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Also dancing/bar scene has bifurcated a lot more into 'people who love clubbing' than it would have been a couple decades ago when there were less entertainment options.
I have an objectively hot female friend who would be a total catch for any guy. Very confident, green flags around being able to fit in with guy-groups, heaps of hobbies, etc. She's single at 32 and doesn’t seem to have had meaningful relationships, and isn't hooking up or anything.
Got to talking about her dating life. I asked her why not go to a bar. She said "do I really want a guy who does bars and clubs at 32?"
I do think she's holding out for a top 5% earner who's tall and handsome.
She's done a recent round of dates off apps. Nobody got a second date. She's seriously disappointed with the type of guys she has available to her. And my thinking is that most great guys (ha) are probably locked down by a great girl (ha) at that age.
She did the career thing, and has somewhat waited out the pool of guys that she considers worthy of a relationship. She's probably going to settle for somebody at one point and be somewhat quietly disappointed.
If she had planned to start looking seriously for the love of her life in her 30s and expects that she'll have the same success, as measured by the "quality" of the man, as the women who make this their top priority from the time they're 19, she's in for a bad time. The really good ones--both men and women--are locked down early, as you've surmised. By prioritizing career, she's made a tradeoff, whether she realizes it now or not. There is no "having it all".
Of course, there's always black swan events. If, against all odds, she finds her doting 6'4" doctor with the chiseled abs and jaw, she'll be on reddit's
r/askwomenover30in a few years giving really bad advice to people who will then be in the situation she's in now.It does need to be said- focusing on becoming a normie housewife(after all, you basically cannot be a career oriented woman without college first, which is going to last longer than that) starting at 19, or in the right circles perhaps 16 or 17, has fairly good odds of working out.
But this woman does not want that. They want a ‘high value’(they and I may disagree on the definition/relative importance of terms here) man. That 6’4 doctor is not going to marry a woman without a college degree. If she’d focused on this at 23(I don’t know how she would do this, but assuming she did) rather than on career advancement, sûre, she’d have had better odds of landing the high-powered husband. But wealthy men do not marry waitresses.
Male doctors mostly marry other doctors and other healthcare professionals, probably for reasons of availability. I'd be surprised if they cared whether their partners have a certificate, a 2 year degree, or a 4-year degree. (less surprised if they had some preference for or against other doctors)
Medicine's particularly tricky to get with normies due to a combination of relocating a lot during peak years and absolutely brutal hours. Most top tier earning/educational professions don't have the same risk of being banished to the middle of nowhere for 3 years in order to get residency or specialization requirements out of the way.
On the flip side, medicine is unusually legible to marriage-minded women who are into that kind of thing as a high-potential career track. There is a reason why <culture X> mother jokes involve the daughter marrying a doctor.
You could probably use "What fraction of lower-middle class women want to be a doctor's wife?" as a measure of family-orientation across ethnic groups.
At least to me, it would code 'not going to be around the house much, will have constant life-or-death calls on his/her time that will take precedence over you, likely nice but permanently stressed'. Rather a double-edged sword.
Very much agreed - lore when I was a teenager considering careers was that doctors had some of the highest divorce rates as a result. (No idea if this was or is correct or not)
But the same is true of any other high-earning upper-middle-class career, apart from the life-or-death aspect. The thing that is different about doctors that makes marrying a doctor a meme is their visibility. I suspect marrying a doctor really is the easiest route for a lower-middle-class woman to enter the upper-middle-class.
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How many doctors marry CNA’s? I’d imagine ~all of healthcare working male doctor spouses are doctors or RN’s, near the top of the hospital hierarchy, not the legion of phlebotomists and nursing assistants below them.
There is still a very strong correlation between woman’s education and her husband’s income.
From what I can tell these days most male doctors come into med school already attached, meet another doctor in school, or end up getting scooped randomly on the apps (if they don't suck) or flounder on the apps (if they do suck).
People avoid the work drama of the past because of woke stuff, although the mid to late career physicians still get up to that sometimes.
Female doctors seem to hold out for someone on the apps of ultra high quality and succeed or fail, with some going for much lower social class/success boy toys.
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Well, not the first time, anyway.
Not the second time, either.
The typical trophy second wife is either a PR girl or some kind of art ho (like Lauren Sanchez Bezos)
Well the examples given several times were doctors. There are degrees of wealth, obviously. If we're talking about billionaires, we're far from my area of knowledge.
I was thinking actual rich people, not just the upper-middle-class. Not necessarily billionaires, but biglaw partners, VP-level corporate executives, bank MDs. Also prominent politicians, who have a similar level of status as the above even if they only have upper-middle-class incomes.
I don't have any visibility into what kind of second wife a multi-millionaire small business owner in the sticks would go for.
FWIW, the divorced and remarried doctors in my social circle all remarried nurses.
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Agree on all points. I mentioned in another reply that in addition to her real monday-friday job, she is also a qualified physio and is still working at a hospital on sundays. I'm guessing she has half a chance with a doctor who comes out of a bad break up or something.
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I can understand not liking the nightclub scene. But I would give the laidback bar a chance; I see mostly older people at a lot of these places, and they are one of the few third places still around to find people today.
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What hobbies? Can't she meet any interesting people through said hobbies?
A huge variety. The usual chick stuff, she does pilates, has a side gig cake making business, works a second job at a hospital as a physio on sundays (I suspect her plan with this is to meet a doctor), studied data analytics in her spare time, mostly for fun and to help her with random tasks at work. She's done a lot of different dance styles, coaches high school gymnastics.
She also does charity work.
Whether you're interested in those things or not, she is definitely out there doing things. And compared to the average instagram scroller, she might be in the top 5% in terms of extra curricular activity. And she's a thin, blonde, athletic looking person. She's attractive.
I'm not single, and I'm more her big brother type of work friend. I would never date her because she's got way too much going on in a week to week kinda way. But there's a lot of guys who would be able and very willing to match her energy (I would have though??)
This is the point where I start laughing hysterically.
No. No, there is not. The reason I say this is because I do know of atleast one person who does match that energy - and the amount of hoops that he had to jump through to find someone who did match him was... well, it wasn't herculean, but it was definitely more than one and definitely more than you'd expect given the guy in question.
Ironically enough, to a medical doctor. Albiet, one who was still in school, but she later graduated and started practicing. So.
If anything, you detailing her list of hobbies explains pretty much everything about her and why she's having so much trouble.
If she does end up happily married, it'll likely be through a remarkable conflux of near impossible events. Or she unexpected matches with someone that's her total reverse, I dunno.
I don't understand this. You're saying nobody wants to match her energy (there are definitely guys who are super energetic and want other people like this, too) but you know a guy and his GF made him jump through hoops? I don't think hoop jumping is limited to high energy girls.
Again, I don't get this. Having a lot going on is a good thing for most people. She's certainly doing what she can to avoid being boring and not relying on her looks.
'Want' isn't the case here. You can't 'want' to match someone's energy. You either match it or you don't.
From my experience, guys who can match that level of energy are rare on the ground.
My exact words were 'and the amount of hoops that he had to jump through to find someone'
Seeing that from off to the sides was one of the things that severely curtailed my enthusiasm for dating. When you've got a guy who runs his own business, owns several vehicles, has a list of hobbies longer than my arm, and is fucking ripped, if you'll excuse the vulgarity, and still struggle to find someone to settle down with, well, it doesn't exactly inspire confidence in one's self.
There's a wide gulf between 'having hobbies that make you interesting' and effectively having three jobs that take up a fair bit of time in her life alongside all the other stuff you mentioned.
Are there guys who can match that? Yes. Are they very rare on the ground? Also yes.
I'm not arguing that she should change. Shine on, you crazy diamond. But I will point out that said hobbies and activities pretty much explain why she's single.
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I'm sure the people do exist who'd match her energy, just in the modern world of dating-app brain a lot of 'matches that would be perfectly successful if arranged marriages/strong family introductions were still a thing' end up getting nuked since the dude held a fork wrong on the first date and she gets irrecoverable Ick.
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They may be entirely gender segregated hobbies.
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The good guys (Doctor who is a 10 or whatever) are either locked down or full time dating app lifer whose stuck in their own stasis of go nowhere hookups.
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Or not. At least from my PoV, it seems that one part of the relationship recession is women who got a wrong impression what kind of guy they can realistically have a long-term relationship with and what real relationships entail, and after seeing the reality that is possible, they decide to forego long-term relationships altogether. And as you say, these women often don't sleep around much either; They are, for lack of better word, volcels.
But otherwise I agree, settling and then quietly resenting your partner is also a popular option.
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Did she use to visit night/dance clubs when she was younger?
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