There is a piece in the WSJ, that is doing the rounds on the internet. It featured a photograph of an attractive woman saying, dating is ‘the only thing you can put 10,000 hours into and end up right where you started.’ The piece revealed she has since found herself a boyfriend.
“Many of the men Katie met, she said, either seemed turned off by her ambition or weren’t career-oriented enough for her. She felt discouraged by just how many of her male friends similarly said they expect their future wives to prioritize their families over their jobs.”
“American women have never been this resigned to staying single. They are responding to major demographic shifts, including huge and growing gender gaps in economic and educational attainment, political affiliation and beliefs about what a family should look like.
The share of women ages 18 to 40 who are single—that is, neither married nor cohabitating with a partner—was 51.4% in 2023, according to an analysis of census data by the Aspen Economic Strategy Group, up from 41.8% in 2000.”
The dating lives of the middle- class American women is never far from the news. Economists have written books on it such as Date-onomics and Make Your Move by Jon Birger. In short, the numbers are against educated women especially in cities. There would be a similar number crunch in any European city such as London and Dublin.
Katie seems to have a few contradictions if you ask me. If the men don’t like her ambition, they are dumped. If they themselves aren’t ambitious enough, they are dumped. And God forbid the men would want their future wife to prioritise future children over and above her career. Prioritising your family is not the same as wanting your wife to stop working completely. But I found this statement interesting. It means that men have finally become wary of the bait and switch.
I wrote about this bait and switch before. We all get married for lots of different reasons but you assume one reason is that you want to have a child with this person and you want this person to care for your children.
Back in the old days this was simple: your wife had a baby and she looked after the baby when it was very young. Now your wife has a baby and if you marry one of those women who prefer their career over her nursing infant, your bouncing bundle of joy gets shipped off to nursery. Men should ask themselves before they get married, if this is what they want.
If you want a more traditional set up but marry the uber career woman then young men have wasted their time dating the well-educated and clever lawyer thinking this is the person who will be looking after his son for 10 hours a day. What he should have done is headed down to the local nursery and asked one of the staff out on a couple of dates, because that’s the person who will be caring for his baby. Usually they are fine. But not always.
In the UK at least things can get nasty in the baby room. Only last week there was yet another conviction of a nursery worker for harming her little ones. Roksana Lecka, 22, was convicted of abusing 21 babies at a nursery in Twickenham, south-west London, after footage showed the worker pinching and scratching children and kicking one boy in the face. Lovely.
Then the Guardian published this piece which made me very angry indeed.
In it the parents of a beautiful daughter who was killed by a nursery worker (I wrote about that shocking case here) are demanding more CCTV in nurseries to protect the infants. No. What we need are more mothers willing to look after their baby.
Genevieve’s mother, Katie Wheeler, took her to Tiny Toes nursery for only her second full day. Wheeler told staff that Gigi, as she was known, had been a bit “snotty” but was otherwise fine. And with a goodbye, she said: “I love you, sweetie.”
Just over seven hours later, Genevieve was pronounced dead. She was 9 months old. “In what was supposed to be the safest place in the world, she had been strapped face down to a beanbag for an hour and 37 minutes and her cries of distress ignored. She was eventually found lifeless and blue, having died of suffocation.” Lord have mercy.
Tiny Toes nursery, where Genevieve was killed, was rated “good” by Ofsted five years earlier, but the trial heard evidence suggesting it was run “shockingly”. On the day Genevieve died, Roughley was one of only two members of staff looking after 11 babies. The previous weekday there were 16 babies – far in excess of the one-to-three ratio for under-twos in England.” So that is 2 adults looking after 16 babies, one adult for 8 babies. In Britain. This is monstrous.
British governments both Conservative and Labour, have been making it increasingly difficult for families to look after their young children themselves. They – along with the feminists – tell you nurseries are just top notch places for children, in fact often better than us mere parents. Turns out, that is a bare faced lie told to keep the feminists happy. It is up there with diversity is our strength.
“Figures obtained by the BBC last year, show there were almost 20,000 reports of serious childcare incidents in England’s nurseries in the five years to March 2024 – up 40% on the previous five-year period. The law firm Farleys Solicitors has said the number of legal claims involving injuries to children in nurseries has increased tenfold over the past decade.” Lovely. Progress! Equality! I’m so happy we have all the women of young children out working instead of looking after them at home. That experiment is working out well.
In my experience and from what I’ve read men are not put off by ambitious women. But if ambition is a code word for an ice-queen who intends to return to work after the maternity word then yes, any sensible man is going to have a problem with that. If that’s what women want, then they should be marrying the ‘less ambitious men’ who is willing to be the primary carer – but it seems they don’t want that either.
The only advice I can give is be up front at the start. I was always very clear I wanted to get married and have children. If the man I went on a date said he didn’t want either of those things, then he might as well have told me he was a homosexual. That’s nice, thanks for dinner, have a good life. Next.
If the next man said he was an atheist and vegetarian this is similar to saying he was a homosexual or that he wanted to raise the kids in the wig-wham and thought Greta Thunberg was a fantastic role model for any potential daughters. Next!
If they tell you that they would quite like Palestine to be free from the river to the sea, it’s next! My dating life was quite brief as I met my husband when I was 25. Which is yet more evidence that the best are taken off the market in their twenties.
Good luck to the youth. It’s a jungle out there.