That “apt” saying is my problem with the study I linked to. Yes education level is a reasonable marker for future ability to provide but it is far from a perfect one.
I’m just wondering if as women increasingly are more educated than the men available to them, and more frequently make as much or more than them, if that selection by “ability to provide” decreases. I see education level more of part of “who they are” …
Of course, most people settle for less than perfection. Increasing economic independence reduces the pressure to settle. Unrealistic expectations, a perception of too many choices, prioritizing other goals, dysfunctional society and social media, and excessive self-regard reduce the likelihood of settling. Is this occurring in practice?
I think many people are able to find someone who loves them for who they are. But if we’re talking about social pressures, women are loved for how fuckable they are and how much unpaid labor they’re willing to take on.
That’s the problem with this sort of armchair sociologizing. It obfuscates all the contextual factors that go into any given relationship. It forces me to say, “Well I’m more likely to have good conversations with someone who is highly educated,” which makes me sound shallow, but it isn’t my opinion that’s shallow, it’s the question itself. There’s no way for a woman to answer this question without pissing someone off.
As far as “owning” spaces, since I do 100% of the cooking and 80% of the kitchen cleaning, you’re goddamn right the kitchen’s mine. If he felt strongly about where I put something obviously he would have a say, but he doesn’t really care. Although my husband is the one most likely to nag me about how I’m doing something. He is constantly correcting what I do. Don’t tell him this, but sometimes, when he’s not home, I open a window without turning off the air conditioning.
I won’t tell. You scoundrel. 
Oh I hate when my wife does that!!!
By intent. What I am interested in exploring, and I’d prefer studies to anecdotes if available but I’m not finding much myself, is the trends that emerge out of that variety of individual contextual factors in individual relationships.
There is a simple reality that at least in the United States, and maybe in other countries as well, there are increasingly more highly educated marriageable age unpartnered women than men and they are are financially doing well.
@Dr_Paprika shares the possibility that many of them will opt for staying unpartnered rather than “settling”. Could be. Although I have read numbers that suggest the younger group is partnering up (not necessarily marrying) more than their elders had. I think some are going to become more comfortable being the primary income producer of the household than in generations past and be more concerned about meshing interests and values and may use education as a crude proxy for those items.
New York is tricky @Dr_Paprika. It is one of the places that 20 and 30 year old highly educated career path women flock to for many reasons, and experience that the educated successful men there are overwhelmingly either already married, or gay, or both!
If you want to study situations that arise when the relation between women/men/money/education parameters change, I can provide you with a case where what you are postulating has already happened. I am talking about Brussels, the Belgian and EU capital. The women I have in mind are the interpreters.
Interpreters are a peculiar breed of people, I speak from experience, being one myself and having married two*. They are usually highly educated, have travelled a lot (that is how they learned their languages) and at least in the context of international organizations like the EU, very well paid and enjoy a high status. Among the privileged professions, and I won’t go into what a privileged profession is and what not, but you can probably get the picture, it is one of the very few where women are in the clear majority.
Now picture Brussels, a smallish capital city in Western Europe, about a million inhabitants. Then there were back in my days there about 20,000 EU civil servants from all over Europe (there should be more today), and perhaps 2,000 interpreters working either as free-lancers or civil servants (fonctionnaires) of the Parliament or of the Commission. They came from all over Europe, logically, because that is where they came from and where they learned their mother tongues: there are no Polish, Hungarian, Italian and what-not native speakers in Belgium, only French and Vlams (Dutch).
I can confirm that those women had a hard time finding a suitable partner. Not all, of course, but it was a recurrent conversation subject. And the solution, though varied and always very personal, was often to get a man that was willing to stay at home, do the chores, raise the children, and accept his subordinate status.
An inordinately amount of those men called themselves artists, though the art they produced was, in my layman’s eyes, abysmally bad. But it helped them to accept the situation on a psychological level, I guess.
So, if you want to find out about the trend you have detected and how it will unfurl in the future, my advice would be to search for the places and circumstances where this has already happened and have a look. Brussels can’t be the only place. And some sociology student should have made a PhD thesis about this already, and if not, it is high time. Because the subject is indeed interesting on many levels.
* Not simultaneously, but consecutively. Interpreter’s pun, sorry.
** As an aside, among the male minority there are a lot of gay men in this profession, perhaps up to a third, which is interesting in itself and is an additional hurdle for the female interpreters when they look for a partner.
Ya see there’s the rub. The belief that being the primary home based child rearing is the “subordinate” part of the partnership.
My mom, rest in peace, was, funny enough, an artist. She did not work outside the home and got the week day meals on the table. What she was never was subordinate to my dad.
Society though labels any task primarily performed by women as lower status (not only home making) so men taking on that role have to have balls of steel to deal with that attitude. An attitude that some women bring into the equation as well!
Anyway I think your approach to thinking about it is very good! I’m guessing finding men with secure enough egos to live that role was difficult for them. I had an attended back in residency who was in a similar situation. She was not only a successful brilliant academic physician, but she was tall blonde and beautiful. She was not shy about complaining that no one ever asked her out, clearly because her stature (several forms) intimated lots of men…
Five of my office partners are women and it is interesting: two are married to doctors (met during med school); three to men they knew from high school or early college. (Two of those men are teachers and one runs a painting business.) Now Peds is not at the top of the med pay scale but still, interesting.
You are right, the word subordinate was not wisely chosen. But for reasons, anecdotical as they may be. But my main point stands: those educated, high achieving women had a hard time finding partners in the '90s in a small-ish city to which they migrated in their late 20s or early 30s (after university in another country), when many relations in their surroundings had already consolidated, so that the partner pool was limited. And their coping mechanisms were varied and sociologically interesting, I wonder whether this has ever been studied in any detail. It deserves to be, you have picked an interesiting subject.
And, anecdotical or not, some of those kept “artists” (I put them in quotation marks to distinguish them from people like your mother) were extremely subordinate.
And many of those women remained celibate, at least to my knowledge.
As the person who initially responded to your comment, I have a few thoughts. First of all, I’ve read enough of your posts on this board to know you’re not shallow. And in the context of this thread, your comment really made me think, to the point where I was doing online research and discussing this thread with my boyfriend this morning.
According to my online research, college graduates are more likely to couple up with other grads, particularly in cases where they’re second generation graduates. Yet I have repeatedly been attracted to men that didn’t graduate.
And I was reminded of my ex-husband’s comments on why he dropped out of college, explaining that he dreaded the thought of having to spend any more of his life sitting still in a classroom. Obviously there are myriad reasons why some men choose to graduate from college and others drop out, but wanting something more exciting than sitting around being intellectual is undoubtedly a common theme. I am a thrill-seeker who is drawn to other thrill seekers, but I find it perfectly natural and not insulting to figure that those who prefer a quieter, more introspective and intellectual lifestyle would be both more inclined to stick with higher education themselves and more inclined to be drawn to a partner with a higher degree.
New York might be tricky. But Rhode Island? Louisiana? Their rates are not much different.
Your citation is a New York Post article citing a study by a law firm?
Assume it is accurate and my response is that I am less interested in marriage as much as at least medium to long term partnering. There may be other issues that people do not choose marriage as the vehicle for that.
Interesting bit on marriage vs cohabitation rates and that tracking with race, ethnicity, and educational level.
Without generalizing too much, I think this is the female equivalent of mansplaining. Neither the husband nor the wife can believe the other knows as much about/how to do something as the spouse does, so there’s a constant stream of correction, which turns into nitpicking, which turns into outright criticism.
I don’t think the problem is unique to education levels or even inmate intelligence. I think it’s just that we all have a built in stubborn streak that tells us that my way is the right way.
The female equivalent of mansplaining is lady riddling. “Who is sexier? Me or my cat?”. (Correct answer: you are the sexiest woman and you have the sexiest cat).
Whether or not something is or isn’t mansplaining is directly proportional to how much the woman likes the man.
I think this is something both sexes do, but don’t notice when they do it. The example of telling your spouse to turn off the AC before opening a window, for instance, is not terribly different from telling your spouse to load the dishwasher with the plates over here. We all think we know the right way to do certain things.
Huh? Not my experience. Any man is capable of being a mansplainer. It’s the behavior, not the person, that bugs.
Both sexes explain things to each other all the time. Certainly it can be done with respect and without condescension. And topic choice probably matters. What woman wants to hear about menopause from their grocery store middle manager?
I contend the explanation itself is only part of the behaviour characterized as mansplaining.
I imagine it helps, but I think a lot of things help to be relatively matched in. (Before marrying my husband, I worried that we weren’t matched in outdoorsiness – he loves rock climbing and backpacking, while I am more of a hotel room kind of girl.) I believe intellectual intelligence in particular is neither sufficient nor necessary, having seen a fair few marriages now where the parties were probably not matched particularly well on intellectual intelligence and seemed to get along just fine.
I think that there are a few things that have to be true in the case of an intelligence mismatch:
I mean, I’m being a little hypocritical here because I couldn’t do it, myself, partially because I’ve been in circles that respect high-academic-achievement over everything else (these circles including my family of origin) for too many years, and partially because my own native emotional intelligence is low enough that it took me many years to figure out how valuable these other skills are. But I think that there’s a reasonable chance @Hari_Seldon 's son will be fine, if the relationship meets the above criteria.
My son is fine. The biggest thing in their 32 year marriage is that they absolutely trust each other. They both loved raising kids (4), although they are now empty nesters. But they are absolutely committed to each other.
I’m typically better educated and paid than most of the people (male or female) that I encounter. (and, I don’t “do apps”).
But, few “fresh acquaintances” know either of those things or can discern them from casual observation. E.g., I don’t dress well, don’t speak like an egghead, don’t drive an expensive vehicle, do my own “menial chores”, etc.
OTOH, I appear to be “charming” and witty/humourous – though “odd”! – in that it is relatively easy for me to engage with others. So, people (not just “partners”) tend to enjoy my company.
At the end of the day, isn’t that really what you look for in a “(life!) companion” – given that you will likely be spending a sh*tload of time with them?
My partner of 30+ years is right-brained (art) while I am left-brained (engineering). No formal education vs. my highly technical degree (and experience). Yet, we respect each others’ abilities and interests, taking extra effort to bring the other into “our own worlds” in order to facilitate meaningful dialog – as well as supporting their efforts and interests. And, showing that we’ve understood/retained those previous efforts in our future conversations on those subjects.