Why There Are No Good Men Left: The Romantic Plight of the New Single Woman - Softcover

Whitehead, Barbara Dafoe Jules

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0767906403 ISBN 13: 9780767906401

Verlag: Crown, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

A hard-hitting, groundbreaking exploration of the new mating conditions that are changing the face of love, commitment, and marriage as we know it.

A double revolution is at work in modern American love: A revolution in higher education has created the most professionally accomplished and independent generation of young women in history, and a revolution in mating has created a prolonged and perplexing search for Mr. Right. Based on extensive research and interviews, Why There Are No Good Men Left explores the romantic plight of this high-status woman with findings that are sure to rouse debate.

Cultural historian, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead documents the new social climate in which the demands of work, the epidemic of cohabitation, the disappearance of courtship, and the exacting standards of educated women are leading them to stay single longer–and to find the search for a mate even harder when the time is right. From the frontlines of college, where dating is dead, to the trenches of corporate solitude, Whitehead reports on a wholesale shift that has stacked the marriage deck against the best and brightest women.

The thirty-something, perplexed single woman is today’s new cultural icon. Why There Are No Good Men Left is the first book to take a serious approach to analyzing where she came from and to ask how she can realize her dreams of lasting love.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Award-winning journalist BARBARA DAFOE WHITEHEAD writes about social issues for numerous national publications. She holds a Ph.D. in American social history from the University of Chicago and currently serves as the codirector of the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University. The author of The Divorce Culture, she lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.

"From the Hardcover edition.

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Christina is 31, slim, pretty, a younger and darker-haired Annette Bening. The daughter of a professor and an artist, she grew up in a family where books, politics, and international sabbaticals filled her early life. After attending an elite boarding school in New England, she went off to college where she got interested in women’s political issues and began to work in campaigns. In the years following college, she moved into progressively more respon-sible jobs as a fund raiser for Democratic women candidates and causes. At the time we meet, she is working as the director of an international relations consulting group with an income in the high five figures. Yet there’s one nagging source of discontent in her otherwise contented and accomplished life. As we chat over plates of mushroom ragout in a trendy Washington restaurant, she says ruefully: “I’m always getting involved with Mr. Not Ready.”

Christina’s last Mr. Not Ready was someone she thought she might end up marrying. They were in a relationship for three years. She followed him from the West Coast to Washington so that they could be together, and soon after they moved in together. But only a short time later, she regretted the decision. It turned out that her boyfriend needed extensive house training. Their story was Pygmalion in reverse. Instead of My Fair Lady, it was My Fair Laddie. She had to teach him, improve him, get him up to speed. It was exhausting.

Plus, he wasn’t a very fast learner. When they first moved in together, they agreed to divide the housework equally. In the kitchen, they decided, she would cook and he would clean up. But he didn’t live up to his part of the deal. “He pretended to do dishes,” she says, bristling with fresh indignation. “I would come into the kitchen the next morning and find dishes still sitting there in cold, greasy water.” After three months, she had had enough of his helplessness, feigned or otherwise. She dumped him. He still called from time to time to ask for her advice. But she was sick of being his mother and
mentor.

Then, to her annoyance and dismay, she found out that her Mr. Not Ready had turned into Mr. Ready. With someone else! He was ready to make commitments to his new girlfriend. Ready to follow her to another state where she had a job. Ready to give her an engagement ring. She had spent three years of her life in a relationship that she thought would lead to marriage or at least to a long-term relationship. She had trained the guy. And now her investment was paying off for someone else.

Even more depressingly, Christina’s women friends were vanishing into marriages. Her social life seemed to be dedicated to going to parties for soon-to-be-married girlfriends. Each year passed with another round of bridal showers, bachelor girl bashes, weddings, and receptions, until finally Christina realized that she was being seated at the cousins’ table at weddings. If that weren’t reminder enough of her lack of romantic success, her mother kept asking why she wasn’t married yet. Christina panicked. She decided to take a break from relationships to give herself time to de-stress, to get therapy, and to think about what she really wanted to do with her life. She gave up dating for a year.

All this happened just as Christina turned 30. By that age, she had expected to be married herself. Instead, she had already been in and out of relationships with seven different Mr. Not Readys. Her heart had been broken four times. It didn’t make sense. Here she was, a woman who set goals for herself, met deadlines, accomplished all the things on her professional “To Do” list, and yet she had missed a major “To Do” in her life.

What made Christina’s situation even more perplexing was that she seemed to have all the qualifications for romantic success. She was pretty, smart, and accomplished. She worked out and stayed in shape. She was independent. It wasn’t as if she were looking for someone to take care of her. Maybe she came across as a little intimidating, but the right kind of guy should be attracted to her confidence and competence, shouldn’t he? Yet, clearly, something was wrong. At 30, her job resumé looked a lot more impressive than her romantic resumé. Time after time, it seemed, she’d been promoted in work and pink-slipped in love.

Christina is one of those perfectionist, pulled-together, Type A young women who can make other women, even those like me who are nearly twice her age, feel slightly discombobulated and disarrayed, as if we might have lipstick on our teeth or sleep in our eyes. She exudes confidence and control. Yet despite her crisp look and executive manner, she becomes younger and softer as she talks about her romantic desires. She is a woman who can do practically anything she wants on her own, but she doesn’t want to be alone for her entire life. Though she’s dedicated herself to feminist causes, she isn’t hostile to men or marriage, like some professional feminists of the ’60s. She isn’t looking for a man to take care of her, but she wants to find a man who will care about her and share her life.

When Christina was in her early 20s, she didn’t think much about how to find someone to marry. She knew that she wanted to be married someday but she wasn’t ready to jump into such a big commitment at that point in her life. She needed to accomplish some things for herself and gain some life experience before settling down. Her parents had married at a young age, and their marriage didn’t last. So she wanted to be mature enough to make a wise choice.

At 31, after taking a year’s sabbatical from relationships, she decided to focus on the search for a husband. By now, she knows what she is looking for. Her standards are high but certainly not impossible: she wants to find a man who is physically attractive and takes good care of his body, enjoys his career but isn’t career-obsessed, pursues interests outside of his work life and isn’t boring, and dedicates himself to being faithful, loving, and kind. But finding such a man is turning out to be more difficult than she once imagined. For one thing, true love doesn’t happen as naturally or inevitably as she once thought. Up until the time she turned 30, Christina believed that finding someone to marry was the one thing in her life that she didn’t have to work at or plan for. She thought that Mr. Right would come along in the natural course of events. But that hasn’t happened, and she isn’t sure how to make it happen.

A New Life Stage

Women like Christina barely existed just a few decades ago. In 1960, a college-educated woman who was in her late 20s or early 30s, and “still single” as she would have been described back then, was a rarity. She represented a miniscule 1.6 percent of all women ages 25 to 34. In the entire country at the time, there were only 185,000 such women, a population roughly the size of the current population of Fort Wayne, Indiana. Today, however, she’s become a far more prominent figure on the social map. College-educated singles now make up 28 percent of all women ages 25 to 34. Their numbers have risen to 2.3 million, equal to the population of four Bostons. 1

This new single woman has emerged in greater numbers as the result of a confluence of two social trends. One is later age of entry into first marriage. Young women today are marrying at older ages than at any time in the past century. Moreover, the most dramatic changes in the age of first marriage have occurred in recent decades. Thus, over the past 30 years, the proportion of women who are single during the traditional “marrying years” has risen...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Crown
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2003
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0767906403
• ISBN 13: 9780767906401
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 224
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland