Career Women and Marriage

“Don’t marry career women” is a pretty blunt title for an article, but Forbes runs with it, providing a fairly convincing list of reasons why marriages to career-minded women are statistically doomed to unhappiness. This is no doubt problematic for all those women who’ve been told that they can’t have happiness and empowerment without a degree and a job, but it’s also terrible news for guys like me who’re attracted to those educated, accomplished, motivated women who stalk the city streets in their heels and suits—much better looking intellectual sparring partners (who often seem to thrash us mercilessly in the ring).

Broken down, the story is essentially about the failure of marriage to meet the impossibly high expectations of recent generations. And while there are certainly many factors involved in the creation of these expectations, I would argue that media portrayals—especially those on film and television—are some of the most significant. Narrative arts are where modern society looks for instruction and modeling on human interaction; we’re raised so heavily on television sitcoms and commercials and supermarket tabloids that the fantasies created and sold by these mediums become integral to our understanding of real relationships. That means that when we talk about our model opposite-sex partners, we talk about them in terms of movie characters. We want Audrey Tautou from Amelie or Natalie Portman from Garden State, because in media-saturated modernity, movies and other pop culture images, as much (maybe more) than real life, are what form our ideas about how people live, love, and interact.

The results aren't just disaffected online daters, they're people like Jacqueline Passey who have stunningly exact, sky-high standards for their potential partners. Passey’s lofty requirements may be justified in some sense (she’s basing things on relatively stable information about the measurable qualities of potential partners rather than vague, fantasy notions about what her relationship might turn out to be emotionally), but they’re indicative of the rather absurd heights to which ideas about relationships have flown. It’s that longing for manic-depressive without the manic, a desire for a relationship that's pretty much impossible.

These standards, in turn, also lead to cultural shifts like what Ann Marlow calls “domesticity without family, or with family lite,” where single or childless professional women choose to take to housewifery out of some weird need for maternal release. There’s no need to have children anymore, so, rather absurdly, we’ve replaced them with… totally overblown kitchens. (Or, for men, hulking home theater systems with remotes that take five hours to program.)

It’s almost enough to make you give a somewhat serious reappraisal to otherwise obviously backward, fundamentalist loonies like this poor young lady, who writes:

In general I would not recommend college to other women. I think, in general, that young women would make better use of their time and spiritual development by pursuing studies on their own and serving their family and their church during their years of singleness.

Only "almost enough," of course, because there’s really no question that even if one were to grant some validity to sentiments like hers (I don't), it’s totally laughable (not to mention probably morally wrong from any reasonable perspective on gender equality) to think that we could effectively turn back the clock to recreate a society like what Suzy Homemaker wants.

Like many Christian conservative types, I’ve got a fairly strong pro-family, pro-marriage strain in me. I’m convinced that marriage and family have been very good for civilization and often good for individuals. They’re robust institutions that have served Western society well for a considerable period of time throughout a considerable amount of change. But more and more, I’m also convinced that marriage is a broken institution, or at the very least, one that, whether we like it or not, is going to continue to evolve into something we don’t entirely recognize. For good and for ill, we may be living in the traditional family’s last days. And while many on my side of the political and religious divide understandably want to fight to keep the family institution in stasis, I’m not sure it’s a battle that can really be won, at least not in the way so many want to. I can only hope, then, that whatever comes after it serves us as well as what we’ve had in the past.