A Little Valentine’s Day Straight Talk. By Susan Patton. Wall Street Journal, February 13, 2014.
Advice for the Young Women of Princeton: Find a Husband. By Susan A. Patton. NJBR, April 1, 2013. With related articles, video, and audio.
Susan Patton, “Princeton Mom,” Is Back: An Academic Takedown of Her Many Misguided Arguments. By Nina Bahadur. The Huffington Post, February 14, 2014.
Dear Susan Patton, Single Women Don’t Need Your “Straight Talk.” By Emma Gray. The Huffington Post, February 14, 2014.
The End of “Marriageability?” By Robert VerBruggen. Real Clear Policy, February 14, 2014.
The 11 best quotes from Susan Patton’s new book. By Urvija Banerji and Anna Mazarakis. The Prox, March 3, 2014.
The 10 Worst Pieces of Advice From Susan Patton’s “Marry Smart.” By Claire Fallon. The Huffington Post, March 6, 2014.
14 Questions for Princeton Mom Susan Patton. By Emily Levy. Vocativ, March 7, 2014.
Susan Patton interview. By Rabbi Joseph Potasnik (her cousin) and Deacon Kevin McCormack. Audio. Religion on the Line. 77 WABC Radio, March 9, 2014. Interview starts at 77:40 in the podcast.
Elites Close Ranks Around Ivy League Intermarriage. By Walter Russell Mead. NJBR, April 7, 2013. With related articles.
Katty Kay: Marriage Is “Old Fashioned” If You Want to Have Kids. NJBR, April 18, 2013. With video.
Sex on Campus: She Can Play That Game, Too. By Kate Taylor. NJBR, July 17, 2013. With related articles.
Patton:
Another
Valentine's Day. Another night spent ordering in sushi for one and mooning over
“Downton Abbey” reruns. Smarten up, ladies.
Despite
all of the focus on professional advancement, for most of you the cornerstone
of your future happiness will be the man you marry. But chances are that you
haven’t been investing nearly as much energy in planning for your personal
happiness as you are planning for your next promotion at work. What are you
waiting for? You’re not getting any younger, but the competition for the men
you’d be interested in marrying most definitely is.
Think
about it: If you spend the first 10 years out of college focused entirely on
building your career, when you finally get around to looking for a husband you’ll
be in your 30s, competing with women in their 20s. That's not a competition in
which you’re likely to fare well. If you want to have children, your biological
clock will be ticking loud enough to ward off any potential suitors. Don't let
it get to that point.
You
should be spending far more time planning for your husband than for your
career—and you should start doing so much sooner than you think. This is especially
the case if you are a woman with exceptionally good academic credentials,
aiming for corporate stardom.
An
extraordinary education is the greatest gift you can give yourself. But if you
are a young woman who has had that blessing, the task of finding a life partner
who shares your intellectual curiosity and potential for success is difficult.
Those men who are as well-educated as you are often interested in younger, less
challenging women.
Could
you marry a man who isn’t your intellectual or professional equal? Sure. But
the likelihood is that it will be frustrating to be with someone who just can’t
keep up with you or your friends. When the conversation turns to Jean Cocteau
or Henrik Ibsen, the Bayeux Tapestry or Noam Chomsky, you won’t find that
glazed look that comes over his face at all appealing. And if you start to earn
more than he does? Forget about it. Very few men have egos that can endure what
they will see as a form of emasculation.
So what’s
a smart girl to do? Start looking early and stop wasting time dating men who
aren’t good for you: bad boys, crazy guys and married men.
College
is the best place to look for your mate. It is an environment teeming with
like-minded, age-appropriate single men with whom you already share many
things. You will never again have this concentration of exceptional men to
choose from.
When
you find a good man, take it slow. Casual sex is irresistible to men, but the
smart move is not to give it away. If you offer intimacy without commitment,
the incentive to commit is eliminated. The grandmotherly message of yesterday
is still true today: Men won’t buy the cow if the milk is free.
Can you
meet brilliant, marriageable men after college? Yes, but just not that many of
them. Once you’re living off campus and in the real world, you’ll be stunned by
how smart the men are not. You’ll no doubt meet some eligible guys in your
workplace, but it’s hazardous to get romantically involved with co-workers.
You may
not be ready for marriage in your early 20s (or maybe you are), but keep in
touch with the men that you meet in college, especially the super smart ones.
They’ll probably do very well for themselves, and their desirability will only
increase after graduation.
Not all
women want marriage or motherhood, but if you do, you have to start listening
to your gut and avoid falling for the P.C. feminist line that has misled so
many young women for years. There is nothing incongruous about educated,
ambitious women wanting to be wives and mothers. Don’t let anyone tell you that
these traditional roles are retrograde; they are perfectly natural and even
wonderful. And if you fail to identify “the one” while you’re in college, don’t
worry—there’s always graduate school.
Gray:
It’s
Valentine's Day. I’m single, I’m a college graduate, I’m 26 and I’ve spent the
last four years tirelessly working to advance my career as an editor. According
to “Princeton Mom,” Susan Patton, tonight I’ll probably be crying into my
Seamless-ordered sushi and tomorrow I need to buck up and find a damn husband.
On
behalf of the vast majority of single women that I know – who are, as Patton so
quaintly put it, “not getting any younger” – I’d like to tell her: “Thanks, but
no thanks.” Your so-called “straight talk” isn’t doing those in your target
demographic any favors.
Of
course, this is not the first time the 1977 Princeton grad has argued that “career
women” are wasting their youth on caring about their jobs, that the only good
men out there can exclusively be found in your undergraduate university
classes, and that being deeply passionate about (and loving) your work is
mutually exclusive with being deeply passionate about finding love and a life
partner. She's already made this argument twice, but I suppose that a holiday
dedicated to Hallmark cards, ostentatious shows of affection and overpriced
prix-fixe dinners is as good a time as any for her to push out her drivel of a
message once again – and shill for her upcoming book.
To the
Susan Pattons of the world, I want to make the following very clear about
single women in their 20s and 30s:
1. Most of us are looking for love.
As many
single women can attest, there is a vast gulf between being open to love and
going on dates, and actually finding a person who you mesh with, who you care
about and who cares about you. The women I know put aside time out of their
busy weeks to date and to push themselves into new situations where they might
meet potential love interests. We sign up for Tinder and Hinge and OKCupid and
JDate, half out of boredom, but, ultimately, with an air of hopefulness. With each
swipe or like or match we wonder whether this will be the one that works – and
often, it’s not. (The same can be said for all of the wonderful and
not-so-wonderful potential partners we met during our college years. I don’t
believe that the men I met when I was 20 are any more “marriage material” than
the men I meet now.)
We
enter relationships and end said relationships when they are not right, we
endure heartbreaks and bad dates, and also have great sex and great stories.
Some of us find someone we think we'd like to be with for a very long time
during these years – and some of us don’t. Both are fine outcomes, and most
people do not end up in one camp or the other because they did or did not try
hard enough to “plan for a husband.”
2. We also are dedicating considerable time
and energy to our careers – but it’s not a waste of time.
Not
only do most of the single women I know love their jobs, find fulfillment in
said jobs and cannot imagine leading lives that did not include a career, but
also, for most of us, work is and will always be a necessity for survival. Even
recognizing women who would prefer not to work after marriage, most of us will
not marry a partner who can afford to take on the full financial burden of his
family. As of May 2013, 4 in 10 American households with young children had
female breadwinners. And single, childless women in urban centers are on their
way to out-earning their male counterparts. But none of this means that these
women will be forced to opt out of marriage because they’ve spent time
advancing their careers and are making decent salaries. In fact,
highly-educated, successful women are just as likely to get married (if not
more so) than other women, they just tend to do it a few years later.
3. Having – and enjoying -- sex does not
prevent us from finding true connection.
“Men
won’t buy the cow if the milk is free,” Patton writes, sounding more out of
touch than I thought was humanly possible. I know women who have slept with men
right away thinking it would be completely casual, and ended up marrying those
men years down the road. I know women who did everything “right” and by “the
rules” with a potential partner and ended up dumped. I have heard (and
experienced) nearly every iteration in between. Sex is complicated and means
something different to every person. It absolutely can make or break a
relationship, but not because you messed up and “gave it away”too early. And
honestly, any man who would lose interest in me right after we slept together,
is probably not a man I’d want to commit myself to legally for the rest of my
life, anyway. Plus, 95 percent of American couples who make the trip down the
aisle have slept together far before their wedding night.
4. We don’t devalue marriage or motherhood.
And a lot of us still want those things.
Let’s
be clear: being a feminist does not, as Patton implies, mean believing that
there is something “incongruous about educated, ambitious women wanting to be
wives and mothers.” Most of the single – and married – women I am close with
identify as feminists and consider themselves to be thoroughly modern and
empowered. None of them think that being a wife or a mother is a bad thing,
some don’t want to be either wives or mothers, and many are single and still
want both. Not spending every waking moment wishing for an MRS. degree or
looking at every new man who enters our lives as a potential sperm donor, doesn’t
preclude a desire to find a life partner or have a baby.
But the
most important thing you need to understand, Susan Patton, is that we single
women choose not to define our ultimate worth by our relationship status. Yes,
we are single. Yes, we are spending Valentine’s Day without a romantic partner
(probably not crying into our takeout sushi). We may or may not feel satisfied
with those things. But we are also so, so much more.
