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Comment by andrewmcwatters | Hacker News Reader

To speak frankly, what are women doing with all this supposed surplus of education? I don't exactly see turning tides in terms of women beginning to dominate markets or leadership positions because they're starting businesses and startups and taking over boards and middle management positions.

Anecdotally, I've seen these single women, they're all waiting until they're past their 20s to find a partner and they expect them all to be complete people by the time they meet them.

I don't see as much of a concept of growing up together off the foundations of who you are as a person today as I've heard it expressed from older colleagues I've worked with.

Plainly, women are asking for too much, and too late in life.

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Please don't do gender flamewar on HN. "Women are asking for too much" is not going to end well, and the kind of thing we're trying to avoid here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> they're all waiting until they're past their 20s to find a partner and they expect them all to be complete people by the time they meet them.

I'm in my 30s and never married. I fully expect someone to come as a full person with an education and career. I am beyond glad that I didn't get married to my high school sweet heart or someone I dated in my early 20s when I was still a kid. I am nothing like I was when I was 20, or 25. Maybe even 30.

I know way, way too many people who did that and are now divorced. And a lot of the women in those relationships had children very early and didn't have a chance to get an education or start a career so now that they're divorced and on their own they're having a very hard time securing good income.

Women are definitely not "asking for too much." I would rather be happily single than compromise heavily on my expectations, and I'd wager the sort of women we're talking about feel the same.

> I know way, way too many people who did that and are now divorced. And a lot of the women in those relationships had children very early and didn't have a chance to get an education or start a career so now that they're divorced and on their own they're having a very hard time securing good income.

My parents talked about how when they were married 'they were just kids' even though they married in their mid 20s.

I wonder if this trend of marriages happening more into the late 20s to early 30s has a large source from the difficulty of obtaining financial stability, and additionally if it is part of the causes of the US low fertility rate.

Would we still wait to mid/late 20s to get serious if all else were equal but the financial stability to buy a house etc. were there as easily as it was for previous generations?

I think a big part of it is a huge portion of millennials are the children of divorced families. I have zero desire or itch to be married. If a partner of mine really wanted to be married I'd be fine with it. I also have no desire to have children.

The other poster mentioned that eventually I'll get married or "life will pass me by". At least that's how I'm reading it. I don't need a partner or to be married to enjoy life. I don't feel that I'm missing anything. I can do whatever I want.

I think it is just your bubble. There is nobody who is divorced in my social bubble. Young and old, all manage it somehow. I am also a millennial.

No one is. It doesn't make you unique or more true to yourself by waiting later in life. You'll get married and _still change._

My point is that people are deluding themselves into this idea that you need to be a finished person before finding a partner.

You will grow together and effect one another. And if you're a committed partner, you'll build each other up.

If you think hard times are a limit for you personally and divorce is always an option in regular everyday struggles, you're going to face some real hard realities one day when you realize options that you had are no longer available while life passes you by.

I think definitions of "a finished person" are being mismatched here. in my experience most people just want a partner that is a functional adult. Knows how to eat properly. Understands taxes. Can speak intelligently about cost of living topics like budgeting groceries and entertainment. Can drink moderately on a weeknight knowing they have to go to work the next day.

Edited to add: In my experience, if you don't date someone who "can adult", you will have to parent your partner, which doesn't go all that well if you're not kinky like that.

Yeah, and all of that sounds totally reasonable until you have a working knowledge of lots of interactions between tons of real people you've actually spoken with and had connections with to learn how life actually works.

Your requirements per a "functional adult" are an example of people asking for too much because they have no practical understanding of reality:

Americans don't eat properly. The average American is overweight.[1]

Americans don't know anything about taxes.[2]

Americans don't understand cost of living. Barely anyone knows what the CPI-W is or how it differs from the CPI-U.

[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/body-measurements.htm

[2]: https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/taxes/americans-dont-know...

I wouldn't consider weight to be a good indicator of capacity to make meals. I know thin people who I wouldn't trust to make me a cup of water and I know fat people who can adhere to a strict diet for their children.

I also wouldn't consider CPI-W and CPI-U to be cost-of-living concerns. I consider being able to say "hey, honey, we can't spend 500$ on your mobile game because eggs cost 7 for a dozen at the grocery store this week, we need to revise our budget" to be adult behavior.

Missing the forest for the trees.

Fat people truly adhering to proper eating don't stay fat. Cost of living and budgets are two separate but related topics.

I think you're kind of missing the point I'm trying to make. There's no point in someone who can define a term for broader trends if they cannot balance a personal budget. The capacity to define a broader trend can inform budgets, but I wouldn't date someone who is shocked when they have no money left for food because they spent it all on a shoe sale. I wouldn't consider that person a functional adult even if they happened to be thin and understood nuances between cost of living statistical measurements.

[flagged]

I never said people don't get budgets wrong. I merely said it's reasonable to try to prioritize dating people who can sensibly budget according to their income and their cost of goods and services in their area. It shouldn't be a consistent problem that you run out of rent money because you didn't budget for paying rent. I think you're misunderstanding my words because you're conflating these sets of preferences like some kind of demand for idealized humans. I think I'm pointing out that people's desires aren't unreasonable and exaggerating them is just strawman behavior.

Savings rates being at all-time lows doesn't mean that people don't know how to budget. It might be that budgeting has become much harder. Similarly, I don't think someone being fat means they don't understand how to cook a healthy meal. It might be that keeping thin has become much harder.

Personal swipes will get you banned here, so would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and make your substantive points without any of that?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> my early 20s when I was still a kid

You were not a kid. There's an old lady on my road whose (late) husband built their house when he was 18. Maybe he was still a kid.

> I am nothing like I was when I was 20, or 25. Maybe even 30.

It would be very weird if you did not change at all between 20 and 30 but nothing precludes doing that with someone else. 99% of modern relationship advice is bad because it tries to convince people that needing to show up to life with everything figured out is superior to figuring things out together. For almost everyone, the latter is a lot more workable. That doesn't mean it will be free from hardship, but it opens up enormous advantages. Time is not free.

I'm obviously not using "kid" in the legal sense. I cannot believe I'm having to write this. I'm referring to maturity and wisdom, experience.

If I want to call my 20 year old self a kid, I'm going to do so without any concern for your input.

"what are women doing with all this supposed surplus of education?"

Maybe a surplus of education just means...they spent more time and money on school?

Dominating markets and leadership positions, building businesses...how much formal education you have rarely plays a big role in these endeavors...

Just my personal experience.

Yeah, that's what I'm getting at. It's not a useful social signal: it just means you spent more time and money and incurred more debt than men without any additional context.

> they're all waiting until they're past their 20s to find a partner and they expect them all to be complete people by the time they meet them

I don't think this is female-specific. I see a lot of young men around me delaying "getting serious" into their mid-30s too, and have very high standards by that point.

I'd include myself. I met my wife at 30, and by that time I was also looking for someone in a similar life stage to mine.

Yeah, I see the same problem with young men, too. People say the dating pool turns in their favor by the time they get to their 30s, but you've missed out on an entire possible era of your life together with someone at that point.

And the dating pool absolutely does not look the same.

It's definitely true that my wife I say "I wish I had met you five years earlier" a lot, e.g. around things like starting a fam. There's something to what you say there, it gives you more runway in HN parlance.

Then again, it's not guaranteed she would appreciate you-but-five-years-earlier, and vice versa. A person probably undergoes a bit more character development than a VC firm does.

Given that we're no longer with the people who we were seeing 5 years earlier ... yep.

"More people are waiting until their 30s to settle down" is a wildly different claim than "women are asking too much."

If the dating pool looks a lot different after that decade that also suggests that a lot of people are still "settling down" earlier, too.

So is the claim that "women are asking for too much, and too late in life" based in 30something men who fucked around in their 20s not having grown up as much as the women during that decade or something?

I met my wife in my 30s, on an app even, I also found I had lost patience for women who acted like they were in their early or mid 20s still.

Yeah, that's possibly me in five years.

> To speak frankly, what are women doing with all this supposed surplus of education?

What's funny is that I talked about Bourdieu a whole afternoon during last week's strike, and today, two conversations where my 10 year old knowledge could be used.

Women historically had low economic, symbolic and social capital, but could have high cultural one. They used this cultural capital to gain the others.

But Bourdieu explain that capital structure is a chiasma, and that people with high economic capital will push to get their offspring to get cultural capital (or at least symbols, aka diploma), and people with high cultural capital will try to prevent it by creating other symbols (that was in the 70s, he basically predicted diploma inflation 40 years before it happened). In the meantime, people with high cultural capital will try to get high economic capital, and people with high economic capital will try to prevent that (basically having too much culture/knowledge is an hindrance to truly get on the highest march)

And I realized I don't understand him well enough to correctly explain his theories, so I scraped my explanations and left the basic, you should read him, but basically, it's inconsious phenomenon that isn't really caused by inconsious sexism (it might but I don't think so) but by capital structure.

Thanks for sharing this.

They are outcompeting men in their premarriage years; in the most significant metros, single women's income matches or exceeds single men's. And as of 2016 40% of managers are female.

I agree that women tend to not be going for the riskiest jobs or those that require significant tradeoffs in work-life balance; for those, you need a supportive spouse, and there are both demand- and supply-side issues in pairings where males play the supportive role to a female primary earner.

> I agree that women tend to not be going for the riskiest jobs or those that require significant tradeoffs in work-life balance; for those, you need a supportive spouse, and there are both demand- and supply-side issues in pairings where males play the supportive role to a female primary earner.

Choosing more risky jobs may be male biology and the gender equality paradox.

No increase in supply of supportive husbands would significantly increase the amount of women choosing riskier careers.

> Iceland consistently ranks as the most gender-equal nation. It is also the nation where men and women are most likely to pursue sex-typical jobs.[1]

Also does a person truly need a supportive spouse to undertake a risky career? My assumption is that people decide their career paths well before marriage, and some men choose their career to be a more attractive dating prospect.

[1] https://bigthink.com/the-present/gender-equality-paradox/

That was badly stated on my part, and I mostly agree with you on the risky-career part (though the work-life tradeoff is a separate axis and one where I think my point holds).

Men probably do choose riskier careers early on in significant part because it increases payouts in the relationship market relative to women. Going from well-off to rich doesn't actually improve material well-being much for either men or women, but it does significantly improve relationship prospects for men in a way it doesn't for women. It becomes a matter of economics: the real payout (inclusive of non-monetary elements) for success in a risky bet is higher for men than women, and so men choose to take those risky bets more often.

I don't believe women past their 20s are "too late in life" to be seeking a partner.

I for one would not want to have a long-term partner with someone below their 20's. They're too young, cannot even go for a casual heart-to-heart over beers/wine, and have no understanding of budgeting, tax analysis, healthcare planning, or any other number of basic adult administration. I'll have to parent them though this, which is supremely un-sexy.

If she wants kids and she is ~35 then one bad shot means missing out on kids.

The poster above specifies <20, so I'm talking about <20 year old women.

You said "I don't believe women past their 20s are "too late in life" to be seeking a partner.". That means 30s. It's not too late, but certain risks are much higher.

I didn't say there is no upper limit. I disagreed that the 20s is the upper limit.

> Plainly, women are asking for too much, and too late in life.

Ah yes, the hive mind of women.

Making more money in better jobs, in better towns, healthier, better lives.

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