But a reader sent us an article from The Wall Street Journal (of all places) that talks about the relationship between dating and marriage in the aughts.
The author, Hannah Seligson (who seems to have published her own book called A Little Bit Married: How to Know When It's Time to Walk Down the Aisle or Out the Door), argues that women in our generation have trouble tying the knot because the dating world has become a lawless jungle, and there’s no clear path that leads to the altar.
Here are some highlights:
Society's messages to young women are so mixed that the path to that goal has been obscured and, at times, blocked. Those of us in our 20s and 30s know that dating—and getting into a relationship that leads to marriage—is at turns ambiguous, arduous, perplexing and often heartbreaking.
So why are "Marry Him" and "Committed" flying off the shelves? Because they do what all popular books on the subject have done over the years, decades and even centuries: They lay out rules, treating love, romance and relationships as if they are quantifiable and controllable. To be a young, single woman looking to settle down today is to be in the Wild West of dating history. Daters are ravenous for advice to order the chaos.
Ms. Seligson eventually concludes that there are no hard and fast rules that can help young women conquer the dating world, and that these books only emotionally berate their readers so that when a girl’s done reading the book, she’ll jump on the next penis that looks twice, and, viola, success story.
We agree with Ms. Seligson’s latter point, but on the former, she’s dead wrong.
In concluding that the rules have changed, she perpetuates a pervasive misconception: that human nature has somehow evolved in the last thirty years.
In Ms. Seligson’s world, things were easier for our mothers. When our parents were dating, guys always had one eye on the altar. Now they see marriage as the first day of the end of their lives.
Things may have changed, but it wasn’t because someone hit a magical switch when we entered the new millennium.
Before women’s lib, girls were expected to be chaste and virginal. They went on chaperoned dates. And while they may not have described their behavior as “playing hard to get,” that’s exactly what they were doing. Most guys made marriage a priority because it was the easiest way to get their girlfriends to have sex with them.
After women started staying in school and pursuing careers, they probably put less emphasis on finding a husband. Sure, they might have partaken in free love, but they were also performing surgery and buying expensive cars with their own paychecks, and this was all huge. Marriage isn’t going to seem like the biggest priority to a generation that’s consistently shattering glass ceilings on gender lines, and so they, too, were making guys work for it.
But now most girls enter kindergarten expecting to have a career, and suddenly marriage is a priority again. But because chastity isn’t (and because the media’s constantly telling us that the best way to win a man is to fall in love with him), men have it easier than ever before.
They can sleep with a woman without promising to marry her (and without fear of impregnating her). Girls rearrange their schedules to give them blowjobs. Sure, they might want to get married eventually, but marriage doesn’t provide the advantages that it used to.
And so the “rules” for navigating this new world are actually quite simple. And women do need to hear them. They need to do what women have been doing for generations: They need to play hard to get.
While the books Ms. Seligson discusses certainly seem to offer terrible advice, the concept of dating advice for women is far from flawed.
We just need better teachers.