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Forbes.com has recently published the article "Don't Marry Career Women" by Michael Noer on its website. Among the "purely statistical" reasons for avoiding the fairer, more-career-oriented sex given in this informative piece of reporting are the following:
1. You're more likely to get divorced.
2. She's more likely to cheat on you.
3. Your house will be dirtier.
4. You're more likely to fall ill.
The first time I read the article, I was completely and thoroughly offended. What decade are we living in, again? I thought that we were past all this-wait, I thought we were, perhaps, past such a blatant display of "all this." Aren't feelings such as the ones this article espouses supposed to be subtly and insidiously expressed by women themselves in endless tomes debating the advantages of contemporary stay-at-home motherhood? I was never so naïve as to assume that the playing field had been leveled, but I had previously thought that men (other than freaky, right-wing Christian men-for which there is no hope) had wisely gone to listen to emo on the monkey bars while the doyennes of girly feminism fought it out with rickety second-wavers in the sandbox.
Apparently I was wrong-much more wrong than I thought. Admittedly, whatever the hell wave of feminism that we're on at this point has done little to alter the dominant hegemony of this country, or the world. At the very least, though, I thought that women had perhaps changed the way that the hegemons thought of them-at home. I mean come on! Think of all the successful baby boomer men who got over themselves and married women who poured out of previously all-male colleges in droves, eager to prove their mettle and raise children and damn the status quo, right? Aren't most of them divorced?
And perhaps re-married to a variety of age appropriate (or inappropriate) women who don't really do very much while their ex-wives throw away the eighties-era power suits and start doing yoga and finding themselves, in the meantime discovering that every man their age is unavailable or gay?
Once I got over being offended, though, I started thinking. What if Forbes.com is right? What if marrying a career woman is bad news? Chick Lit authors would certainly agree, seeing as the majority of their heroines are underpaid media employees with great shoes and a yen for an i-banker. The ladies of Sex in the City would certainly agree, seeing as Miranda had to forfeit her career as a partner in a successful law firm in order to really appreciate her bartender boyfriend Steve and their newborn baby. My father (and, it goes without saying, the fathers of all my friends) would certainly agree, seeing as he's remarried to a woman whose chief role in life is to make sure that he's as pristinely taken care of as possible while dallying about in the arts. And as for his best friend-oh, he's still married to his college sweetheart, but she never really worked anyway. The proof is in the pudding, as they say, and fortunately Martha (single and divorced for-of all people-our "zipless fuck" friend Erica Jong) has a homemade recipe.
As an under-employed female with indistinct career plans, what does all this mean for me? I guess I'm the marrying type.
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