1. No one is good enough. Read: no one good enough found them attractive and gave them a tumble.
2. The modern "I can make it on my own" paradigm.
By the time some of these women figure out that both of these scenarios lead to loneliness and unfulfillment, it's too late.
I have a female friend who married after college. The guy was a philandering dolt and she divorced him. She wanted to be a career woman and worked hard eventually leaving her firm and becoming a consultant.
Now, consultancy has dried up. She is 53, has had to take an office job (bye-bye "career woman") and is past child-bearing age. Over the years, she dated lots of guys, but always was probing the upper echelons of income even though she was not a member of the gentry. These guys got what she had to give and dropped her, but she was still looking for the brass ring - Mr. Perfect with a high six-figure or even seven-figure salary, a fancy home, a vacation house, etc. She never found him even though she has finally pronounced herself ready to marry again.
So, now she is alone, childless, working to pay off debt and aging rapidly. She bought the lie of feminism: "You can have it all." No one has it all. We only get parts of it and have to make sacrifices to get those.
I was chastised by many in my youth for impulsively committing to a handsome man 6 yrs my senior. Whirlwind courtship - brief engagement before the wedding.
The babies starting coming very quickly and quite often.
I pretty much broke all the “feminist” rules.
At times I doubted my own choices - it wasn’t easy, and we were not as financially secure as our career-oriented friends.
Now that we’re in “middle age”...I’m not regretting it at all.
Sure...we could use more money and larger saving accounts - but I’m still not regretting it.
The actual factor here is one the author of this piece is quite incapable of recognizing.
Historically, women always expected to “marry up,” to marry a man higher in status, income and power. What was “missing” with the guy she dumped was that he wasn’t “up” enough.
When the status scale for women was aligned so that the male scale was higher than the female across the board, this was roughly practicable for most women.
As women, especially the women described in this article, rose in status, there were fewer and fewer men who were even higher up the scale. And since men have always been happy to marry down, many of them married gorgeous trophy wife types from farther down the social scale, bypassing these women entirely.
IOW, the real problem is not the sexual revolution as such, it’s the leveling of status for men and women. I suspect there are plenty of men for these women, if they were willing to consider equal-status or lower-status men as mates, but they aren’t.
Because they’re alpha females (or think they are) they believe they deserve an even higher-status alpha male. And there just aren’t that many of those around.
There’s a catch in the “career woman” scenario that I
saw on Laura Wood’s Thinking Housewife blog IIRC. Once
the woman reaches 40+ she gets pushed out all too often.
[yes, there is age discrimination against men too, I am
well aware]
I worked with a woman who was single and headed toward 50 who dropped a guy that she actually really had fun with and a lot in common. Her reason... he was two inches shorter than her and his hands were smaller than hers. I ran into her at a business networking event this year and she is now dating a married man who lives with her instead of his wife. He is a Catholic. He apparently feels he is committing a less grave sin by committing adultery than if he were to divorce his wife of 30 plus years. Crazy????