I wrote about the “special problem of intelligent women looking for love” a little while back. It picked up on what a lot of us are noticing. That women, despite being informed to the contrary, can’t have it all – career, kids and a frightfully successful career. Mostly because it means doing it all. Which is killing us. But also cos it’s disrupting age-old male-female, ying-yang dynamics.
I look around my ‘hood. Things are weird. This is what it looks like:
* lots of hot women with super careers in their 30s (at their career peak) who are single. And who’ve been single for yonks. Yep, they left settling down until after they got their career sorted…but that’s only part of the problem. Cos surely men were doing the same? And are in the same position? But, no….
* men haven’t so much disappeared as, well, changed their tactics. Around me, there are lots of single hot men in their 30s/40s… on dating frenzies, not wanting to settle down. Cos they don’t have to. Why? They have 20934 single women lunging at them, 20-year-olds through to women in their 40s. They’re Peter Pans. With too many options. They don’t have time to think about settling and committing. The frenzy of women in their immediate orbit is too distracting. Men are distracted easily by this kind of frenzy.
* BUT these men aren’t happy because they’re not being real men. They’re denied the opportunity to pursue, to go after the woman they reckon is perfect for them. That’s because they’re being pursued by women. Why? Cos everything is out of whack (women are used to chasing things and get impatient when men don’t approach, but also because the men aren’t pursuing.. cos they don’t have to….and it goes around and around). And so men feel emasculated by this. Because men are meant to be the hunters. The peacocks who do dances and display their prowess to women, to earn female trust and affection. Since the cost of partnering is higher for women, they must be fussier and sit back and weigh up their options. This is a biological imperative.
* women are equally defeminised by these contemporary shifts. Because they don’t get to be the pea-hen, pursued and courted and desired.
And so we are in gender-lock. As an old guy who does yoga down the beach in the mornings at the same time as me said last week, “It’s like men and women today aren’t even seeing each other”.
It’s true. We’re not.
Because we’re not in our feminine/ masculine power. We’re outta whack.
Anyway, a new American book “Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate and Think About Marrying” has just come out and is adding to the debate. It says:
Women are going ace-guns in their careers…but this success has come at a great cost to women’s sexual bargaining power. The upshot: we’re not pursued by men…we now do the pursuing, which tips the relationship power to men…which is not a good thing. Women should be holding the cards. It works better this way.