London - Wiser heads than mine warned women years ago: sometimes, you need to be careful what you wish for. But we didn’t listen, did we?
Liberated by the social changes of the late 20th century, we raced headlong into fulfilling our potential. We always believed we were smarter than men; this, at last, was the chance to prove it - and to preach it to our baby daughters.
Which is why, here in 2011, boys have fallen dramatically behind girls academically. And armed with better qualifications, women are increasingly outranking men in status and salary.
But what happens when these women look around for a mate? According to new research from America, published in The Atlantic magazine, women’s success is making it increasingly difficult for them to find “traditional” husbands who are richer and better educated. So, they are “marrying down”.
And I can tell you from long experience what happens to such mismatched relationships.
I was in the vanguard of pushy broads who elbowed their way up greasy poles. By 30, in the early Eighties, I out-earned almost every man I knew
But this meant my romantic life was confined to men from a different economic world - although at first it didn’t bother me. For decades I relished playing uptown, uptempo woman to my downtown, downbeat guys.
You bat all day against men just as ambitious, cunning, ruthless and nasty as you have learnt to be. It’s hardly surprising, then, that at home you yearn for the opposite.
Sometimes, for the “bit of rough”: all mud and muscle, you helpless Jane to his big ol’ Tarzan.
Sometimes your version of opposite is the “gentler” side of life. “He’s an artist,” you gush to strangely quiet friends. “A poet. So talented.”
He’s not, of course, and one day you’ll know it. Because no matter what the pleasures of the short term are, in the long term these mismatches don’t work.
The first thing you notice is your invitations slow down. Your best friends tend to be those with whom you have studied or worked - what, really, are they supposed to talk about with your, uh, poet?
Never mind. You can go out with his friends. That is, if you’ve never experienced reverse snobbery.
The men ignored me or muttered lewd remarks, as if to put me in my place as “only” a bird - while the women would chat about chores or childcare, sneering at me: “I suppose you pay someone else to do that, don’t you?”
Terrible truth: I did!
Still, who cares? The two of you, warmed by passion, can go out on your own. Who needs anyone else?
But where will you go? Somewhere with your taste in costly fancy food where you will have to pay and risk him feeling emasculated? Or to a Spur, which he can afford but - no matter how much you protest your love of potato skins - he’ll know you’re hating.
I knew one couple who went to a fancy place, but she slipped him the cash in advance. I never did ask how things went in the bedroom on those nights.
This shows the type of deception a high-flying woman with her kept man will go to. Celebrity women will call him “my manager”; entrepreneurial women call him “my business partner” - nobody is fooled. Today, there is a new phrase: “Stay-At-Home-Dads”; 600,000 of them, and rising. Some might be that. But I bet many more are what we used to call, at best, “unemployed” or, at worst, “layabouts”.
And the fact we need to come up with new terms proves that, bubbling under these relationships, is always a Catch-22: if he doesn’t mind you being cleverer and richer, perhaps he’s just a gold-digger.
Or, if he does mind, and can’t or won’t close the gap between you, perhaps he’s just a loser.
In the end, trust me, the row will happen - and with only slight variations, it will sound like one of my more memorable ones:
He: “You think you’re so smart, with your car and trips and fancy house.”
Me: “House? Oh, the one I studied for, worked for and paid for?”
I recall how the absence of riposte hung there, louder in its silence than the nastiest of fighting talk between equals.
There isn’t a political party that doesn’t claim to want greater social mobility. But they mean upwardly mobile.
Which is why David Willetts, the Universities and Science Minister, reports that we have “a decreasing pool of the kind of men women graduates have always tended to marry” and, as a direct result, “a significant trend” for them not to marry, not to have children or - disastrously - to “marry down”.
I was lucky. Before my “poets”, I had a brief marriage and a wonderful daughter. Today, she and my granddaughter are my consuming loves; men are for friendship, flirting - and, if it’s ever more, that’s none of your beeswax...
But I accept that for many smart and able younger women this would not be their ideal.
So, if they want to find their equal in academic and professional success, they should grab him now, from the dwindling numbers left.
Ignore the poets. Skip the artists. Pass by the “bit of rough” and head straight for the one who will give as good as he’s getting.
And take it from me: only in fairy tales does a kissed frog turn into a prince. In real life, a kissed frog burps at you. - Daily Mail