Where have all the good men gone?

As one woman told me, “I want to experience everything twice, once for myself and then again, with my future husband.”

Where have all the good women gone? Are there any left.

Seriously, I happen to think there are, just as I think there are good men out there...still. It seems to me that the hunters just need to be adults in the way they engage in the hunt. I have a daughter that sort of did the head-over-heels thing with her first real flame when she went off to college. Naturally, I was somewhat anxious to meet him. He came for a visit, and the whole family met him, but generally in small groups, that is, we didn't overwhelm him by any stretch. He seemed like a decent fellow, but there was no "there" there. At that point, I saw this was going nowhere, that eventually, my daughter would have her common sense prevail.

In separate conversations I asked my older daughter and my wife what they thought. Both came to the same conclusion as did I. My wife just said she hoped my daughter would be the one to go her way first. It didn't work out that way, but they did go their separate ways.

I may be biased, but I think my daughter is a good woman. She's conservative and very willing to argue her views with anyone. I like to think she will be a little more careful in hunting a man rather than a boy the next time around.

P.S. I also think both of my daughters are lookers.

It turned out that her boyfriend needed extensive house training....She had to teach him, improve him, get him up to speed. It was exhausting.

Hey lady, your boyfriend isn't your puppy or your employee.

Girls, do yourself a huge favor. Don't try to change your boyfriend. Guys aren't handyman special starter homes, they're human beings. And by the time they're 30, what you see is what you get.

This one strikes me as another of a very large group of self-absorbed "I can have it all" women who are puzzled by the fact that their own manifest perfection doesn't draw the adulation to which they plainly consider themselves entitled. One clue is that the poor fellow who she finally got "trained" departed to give some other woman the benefits of Chris's Skinnerian experiments.

It's as if she has a checklist of things that she feels that life owes her - good job, check. Career mobility, check. House, check. Pet, check. Computer, check. Furniture, check. Unfortunately we depart philosophical company when the list includes human beings, as it all too often seems to continue: child, check. Loving, obedient, trained mate, check. What is wrong in this is that these entries assume the status of possessions, and not human beings of equal importance with checklists of their own, one item of which probably does not read: arrogant, domineering, demanding, hypercritical, bossy mate or parent whose expectations you are required to meet however high they are or however often they change, check. The husband box can always opt out; sadly, the child box cannot.

I've said it before, but it bears repeating: there are plenty of "good men left," it's just that the ones bitching about their scarcity aren't always "good women."

Don't they say that not looking is the first step?

I guess. Hasn't worked so far, but I'm open.

"As one woman told me, “I want to experience everything twice, once for myself and then again, with my future husband.”

I guess what she means is when you buy a pair of shoes you try them on first. Or something like that. I don't know what she means.

Wherever they are, I don't seem to run into them.

Sloppy seconds is never good.

She had to teach him, improve him, get him up to speed. It was exhausting.

Aeons ago, I briefly dated a woman who had that sort of attitude. I don't consort with nasty, manipulative feminist b**ches; when her true character was revealed, I told her off. I suppose she probably ended up as one of these angst-riven 32 year olds, wondering where all the good men are. The answer is: they took a second look at her and headed elsewhere.

And when a man does it, the courts track him down and garnish his wages, confiscate his tax return, revoke his driver's licenses and otherwise see to it that his responsibilities are met --even if it's not his child.

Try getting a judge to uphold a visitation order against an unwilling custodial mother.

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.

The problem is that if she finds such a man, he's almost certain to be politically conservative. He may go to church regularly, or even, horrors, own a gun.

Wherever they are, I don't seem to run into them.

Neither do I. Maybe I should walk the dog at a different hour?

southEAST Asian

All these Wonderful Women Who Can't Find Men Worthy of Them articles come from a single template.

Every couple of weeks they just tweak the names, rearrange a few paragraphs and publish it again.

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 responsible jobs as a fundraiser for Democratic women candidates and causes.

These are disqualifications for the title of "wife". Can she bake cookies, at least?



January 3, 2003

BOOKS

FROM THE ARCHIVES: January 3, 2003

High-Priced Emancipation

By MEGHAN COX GURDON

Anyone who has ever struggled to find a house to buy should intuitively understand the difficulties faced by the legions of accomplished, educated, 30ish women currently roaming society in search of a husband. They are the stuff of mass entertainment now, these handsome, quick-witted graduates of higher education. On TV, they're the saucy females of "Sex and the City" and "Will & Grace." They surface in fiction as lovelorn Bridget Jones and the hapless heroines of Pam Houston's best-selling short stories.

In real life, we all know them, for they are sisters, friends and daughters: smart girls who went to college, knocked themselves out launching impressive careers, took apartments in edgy urban areas and now, somehow, closing on 30 -- or seeing it in the rear-view mirror -- can't seem to get hitched. Some of us (ahem) barely escaped being one of these ever-questing achievers, who abound to a degree never before seen in history. Their abundance is a boon to men in search of delicious company, but it is no fun for the seekers themselves.

You are wondering why I mentioned buying a house. It's because, I have realized, an enthusiastic homebuyer and a hopeful spinster are in almost exactly analogous positions. Preparing for domesticity is at first breezy and exciting: The streets are filled with all sorts of terrific houses (and men), and the choices seem limitless. It's only when you get to the point of purchase that real estate (or romance) reveals its heart-breaking propensities.

For, in fact, you can't choose from among all houses, only those that happen to be, for whatever strange or unsavory reason, on the market. It's hard to find the mix of qualities you think you deserve. The nicest ones either cost too much or get whipped from under your nose by a more nimble purchaser. Houses with "potential" mean years of wearisome renovation. And that place with the fabulous view? It has been on the market too long; there must be something wrong with it.

Of course, most homebuyers do eventually settle on a property, and these days by age 40 most women (72%) have been married at least briefly. But the process of finding a mate is, for many educated brides, more bruising and lengthy than they ever had cause to expect. Cultural historian Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, who teaches at Rutgers University, can tell them the reason. In "Why There Are No Good Men Left" (Broadway, 210 pages, $2.95), Ms. Whitehead outlines, with impressive ideological neutrality, the massive social changes that she believes have produced, since the 1970s, these successive crops of marriageable, yet unmarried, women. [Book]

Not least among them is the Girl Project, as she calls it, the 1960s-onward effort to prepare girls for future adult lives as independent, salaried individuals whose happiness is not dependent on marriage or traditional female work. Enthusiasm for raising such daughters was heightened by the rapid spread of divorce, with its impoverishing effects on noncareer women. The Girl Project has resulted in a magnificent social promotion of young women, who now, among their other accomplishments, outnumber men at most colleges and universities. Further, it "has changed the consensus on what are socially desirable attributes and virtues of young womanhood," Ms. Whitehead writes, making sharp talk, sharp elbows and a thrusting sense of destiny commonplace among co-eds.

Crucially, the Girl Project also created a radically altered timetable for an educated woman's early adult years. Instead of college, marriage, children and, perhaps, career, the new single woman roars out of academia with no desire for romantic entanglement or expectation of it. She establishes herself in a career, takes multiple sexual partners, perhaps moves in with a boyfriend or two, and then -- well, we all know what happens. As 30 hovers into view, she begins to desire a warm home life along with the fruits of her education and work. But her upbringing, as Ms. Whitehead explains, has not prepared her for this eventuality.

In interviews with young women over the course of three years, Ms. Whitehead found that today's sophisticates have "little awareness of the social realities that influence the timing and choice of a marriage partner. They know a lot about the realities of other high-stakes selection processes -- how to choose a college or career path, for example -- but they aren't as well versed in how to go about finding the person they will spend their lives with ... . Some [have] an expectation that they [will] find their soulmate serendipitously, the way people do in the movies."

And here's where these girls get hit with the double-whammy: They've come of age at a time of what Ms. Whitehead coolly calls an "upheaval in the mating system." Dating has all but vanished from college campuses, where educated men and women used to find spouses in their own cohort. It's harder to find a mate in the fluorescent-lit office buildings and neon-lit bars of postcollege life. And traditional courtship -- stages of increasing, public, romantic seriousness, culminating in marriage -- has been substantially replaced by a cyclical "relationships" system.

What Ms. Whitehead calls the "signature union" of this system is cohabitation. Here, as in so many apparently gender-neutral arrangements, one party (in this case, the woman) is at a severe, almost punitive, disadvantage. "Living together is a great deal for a guy who wants to keep his options open as long as possible," Ms. Whitehead writes, explaining that he can enjoy many of the pleasures and advantages of marriage without committing himself. "He does not have to meet, much less, pass muster with parents, family members or friends.

And he doesn't even have to make a proposal to live together: All he has to do is spend a lot of time at her place, let his clothes, sports gear and toiletries accumulate and then wonder out loud whether it makes sense to pay two rents. And of course, when it's over, he can leave it to her to pack up his stuff. Indeed, the benefits of cohabitation for men help to explain why there is no courtship crisis for high-achieving young men." Those italics are mine, and frankly they ought to be underlined, too.

Lately I've been distributing copies of "Why There Are No Good Men Left" to the pretty college students who occasionally baby-sit for my children. Better they encounter the great social forces at work in their lives now than in five years' time. And on the strength of Barbara Dafoe Whitehead's powerful arguments, I've also found myself, in idle moments, rehearsing what I'll say to my small daughters when they hit puberty. Dating is not, I will tell them, to "experience life" but a process of finding a life-companion. And the answer to the seductive question, "Shall we live together?" should always, always be "NO."

Mrs. Gurdon is a writer in Washington.

	URL for this article: http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB1041546873193895993,00.html

Updated January 3, 2003

Are you speaking from experience? Are you married to a hooker?

Yeah, and maybe I should choose a different profession.

Yeah, and maybe I should choose a different profession.

What do you do?

She had to teach him, improve him, get him up to speed. It was exhausting.

The difference between men and women: women marry men expecting them to change and they don't; men marry women expecting them not to change and they do.

Fred is worth reading on the general topic:

To Marry Or Not

Feminists As Mutant Frumps

Against Marriage (Think About A Collie)

Why White Men Prefer Asian Women

Fred's a little curmudgeonly (but then so am I), but he makes some good points.

Marry a good Christian woman is my recommendation.