Why Being Successful And Independent Will Ruin Your Marriage Prospects (And Why The Media Love To Tell You This)

Frieda Klotz, Contributor

“IT is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.”

There’s something beautiful about the hard-nosed frankness of the opening lines of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Posessions, fortune, rightful property – just in case her readers are romantics, she reminds them her themes will be marriage and money.

When it comes to marriage, little has changed since 1813 — or that is what you might be forgiven for thinking if you have been swept up in the furore over Kate Bolick’s article in the November edition of the Atlantic. Bolick tells how she rejected a series of perfectly nice suitors when she was younger. Now, at 39, she wonders if she will ever marry. She goes on to argue not only that the institution of marriage is dying, but even more worrying, that because of economic shifts, the “high-status American urban male” is becoming increasingly hard to find.

It’s ironic that in a piece examining shifting marriage trends, the attitude that comes through is that of Jane Austen’s England. Apparently in modern American society, tying the knot remains yoked to notions of money and social standing. Bolick tells readers that as women attain parity with men — they are more likely than men to go to to college and are (maybe) starting to earn similar amounts — the number of traditionally “marriageable” men is shrinking. Her high status men are all media folk: a writer, an editor, and a “prominent academic.” Status is the key term in Bolick’s choices. As Hadley Freeman put it in a typically insightful piece in the Guardian — Single Women: An American Obsession — Bolick’s take on the institution of marriage is “weirdly monetized and loveless.”

Credit to : http://www.forbes.com