Agreed
Also agreed.
But calling that, and only that, “husband/wife hunting” and assuming all such cases are mercenary at best, is IMO silly, misleading, and often unjustified.
I graduated from an all-girls Catholic school on the US East Coast in 1983, and a month or so before graduation, our PE teacher came to give the ‘beloved talk’ that she gave all senior classes. Basically, she told us how university was all about catching a husband, how we should play dumb because ‘guys don’t like smart girls,’ and railed on and on about dressing up and wearing make up to be attractive to a guy. Most of the class thought it was the most wonderful talk ever; a small minority were horrified.
While I was actually in uni, I ran into a friend of my mom’s, a guy I’d really respected; when he found out I was in my second or third year of university, he laughed and said, ‘Ah, yes, going for your MRS degree, huh?’ He was serious. That was the last time I had anything to do with him.
Graduate school at UVa – I knew a young woman, couple years below me on the course, who made no secret that she was earning her PhD with no intention ever of using it – she wanted to accumulate conversational topics and tidbits for the inevitable dinnerparties she’d be hosting for her future lawyer husband (UVa has a big law school, for those who don’t know). Gah. Surely a copy of the Guinness Book of World Records would be cheaper than six years out of state, graduate school tuition?
Post grad, mid to late 90s into the 2000s, my ex and I were friends with a couple where the wife had earned an art history degree again to have interesting conversation to attract a spouse.
So, husband-hunting through university enrolment was alive and well in the '80s & '90s, anyway.
I think that for me the difference is between “people who are living their lives and at some point expect/hope to get married” and “people whose only goal in life is the eventual pre-designed marriage, and who subordinate everything to that” (not only do they want a compatible person, but that person has to meet very clearly predefined specs). The second group has a subset for whom the goal is the wedding, being close to this subset tends to be extremely unhealthy.
As it is today.
I have a niece who is a theater major and while she hopes to make a living someday in the acting world, she totally understands how difficult that is and she is honest to say her career goal is to marry a rich guy. And she’s not kidding. In fact thats kind of what her mother did.
Thing is in the acting world it is hard to hold a straight job and be able to go to auditions or say work for 3-6 months in a movie or play. You have to be in it or not.
Counterpoint: “marry for money and you’ll earn every penny.”
Counter-counter point. Never marry for money. Just hang out with successful folks until you find one you like.
Just kidding …
It’s not my cup of tea, but I can certainly see why the biological imperative would be an entirely legitimate goal in life and hard work in a career stupid by comparison.
Well, and then there is the cost of daycare which many times can equal what someone is earning.
Plus for many careers, getting ahead means long, long hours and being away from home or working odd hours. You can’t be a parent that way. Many a Mother has gone to pick her kid up from daycare at 6 pm where she dropped them off 12 hours earlier, and the kid calls the worker “Mom” and doesnt want to go home with her.
I really need to visit the Dominican Republic one of these days.
I call bullshit on the part in bold. Sounds like the standard type of fear mongering that is always directed at working mothers, that somehow never sticks to working fathers. Even if they are deployed from home months at a time, working the graveyard shift, or only seeing them every other weekend.
That isn’t to say at all that it is ideal to be sticking young kids in day care all day. Just saying more is going on at home if a kid forgets who his/her mother is just because another adult is watching over them during the day.
No, it actually happens. Kids do often bond more with a female daycare figure than their own Mothers when they have more bonding time and special moments. Remember many times when the real Mom picks the kids up from day care after a long day she is very tired so has little energy for any kind of quality time.
Shrug, my mother hid her wedding picture after my youngest brother identified the two people in it as being “Dad and Bego”, where Bego was the maid.
Mom was a SAHM, but she was also many pounds and a huge belly bigger than the woman in the picture, and Bego’s hair did look like something out of the early 60s. Yet Mom still hasn’t forgiven her son’s “betrayal” :rolleyes:
Things like calling the wrong person “Mom” are part of a normal phase of language development, when the kid still hasn’t figured out that “Mom” doesn’t mean “female caretaker” or “female caretaker in a given age range”, and that he’s not supposed to call Judy’s Mom “Mom”, even though she is indeed a Mom and Judy calls her Mom. Turning a language confusion into an emotional one is as absurd as my mother’s rage over her toddler’s confusion between two similar-looking brunettes.
I have an aunt who is positively a genius at being a mother. She could get me to behave when my mother never could, but she could also get me to be happy when my mother never could. My mother and I fought all the time, which is why my parents threw in the towel and let me live full-time with my aunt and uncle (who by this point were in another state) when I was in high school, after my aunt had taken care of me after school most days, and some weekends while my mother was finishing her Ph.D, and starting to work on her career.
My aunt gave birth to four kids, all of who are very successful, she raised me, she had a few foster kids after her youngest went to college, and ended up adopting one of her foster children, had one of her sister’s kids for a little while, and was also the place in the neighborhood that kids dropped by when no one was going to be home at their houses after school. Sometoimes it was a formal arrangement, and sometimes kids just dropped by.
But I don’t think she was ever “husband hunting.” She did get married pretty young-- 22, I think-- but that was a notmal age for marriage back then. My career-focused mother got married at 24.
In fact, my aunt was the first generation in her family to marry in the US, and the first not to have brokered marriages (albeit, I think her oldest sister did have a marriage brokered here). Her parents had a really successful brokered marriage, but they did have a courtship period, and the opportunity to consider more than one person. They just visited the shadchan with their parents, and decided with advice from their elders who to meet, and the whole families met on the first date, and when they liked each other, they had a courtship of four months or so.
Anyway, I think a lot of men probably resent the idea of being a means to an end (married life), rather than an ends in themselves (a lover and companion), and it’s hard not to blame them. “Husband hunting” sounds like you are just looking for someone who fits the suit (two Johnny Bravo references in one week!) I’d resent it to.
But considering how many people are joining Match.com, eHarmony, etc., I think it’s hard to hold the fact of it against people openly “on the hunt.”
It still feels weird to me. I kinda tripped over my husband when I wasn’t looking, though, so maybe I just can’t relate.
But a great majority of those profiles are several-paragraph-long proclamations to the world of what a unique and interesting person they are, with little or no mention of whom they want (other than “not an psycho/asshole like my ex.” Then the profiles stay up for years and years, so long as new e-mails appear in the in-box. Like grooming and fashion, its done more for ones self-esteem than for ad-hoc mating.
There are also a number of men looking for a woman who isn’t going to be ambitious, who is going to raise kids, keep house, and present a creditable impression during the corporate boondoggle that wives must attend - that is look good and make decent small talk. I’ve worked with men like that - fewer now than in the past - who wouldn’t dream of having their wives WORK.
Hopefully, these people find each other during their respective hunts.