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My Advice to Young American Women — Don’t Get Married
At least not until you’re older, and maybe never
I was recently chatting with a friend of mine who has a life much like I do — she’s a GenXer with one child and a husband she loves and who treats her like an equal. Yet her life with her husband hasn’t quite turned out equal. They recently moved from Washington DC to Denver because he made partner in a law firm there. Meanwhile, she left her job with the Library of Congress behind. Now, she’s not sure what she’ll do. She has plenty of job prospects and lots of skills, but she’ll be starting over in a career while he’s achieved the pinnacle of his. It’s a story I hear from women all the time.
Also like me, she took some time out of the workforce to be a stay-at-home mom while freelancing part time, and her earning potential dropped like a stone in a pond. Like many women, we’re now faced with the truth that even though we’re smart, capable and have kept our professional skills up to date, were we to strike out on our own, we’d have to pare down our lifestyles to the bare minimum. Our husbands would move on comfortably, whether they decided to remarry or not.
My friends and I were raised in the 1980s with the expectation that once we graduated high school we could have it all — marriage, career, kids, comfortable lifestyle — all of it. It’s what the movies told us. It’s what our parents taught us. All the magazines and talk shows and sitcoms and even the music was about guys and gals settling down in a sunny hetero marriage and enjoying all the privileges American life looked as though it was going to offer. So we did that. Some of us got our degrees, some of us didn’t, but most of us got jobs and married and bought houses and had kids and now we realize it was all a lie — especially my female friends. Being a GenXer, I have some Boomer friends, too, and as their husbands die, I see the women finally, joyfully embarking on a life for themselves. For many of them, it’s the first time in their lives they have full control of their money and their living space, and frankly, they love it.
Of all my straight married friends and acquaintances, I can think of only one couple that would move to another state for her job as opposed to his. She’s a professional with a degree and he’s a…
