I found an interesting little bit of info...
Baby Center conducted a poll and polled over 22,000 women who had children over the age of 35.
The reason(s) they gave for waiting is not what you'd think...
7% waited for an established career.
The overwhelming winner, though, was a whopping 45% to waiting to find the right "one". Second in the winning was a 10% on not wanting to wait, but couldn't conceive.
Now, either the answers are bogus, times have changed, or some people really have no idea why women are waiting... Although maybe finding the right one has been largely eclipsed by the career, though the career was never the primary reason...
What these women thought was worse was also interesting -
Only 32% thought it was worse to end up infertile than to have children when emotionally or financially not ready.
I'd agree, but I wonder at their definitions of "emotionally or financially ready".
I somehow think they are a wee bit unrealistic.
4 comments:
"7% waited for an established career."
I think that this 7% should be concatenated with the 9% who wanted to be more financially stable. But even so, your point holds: that self-reported career considerations don't seem to constrain a woman's baby-making behavior. Really, that consideration would only apply to a wanna-be single mother anyways, presuming that she's not on welfare or has a "baby-daddy" or other such income stream.
I think that career considerations factor into this 45% though, and that's because the educated mother loses 5-8 years of baby-making time because of schooling.* That leaves her only 7-8 years max in which to find a mate and crank out some kids before her eggs start to become overaged. Thus, while career isn't an explicit concern, it becomes embedded in the delay anyways because of the significant (and some say wasted) investment of resources in a piece of paper.
The 45% waiting to find the right "one" is very interesting though. It suggests to me that the "eligible bachelor paradox" in which women overestimate their market value is alive and well.
This delay couples with the eligible-bachelor paradox in that the best men have already been snapped up by 'weak bidders', leaving lower-quality guys or recycled divorcees as the only potential mates. This also adds years to the time it takes to conceive.
So, while "career" isn't explicitly named by those 45%, in reality, it makes up a huge proportion of the delay anyways.
* While she's in school, she's not likely to want a child, and it will take her a couple of years after school's over to be sufficiently mature to be a good mate for a man
If you've ever seen the personals ads that women write, then you'll see that their expectations are unrealistic. They want a man with the body of Schwarzenegger; the money of Donald Trump; the looks of Brad Pitt; and the brain of Einstein. Go ahead; check 'em out some time. Their lists are such that only a handful of guys could even HOPE to meet them.
That also begs an obvious question of how many good guys she blew off when she was young, hot, and desirable. Was she chasing jerks and bad boys until her 30s, when she belatedly realized that this was counterproductive? Were her standards unrealistic?
I'm sorry, but I don't buy the thesis of this article. Let me tell you a story...
I knew a woman when I worked at a certain, well known computer company. I'll call her Sandy. She was 35 at the time; she was attractive; and she had a nice body to go with it. That said, she was no doubt hotter when she was younger. Even so, she had NO PROBLEM GETTING GUYS. I know, because I'd hear her complaining about guys not committing. Why didn't she strike while the iron was hot in her youth? Again, the same questions I raised above could apply to Sandy also.
You see, guys are most vulnerable to a woman's charms until his late 20s or early 30s. After that, then our sex drive starts dropping off, and women no longer have the same allure for us that they did when we were younger. Furthermore, the older a guy gets, the less BS he is willing to put up with. As a man who's 46, I have almost NO TOLERANCE FOR A WOMAN'S CRAP, whereas I couldn't say that at 26. IOW, if a gal wants to get a guy, she has to set the hook when he's willing to take a bite out of it. After that, we become more discerning; we see what crap women and marriage are once we hit 30 or so, and we are less inclined to do it...
Part of it is simply that the economy sucks for young people.
When there isn't a lot of prosperity, people of both sexes who would otherwise want to breed look at their checking balances and say, "Hmm, maybe not this decade, maybe not this lifetime..."
Just a wee bit?
LOL!
Post a Comment