarily clash anymore. But when I was growing up, there was still a dichotomy."
Mothers of today's SWANS marvel at the different paths their daughters are taking — and the myriad choices available to them.
Alice, fifty-six, has her master's in public health and teaches at a prominent college. Yet she said she always felt that her husband had the "career" while she merely had a job. Her career, she said, was raising her two children. Alice worked at prestigious posts at government agencies, helped launch grant programs for others studying public health, and worked full-time with the help of a nanny to watch the kids. "I was unusual then," she said. "I loved my work, but the family always came first — it had to."
Allison, sixty, agreed that her experience in her twenties is very different from the options available to young women today. "I grew up, went to college, got married after my junior year, and finished senior year married," she said. "I followed my husband in his career and stayed home after my daughter's birth. At least until the children were in kindergarten, women stopped working when they had children. My mom had done that, and that's what I did, too." Allison's daughter is twenty-eight and taking a completely different path: She has a graduate degree; she's seriously dating a smart, accomplished man; and she's looking forward to balancing children and a career simultaneously. "It's just a different world from what I was doing at her age."
Still, the negative conventional wisdom that successful women don't marry is routinely perpetuated in the media, by well-meaning but misguided relatives, and by young women themselves who are concerned that they have overqualified themselves for romantic happiness.
A 2005 letter to the "Dear Abby" advice column sums it up: A woman in her early thirties wrote to Abby after reading several articles "about how smart women are less likely to get married." She and her friends want to meet Mr. Wonderful and get married, she wrote, but she worries that "if we have to curtail our professional success, financial wherewithal and IQ to do it, how can a person even begin to do such a thing?...Help, Abby! What's the answer for smart, fun women who have their acts together? How can we best poise ourselves to find true love while being true to ourselves?" The young woman signed her letter "Losing Faith in Finding Mr. Right."
True to form, Abby had some good advice: "Stop reading defeatist newspaper and magazine articles. They'll only make you desperate, clingy and depressed — and none of those traits is attractive."
For young women today, the "success penalty" has disappeared. Education and income now have little negative effect on marriage rates, and in many situations, they actually act as benefits, if you have the right tools to use these skills to your advantage. Even Newsweek recanted its gloom-and-doom pronouncements in 2006. Times have changed, but many of our perceptions haven't...until now.
It's time for women like you to use the advice in this bookto make your own headlines. C'mon girls, it's time for some good news!
Copyright © 2006, 2009 by Christine B. Whelan
Table of Contents
A SWANS Story
1 Are You Among the SWANS?
2 Shattering the Myths
3 Success Is Sexy
4 What SWANS Want
5 Gentlemen Prefer Brains
6 Who Is Mr. Right?
7 Social Graces
8 A Desire to Nest
9 Sailing to the Altar
Acknowledgments