Decoding Love - Andrew Trees [45]
HOW WOMEN CAN BE TOO SUCCESSFUL FOR THEIR OWN GOOD
Sex is not the only area where cultural feminism has run ahead of evolutionary biology. This tangled web has invaded our pocketbooks as well as our bedrooms. Remember that according to evolutionary psychologists women look both for good genes and good resources when selecting a mate. In our postfeminist world, though, more and more women are successfully pursuing high-powered careers and achieving economic success. Given this development, you would expect that these women would place much less emphasis on a man’s resources and much more on his genetic quality. But culture changes much more rapidly than evolution. Nowhere is this more evident than in a successful woman’s attitude toward how successful her future husband needs to be. It turns out that successful women don’t place less importance on a man’s financial success—they place even more emphasis on it. They still want the man to earn more than they do. In fact, injecting female success into relationships has added a new layer of instability. According to one study, when women earn more than their husbands, they are 50 percent more likely to get divorced than a couple in which the wife earns less, and divorce itself is closely linked with women’s economic independence.
This is a problem that is only likely to worsen with time. One examination of the 2005 census data has revealed that women in their twenties earn higher salaries in several major cities than their male counterparts. The reason for this is largely due to education. Fifty-three percent of these women are college graduates versus only 38 percent of men—a double whammy for women from a dating perspective since, on average, men and women prefer for the man to have an equal or greater amount of education. According to a recent New York Times article, the salary differential has become a source of hostility between men and women, and many women now downplay their success, even as they still find themselves struggling to overcome their own expectations about men being the primary breadwinners.
All of these issues were regularly voiced by the women I interviewed. One woman said that she took her title off her e-mail to avoid intimidating men, while another said that she tried not to mention her degree from Wellesley because she didn’t want to sound like “a Gloria Steinem type.” Another made a point of emphasizing certain weaknesses, such as always joking about her inability to find her keys, as a way to come across as less intelligent. And a number of women hid the fact that they owned their apartments. Success at work also creates its own identity issues. A successful marketing executive said that she had problems when she would go out on a date directly from work. At work, she had a serious, no-nonsense attitude, and she would carry this attitude into the date, which immediately turned off most men who wanted to feel that they were in control. She kept hearing from mutual friends that the men found her “intimidating.” She now goes home after work, changes clothes, and consciously tries to act more feminine and demure.
While men are hesitant to say that they are turned off by female success, most admit that it does play a role in their dating. All of the men I interviewed said that they did not like “hard-core feminists.” Most also expressed doubts about a relationship in which the woman was more successful. Only a few men would say that they were actually threatened. Most preferred to couch their concern in a more oblique way by saying that it was a sign that the woman “didn’t share my values” or “wouldn’t be a good mother.”
All of this reveals a gap that has opened up between the environment we were shaped for and the culture in which we now find ourselves. Common sense suggests that a successful working woman should be interested in a man’s genes, not his salary. Not only does she not need the money, it could be argued that going after a very successful man is counterproductive for the