Indeed, there I was in the company of intelligent women talking and laughing about – well…everything! Interesting viewpoints with great company, scrumptious food and wine. There was never a dull lapse in the conversation. "What could be finer?" I wondered, enjoying the moment.
It began to dawn on me that while these bright women are successful in their careers and had the ability to sustain loyal friendships, they toss and turn in their private lives. Even the “happily” married ones feel quietly stifled, choked by the injustice that women are forced to deal with in their relationships.
And I compare these women to other less intelligent friends who claim to be passionately in love and who enjoy meaningful relationships. "Lesser" women who have little to say beyond leg waxing, recipes and gossip (yawn) are privy to sustaining more lasting liaisons with the opposite sex.
This isn’t just my view, either. Forbes Magazine warned men off marrying career girls pointing to recent studies that show that clever, professional women are more likely to get divorced and cheat and less likely to have children. The American Journal of Marriage and Family even cites studies that show that the divorce risk rises when women out-earn their husbands.
Why is this so?
Is it because smarter women expect more or does knowledge make these women more controlling? Do they approach love with too much academic prowess and intellect when what is needed more is surrender? Is it because lower achievers are more easily hoodwinked by the male sex?
What a shame that brilliant, high-flying women strike out in love, often losing out to bimbos!
* Even intellectual Athena, goddess of wisdom, featured in this photo outside the Academy of Athens, lost out to Aphrodite, goddess of beauty, when they fought over the golden apple. Paris proved yet again what jerks men are by offering the apple to Aphrodite just cause she bribed him with sultry Helen of Troy...
2 comments:
I haven't read the Forbes article, but I'd guess that non-career women have fewer financial options and that might factor in to whether or not she divorces.
Don't know about the cheating, though! Seems like you either would or you would not, having nothing to do with work.
I guess it's the same in the men, at least I know one example (myself). Seems to have to do with the priorities of your brain, when it prefers to center on thinking you spend lots of time with thinking, and then you naturally spend little time with emotions, and when you spend little time with emotions you naturally are less likely to follow all the semi-automatic proceedings that control the flow of normal relationships.
On the other hand, maybe the problem only occurs when not both of the partners (or why not say, all of them, as my thinking now carries me away towards liberal thought), are intellectual enough. (Didn't I notice some criticism when Paris chose with his guts instead of with his head?)
Also don't underestimate the influence of the common sense, in our society there still is (I'm laughing at the "still") some bias towards men having to be intelligent, and women having to be beautiful, and the result is a) that men are considered to be more intelligent than women (and women to be more beautiful, but most don't know how malleable our beauty ideal is), and b) that men have a repressed emotional side that comes out in this decision of Paris, for example, and women have a repressed intellectual side that sometimes comes out with them trying to be hyper-intellectual and more male than the men.
There would be lots to say about this topic, hope you don't get me wrong from the fragments I could only put here. (On the other hand, fragments are nice, thinking of Greece statues gives some boost to imagination, and how it would be when wholly.)
Post a Comment