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…
