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In Zandria's recent BlogHer post, When do you consider yourself off the market? she linked to a post from Moxie who stated: "It's my opinion that men do not date with the intention of settling down. They date for companionship. Whereas women date to settle down. We reach that end goal emotionally and mentally long before men do." I have a different take on this common perception.
Historically speaking, men and women were taught a game - maybe it even came from who we were in our earliest times. The game was, women want to settle down and men want to be free. So women had to weld their feminine wiles to trap a man. And a man was always a little wild; it was the woman who wanted home and stability and family. Of course, this wasn't actually true of everyone, but most everyone felt like they had to play the game.
Not actually the basis for truly happy people and relationships, although the divorce taboo kept many families together anyway.
Go forward in time to now: Many, many women have more choices than ever before, AND many, many women aren't being given a script from the moment they pop out of the womb. Many women are being told to look inward and consider who they really are and want they really want at any given moment in time.
Were we really surprised that many women like sex and casual fun, too? Were we really surprised to find that many women are naturally ambitious and intelligent and natural leaders?
Well, I guess some of us were.
I live in Los Angeles, Calif. where lots people are very, very free, socially speaking. And I feel that the natural change in women when presented with freedom and options does cause a difficult transition period for society. Surely, I have sat at a table with men and women, where a man has pronounced, "I don't date women over 25 (30, 35) because they all want serious relationships and to get married and have kids." Meanwhile, most of the women around the table are looking at him blankly like, "Dude, seriously?" That's a really sweeping sentence, and sometimes I just have to laugh at all the different ages that's been "true" about me as a woman. Poor guy.
Many men find themselves still playing this game - only to find that many of the women in their dating pool aren't playing the other side anymore. Nobody's looking to trap them. You want to live a casual lifestyle? That's cool. Plenty of women do, too.
Women's side of the transition is that when you do get to that point where you're ready to settle down and have a family, society is only so eager to cry stereotype. Aha! Another woman looking to trap a man so she can have children! We knew that's what women always want all along!
Many women are so terrified of losing their hard won individuality and becoming easily categorized and dismissed as a "woman" and a "mother" that they run from relationships and/or choose to stay single. There is this phenomenon where you feel that you were allowed to be free until the moment you say "yes" and suddenly you're supposed to spend all your time planning a wedding and the traditional stereotypes crash down around you like prison walls - which only prepares you for a world where you still do most of the housework and the childcare and you're totally marginalized as a "mother."
But I digress into my terror zone, sorry.
So now we have men who no one wants to trap and women who feel they can't settle down without losing themselves. How will our world ever go on?
Certainly some people point to this as a broken system and advocate a return to gender stereotypes. The freedom of half of humanity be damned.
But a funny thing happened on our way to extinction. It turns out, men aren't dumb animals.
OF COURSE men want to settle down and have families, and what's happening to many men in their 30s and 40s in Los Angeles is that they are realizing that they are going to have to own their wants and desires. They're going to have to stop playing cool if a relationship and a family is what they want. I suspect that many men in their 20s don't even have to go on this journey - they are already learning to own what they want out of life when they want it, just as many women are.
