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24 February 2007
Nice article about how things are getting better for everyone. So the doomsayers are wrong. Educated men and women are more likely to marry and less likely to divorce than others. And guess what? They have better sex lives, too.
Heh. Yeah, I realized after I posted that it could come across that way. Just meant it more as a "Yay, women for kicking ass, and yay, men for being strong enough to like kick-ass women."
I figured. Although me and pips would confound the stats. She's the one with a Masters and she's been divorced and is now married (after 10 year relationship) to a guy with a high school diploma and two desultory years of college. I love being a statistical monkeywrench.
Don't they talk about that at the end? How women are always warned that if they are more educated than the guys they date, they'll never find a husband, but statistics are starting to show that changing, too?
Yeah, here:
Psychologist Rosalind Barnett of Brandeis University and journalism professor Caryl Rivers of Boston University have found that 42 percent of college-educated married women who work outearn their partners, and their marriages are just as stable as those in which the husband makes more than his wife. In fact, Barnett's new study of dual-earner couples, based on data from the 1990s, found that as the wife worked more, the husband's view of the quality of his marriage actually improved. Surveys also show that the longer a woman holds a job, the more child care and housework her husband is likely to do, and that well-educated men have increased their housework more than less-educated ones.
Though I guess that doesn't address the education gap you're talking about. They talk a bit about women with graduate degrees no longer marrying less than women without, though.
Now that I think about it, my mom has a BA, and my Dad has only a high school diploma (gotten in night school, he had to drop out to work, then he got drafted) and they've been together almost 38 years. Also, my high school crush (unrequited) is a professor now, and my college girlfriend has a Ph. D. (she's also married to my college drinking buddy, but that's a whole other saga).For a relatively unlearned guy, I seem to have a fatal bent for the lettered broads.
My last long-term boyfriend had a high school diploma, and I have a J.D. But, um, that relationship failed, so I guess I'm not really making any kind of point.
Hrrrm. As an over educated person, with partners who have certainly been educated but not overly so, I'd be inclined to say that it's a trade off - I can over brain stuff, but The Other can Get Things Done - that's real smart, not book smart.
I don't consider myself an intellectual or highly educated. But as a married woman, I can relate to many points in the article. Yay for ass-kicking women and the men that love them.
Between this article and the announcement that rape has decreased, especially among younger men, I'm feeling very heartened that we're doing stuff right.
Smart women rock! I love that my wife is smarter and more creative and organized than I am. Life would be so boring to be married to someone who wasn't.
I'll be completely honest. My husband is smarter than I am. In every way. I'm cool with it though. And no, I don't go around telling him that I believe that. I'm not that stupid. :)
(well, I'll spill the beans. pips is more educated than me, older and makes more money. she just keeps me around as eye candy. I spend my time on the patio in a swimsuit drinking cocktails and doing my nails. I'm a trophy husband.)
LoriFLA, I think it's easiest to do studies with concrete measures like educational level or whatever, but obviously those measures aren't required to be a kick-ass woman. I'd like to think these studies show that kick-ass women of any and all types, graduate education or no, are finding kick-ass men, and that those kick-ass men and those kick-ass women are making each other happy.
George was much more intelligent than me, but had dropped out of college to become a hippie (well, it was 1969, after all, I'd have probably done the same).
My ex-husband had no academic qualifications, but was very well read. And he had a Ph.D in lying too, I learned to my cost.
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