The New Eve - Lewis Robert [17]
Issue 3: Successfully Engaging a Man
If engaging a man feels as if it has become more difficult, it has! Stephanie Coontz, the author of a comprehensive book on the history of marriage, says, “Relations between men and women have changed more in the past thirty years than they did in the previous three thousand.”7 Traditional relational pathways have become tangled and confused. Polls indicate the greatest pessimism women have today is about their love lives. Single women around me keep asking, “Where have all the men gone?” They are frustrated and bewildered at the timidity and passivity of modern men. A recurring complaint is that men no longer take the initiative. They seem to run from it as if from an infectious disease.
On many college campuses “the date” is becoming extinct. New York Times columnist David Brooks shares the following personal encounter he recently had with a group of students. “One night over dinner at a northern college, a student from the South mentioned that at her local state university, where some of her friends go, they still have date nights on Friday. The men ask the women out, and they go as couples. The other students at the dinner table were amazed. The only time many young people have ever gone out on a formal date was their high school senior prom. You might as well have told them that in some parts of the country there are knights on horseback jousting with lances.”8 More and more with men, young women are having to step forward first to make the call, take the lead, and be the pacesetter in the relationship.
Women are also changing the ways they engage men. Casual sex is up; so is living together. So is having a family without a man. Today a record 37 percent of all new moms are unwed, many by choice. The most dramatic increase is with women in their twenties. “More American women than ever are putting motherhood before matrimony,” reported Newsweek writers Debra Rosenberg and Pat Wingert.9
Unmarried women are today's fastest-growing demographic.10 And when you do meet a man you desire to commit to, what are the rules of engagement that will make the relationship last? Do you know? Does he agree? What are the roles, yes roles, you will play in your new life together? If you think they will be the same, think again. The so-called fifty-fifty arrangement is always in the eye of the beholder. What you say is my fifty, I may feel is my eighty and vice versa. Who keeps score?
So what are the conditions that bring a man and a woman together in happiness? A host of problems arise when you don't know. That's why we are going to tackle this important issue in chapters 10 and 11.
Issue 4: The Challenge of Motherhood
What does it take to be a good mother, especially when a career is mixed in? The “mommy wars” pitting working women against homemakers has marked the deep divide that exists over this issue. It's one loaded with hard choices, intense feelings of guilt (real or imagined), personal ambitions, and economic necessities. We will address this issue at length in chapters 4, 7, and 8.
Being a mother is like being a nurse, chef, guidance counselor, mediator, teacher, playmate, policeman, and air traffic controller all rolled into one. If stay-at-home moms struggle to fit all this into a single day, mothers who work full-time outside the home face even greater challenges. The hardest-working people anywhere are career women who double as moms. A USA Today poll revealed that 60 percent of working mothers would choose to stay at home if their financial situation permitted it.11 But financial concerns often rule this out. Today 60 percent of women with children under the age of six are working outside the home, the very time when social scientists and child psychologists tell us that children need maximum attention and nurturing from their moms to