Considerations

A Boston Globe Mag­a­zine arti­cle on mar­riage and divorce in mod­ern times con­tains this inter­est­ing obser­va­tion in a world of dat­ing ser­vice, dat­ing web­sites, and a dat­ing agency:

Aca­d­e­mics, ther­a­pists, and divorce attor­neys say that for young, child­less cou­ples where both par­ties are edu­cated, employed, and capa­ble of finan­cial inde­pen­dence, emo­tional ful­fill­ment tends to out­rank other rea­sons to get mar­ried to a degree that would have been almost unimag­in­able for their par­ents or grand­par­ents. Today, emo­tional ful­fill­ment may be the only rea­son to marry — and the lack of it can mean the end of a marriage.

Women, I’ll admit, make most of the deci­sions in the dat­ing scene. Men will gen­er­ally express an inter­est in all women who are above a cer­tain level of attrac­tive­ness (though other fac­tors can come into play), but women are the ones who choose which men they will con­sider out of those who express an inter­est. Women are the gatekeepers.

I have no data to sup­port this argu­ment, but I’ve always thought that the qual­i­ties that Amer­i­can women want have changed since, say, the 1950s. Before fem­i­nism open the doors to the cor­po­rate world, women needed secu­rity above all else. They needed men – more specifically, successful wage earn­ers – to achieve this end. So, there­fore, women tended to fall in love with men who would pro­vide that secu­rity. (Love is not blind — peo­ple tend to fall in love with those who have spe­cific cri­te­ria pre­vi­ously deter­mined by their sub­con­cious minds. I once heard it deemed “falling in love with a frame­work.”) Today, how­ever, every­thing has changed. Women, with increased access to higher edu­ca­tion and the cor­po­rate world, can now take care of them­selves. This, of course, is a ben­e­fi­cial out­come – no per­son, except in the obvi­ous case of a child, should have to be com­pletely depen­dent on another.

Still, this real­ity has rewrit­ten the rules of the dat­ing scene. Women no longer need men; they merely want men. Women can afford to be more picky and stricter gate­keep­ers. As the Globe arti­cle notes, “emo­tional ful­fill­ment” — a vague term, of course — is now the pri­mary cri­te­rion. After all, women tend to “feel” while men tend to “think.”

But, here is the question: is an emo­tional high brought about by hor­mones and a partner’s phys­i­cal attrac­tive­ness enough to sus­tain a rela­tion­ship in long run? Or do long-term rela­tion­ships need some­thing else to last?

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