Cats and Batteries

Part of Dennis Prager’s selling of marriage involves selling women on marriage. To his credit, he doesn’t just focus on selling marriage to men. Fortunately, for him, he got a call to his show, which I heard, that he turned into this column. I have no idea if she was one of those hired callers some shows use.

I found the column at Townhall, which is part of Salem, the company replacing Michael Medved with Sebastian Gorka at the end of the year. There, the column had the headline ”A Message to Young Women from a Career Woman”.

Every Wednesday, the second hour of my national radio show is the "Male/Female Hour." A few weeks ago, a woman named Jennifer called in. For reasons of space, I have somewhat shortened her comments. Every young woman should read them. This is precisely what she said:

Every young woman.

"Dennis, I want to get right to it. I'm 50 years old with four college degrees. I was raised by a feminist mother with no father in the home.

This is why you don’t donate sperm and you don’t have sex with that kind of feminist unless you’ve had a tested vasectomy.

My mother told me get an education to the maximum level so that you can get out in the world, make a lot of money.

There’s nothing wrong with that.

And that's the path I followed. I make adequate money. I don't make a ton of money. But I do make enough to support my own household.

Great! She’s not being a drain on taxpayers.

"I want to tell women in their 20s: Do not follow the path that I followed. You are leading yourself to a life of loneliness.

There’s something missing here. Getting an education (or training) and figuring out how to earn money doesn’t necessitate loneliness.

All of your friends will be getting married and having children, and you're working to compete in the world, and what you're doing is competing with men.

Yes, you’re competing with men. And other women.

Men don't like competitors. Men want a partner. It took me until my late 40s to realize this.

OK, but you only need one man to whom you can be a partner, right? Sure, some women have more, but still, it leaves the vast majority of men as potential business competitors without it being a social problem.

"And by the time you have your own household with all your own bills, you can't get off that track, because now you've got to make the money to pay your bills.

Wrong. Wrong!!! You can live beneath your means. Plan, budget, save, invest, and insure. Don’t buy a residence unless you’re planning to die in it and can buy it outright or put a significant down payment on it. Other than that, don’t rent money. In addition to saving for retirement, save up a year's expenses in a liquid fund. Also, always be looking for a better opportunity. Doing these things will prevent you from being at the mercy of an employer.

It's hard to find a partner in your late 40s to date because you also start losing self-confidence about your looks, your body. It's not the same as it was in your 20s.

It’s not so much your lack of confidence. It’s that desirable men in that age range are married, or realize that they don’t need to be in a relationship, and can get younger, hotter women. I’ve found many women in their 40s and much older than that very sexy. But appearance is often the first draw for a man, and a woman is never going to look as hot as she can in her early 20s. There ARE women who are messes in their early 20s and get things figured out and get themselves together later, sure, but if they had done so even earlier, their peak would have been in their early 20s. A man who isn’t going to look at you isn’t likely to bother approaching you.

Maybe she just didn’t have time to explain it, but none of the above precluded finding a man, unless she’s saying that no man wants a woman who is pursuing so much education. And did doing that saddle her with debt? It’s far more expensive now, but depending on how she handled things it is possible she accumulated a lot of debt. But that’s not a given. People can pursue education and career without taking on so much debt. But yes, if you’re working full-time and going to school full-time, you don’t really have the time and energy to devote to a relationship. People try it, but it’s not good. It's one reason I think it is bad advice to tell men to marry young (if they're going to be foolish enough to marry at all). Someone can be up and running in their career by their mid-20s, though, and if the really want it, can then find a companion.

You try to do what you can to make your life fulfilling.

That’s what just about everyone does, not just people who didn’t marry or have kids.

I have cats and dogs.

And batteries, too, right?

But it's lonely when you see your friends having children, going on vacations, planning the lives of their children, and you don't do anything at night but come home to your cats and dogs.

She can go on vacations, too. She just wanted some man to pay for them. That she “doesn’t do anything at night” is by her own choice. There are friends, hobbies, charities, and so many things she can choose to do. As Dr. Laura says, loneliness is a voluntary condition.

What she doesn’t see is what goes on inside the homes of those parents, how difficult vacations can be with kids. There’s a lot of drama and trouble she’s not seeing.

I don't want other women to do what I have done."

There are a lot of people who are married with children who don’t want other people to do what they’ve done. For various reasons, almost none of them actually say it. But if you could hear people’s thoughts it would be very revealing. Just read my blog!

I would like to find somebody to go on vacation with.

You can do that.

"You have other concerns when you get older and you live alone. Who's going to take you to your medical appointments?

This is what planning is for. You can pay professionals to take care of you, and if you’re not spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on children, including many thousands of dollars 15-20 years ago and thus money that could have been invested back then, you an afford to do that.

If something should happen to you, there's no other income there to help you.

Insurance. Investments. Heck, just the $20-30,000 you would have spent on a wedding fifteen years ago could be much more by now, if invested right.

"I'm stuck now because I go to work every day.

You mean like most men and many women, including those who are married?

It's painful to not have a Thanksgiving dinner with someone.

Tom Leykis is divorced and has no living children, and he does Thanksgiving dinner with lots of people. So do most other people who are childfree and unmarried.

You know, there’s a chance her problem isn’t that she was devoted to career, but her negative and limited thinking.

You sit home alone and you do nothing.

There was a time or two my wife took the kids and left me alone for days. I assure you I didn’t “do nothing”. I had more things I wanted to do than I had time. I would have been happy if she'd never come back, except that I knew I had an obligation to our children.

I avoid my friends now that have children because I have nothing in common with them.

That’s because they have no time for much aside for parenting, so that’s all they can talk about.

"Somebody asked me the other day, 'Why did you stay single and never have kids?'

How about pointing out that being unmarried and childfree is our default state? That you have to actively acquire a spouse and conceive children? Turn the question around. Ask them why they got married and had children.

I want to tell women: Find someone in your 20s. That's when you're still very cute. That's when you're still amiable to working out problems with someone. It's harder in your 50s, when you've lived alone, to compromise with someone, to have someone in your home and every little thing about them annoys you because you're so used to being alone. It's hard to undo that, so don't do what I did. Find someone in your 20s."

In other words, don’t be yourself. Be someone’s else’s partner. She’s right that women who want to snag a man should do so in their 20s. Otherwise, if they want a man who can financially take care of them, the age range of available and willing men will rise significantly with each passing year. For example, a woman in her late 20s can get a man her age who is already successful or has a lot of potential. Or she can get a successful man of just about any older age. But When she’s in her 30s, she’s probably going to have to get a man in his 40s or older unless she wants to have to earn nearly as much as he does, at least. If she’s in her 50s, she might have to go for a guy who is in his late 60s or older, because successful guys in their 50s can get much younger women.

jgalt52 left a comment:

As women have learned to become more and more feminist, they have forgotten how to be feminine. Young men have noticed and are more often saying no thanks to marriage. Just like any other movement, as each "wave" evolved into the next, feminism became increasingly militant. What started as a cause for equal access to opportunity has evolved into a man hating quest for retribution. We all saw all those "Nasty Women" on full display at the post Trump inauguration "Million Angry Women March" in Washington. Part of feminism's lie is that women are just like men so young men on campuses can count on women's habits to mimic theirs as women willingly embraced the hook up culture. But human nature is not pliable. There's a reason why younger women are more desirable to men, it's because it's during those years when women are most attractive they are also most fertile. Waiting until they reach their 30's becomes a problem in both conceiving and in problem pregnancies and greater risk for birth defects. This is nature trying to tell us something and nature doesn't cooperate with silly social movements (experiments). They're also hitting the wall looks wise as they get older, the clock is ticking and desperation isn't attractive. What man wants a woman who's been giving it away for a decade or so to dozens of men and is now past her prime looks wise and will never experience her at her peak. Also, men in their thirties are still able to "hook up" with willing more attractive younger women in their twenties.

Next, as men move into their later twenties and early thirties, they are more financially settled and established in their careers. They've accumulated some wealth. With the legal climate so heavily weighed in favor of women, in divorce, child custody and property settlements in court, and factoring in the fact that about 70 - 80% of divorces are initiated by the woman, marriage is seen as a risk not worth taking. At 50% failure rate, marriage looks mostly like an opportunity to lose half of your stuff. Women have done this to themselves

Where is the lie?

Today, Dennis Prager devoted his male-female hour to this topic, or, more precisely, a letter he got responding to it in which a woman lamented that men today want hook-ups, don't buy women drinks in bars, go ghost, etc. Dennis corrected pointed out that if men and women were truly the same, women would be OK with things just being hookups and casual on an ongoing basis. But he again used the time to try to sell people on marriage. He pointed out that people have problems whether or not they are married, so why not be married?  That's a little like saying people die anyway, so why not be a chain smoker?