This gets said so much on fora with men who regard themselves as “redpilled”, but it makes no sense to me personally. As a bookish and arts-inclined person, so much of my worldview, the things that occupy my thoughts during the day, has been formed by the canon of literature, music, films. No woman would seem dating and marriage material to me if she weren’t similarly erudite and we would have some common ground in that respect. It has been the number-one factor driving all my relationships over my life.
Often the man claiming that men don’t care about a woman’s education, goes on to say that what matters is that the woman knows, for example, how to cook. That, too, has never made sense to me. I live in a country where for the childless, eating out good healthy food is not appreciably more expensive than cooking at home, and a woman who chooses to take advantage of that and use her valuable time for other pursuits, would seem more attractive.
> Often the man claiming that men don’t care about a woman’s education, goes on to say that what matters is that the woman knows, for example, how to cook. That, too, has never made sense to me. I live in a country where for the childless, eating out good healthy food is not appreciably more expensive than cooking at home, and a woman who chooses to take advantage of that and use her valuable time for other pursuits, would seem more attractive.
If a woman is basically the mirror image of a man (degree, high paying job, spends most of the day at an office), then what exactly is a man buying into with a relationship with said woman? Maybe intimacy, but that feeling will wear off after a few years. A vagina? Well, that's kind of depressing on its own. Expecting men to love and accept women who serve the exact same role they do in life is like wondering why companies aren't run entirely by managers, or entirely by assembly line workers. Men can already make a bunch of money and find intellectual stimulation from other men, and a woman has to compete with that. So what does a woman necessarily provide a man in that case?
Related to that, an intellectual woman probably isn't going to have a lot of time for anything outside of a few hours of eating food, watching Netflix, and maybe sex. That's all fine and good, except there's a kind of relationship that already fulfills those things, and it's called friends with benefits. Why make a contract with the state that gives half your possessions to the opposite party if things go wrong when you can get the benefits without any of that baggage?
No offense, but it can be really astounding how people simply can't understand that the programming they received about college degrees can be wrong. Man spent millions of years mating with women who didn't have a college degree (and vise versa!). A woman with a college degree does little more than what the man already can do with his own college degree.
It's just like the field of software engineering. No one really wants to work with a jerk with credentials. They want someone with good qualities that they can get along with.
Sure, one can get intellectual stimulation from other men, but having an intellectual partner means one can have intellectual stimulation around the clock – if you think of something interesting at any hour of the day, you have someone to share it and discuss it with. I value my male friends, but you can't reasonably expect to see them more than a few hours a week, and many gradually fall away as they e.g. get bogged down in childrearing that no longer leaves them time for the intellectual things that once bound us together. Your feeling that the woman won't have time to provide companionship doesn’t necessary hold in this day and age when more and more people doing knowledge work are working remotely, so you might be sitting together most of the day.
Also, if one's particular interesting in learning extends to longterm travels, immersing oneself in foreign countries to study the languages or aspects of culture there, your male friends are probably not going to accompany you for more than a brief time. When people go on longterm travels, it is their partners that they rely on for companionship. (That holds, of course, for non-intellectual people traveling, too, as anyone in the bikepacking or overlanding scenes can tell you.)
For a bookish person, being in a relationship with a partner who merely has "good qualities", but who doesn't share that basic context, can mean feeling like one is not truly understood and there is a barrier between you. There is nothing worse than being in a relationship yet feeling alone.
I agree with most of you're saying, but I don't believe this requires a woman needs a college degree or hold down a "job" to be a good companion or that a college degree likely helps her at all in that context. I would even argue the same for men. The thing I'm arguing for is that it shouldn't be surprising that most men are indifferent to women's college education. Yes, some men on the edge of the bell curve are going to require a woman of a university background. The rest of the time, it doesn't add anything to a man's experience with a woman and can even potentially detract from it.
A college degree is not at all mandatory (or always sufficient) to be educated. However, people, regardless of gender, that aren't educated just don't tend be that interesting. Do you really want to spend your life with someone your found uninteresting?
I personally think that the more educated people a society has, the more interesting people there are to meet.
Of course there are dull people out there but do you think that most people without college degrees are dull?
While you were in college all the non-dull non-college people were out there having different life experiences than you-- learning things you don't know about.
In many ways education makes us more homogeneous. To an extent this can help make each other seem more interesting because it gives us common language and intellectual frameworks to have discussions, it dispenses with some boring preliminaries. But beyond that point, I think sharing common education makes people actually less interesting, not more.
There is a huge social stigma to non college educated folks. Many feel ostracized and inadequate their while lives even when monetarily they are as or more successful than most college folks.
If this is something you, or anyone else reading this, feels like you're suffering: I can offer that you won't necessarily feel this way forever.
Particularly, that kind of feeling inadequate in spite of success is a likely a form of imposter syndrome. Many other people experience it, including people with degrees (there is always someone else with more or more illustrious degrees). Many people feel better just knowing that other, even obviously super-accomplished people, have felt that way and many people seem to more or less age out of it.
While I can't refute the existence of that social stigma, at least I found that there isn't much of that in actuality... but that doesn't prevent it from existing in your head. Of course, there are people who always find something to be snooty about. If it's not the pedigree of your academic credentials it'll be about the brand of your sneakers. Surrounding yourself with thoughtful and emotionally healthy people can help.
At least that is what I experienced and heard from others.
You are very presumptuous and should consider changing your rhetorical style as it is very off-putting.
> Of course there are dull people out there but do you think that most people without college degrees are dull
I meant precisely what I said. I don't intend to make a broad statistical statement based on my limited personal annecdotes.
> While you were in college all the non-dull non-college people were out there having different life experiences than you-- learning things you don't know about.
I don't have a college degree. There are many thing I don't know about, which is why I like talking to educated people.
> In many ways education makes us more homogeneous.
I strongly disagree. ”Education” only creates homogeneity to the degree to which educational institutions focus on indoctrination over education.
I strongly support enouraging education for people of all genders, ethnicities, intelligences and socio-economic backgrounds because I think it will make the world a more interesting (and better) place.
> if a woman is basically the mirror image of a man (degree, high paying job, spends most of the day at an office),
I have to be perfectly honest, but to me, this is entrepreneurialism, not intellectualism. Someone might go to college and get some massive degrees to become i.e a lawyer or a senior dev, or a doctor, but ... those are trade skills. There's a fair amount of overlap, but to me, intellectualism is something distinct.
For many of us, intellectualism is the "philo" part of "philosophy"; the love of knowledge. Not knowledge as a means to an end; as a means to a high-powered, eat-your whole-day career. But rather; knowledge for its own sake - knowledge that exists as a sort of purpose for life (whether secular or spiritual, it's practically the pursuit of curiosity and knowledge-seeking as a sort of borderline religious calling).
Guys like that are looking for a woman (or man, if they're so inclined) they can have fulfilling conversations with, every day, for the rest of their life. And it's not something you can do with your "pals"; there are some of these conversations you can only have with a soul mate. Hell, there are some of them you can only have with your lover - not a friend-with-benefits (which, sadly, includes a lot of spouses), but someone you've been willing to be truly vulnerable with and expose the depths of your soul to.
But yeah; for a lot of us, they have to have the same deep love of knowledge, curiosity, and sense of wonder about life - or there can't be love, there.
The basic flaw in your argument is someone with a degree, high paying job, who spends most of the day at an office doesn't necessarily have the same personality as me so isn't necessarily a mirror image.
I chuckled a little at your comment because you are sort of the anti Henry Higgins, the character who sings "Why can't a woman be more like a man?" in the famous play set in 1917
>then what exactly is a man buying into with a relationship with said woman?
Jack Donovan has a great corollary to this in "The Way Of Men" where he says that society is nowadays trying to "fix" men as if they are "imperfect women."
this is outrageous?! and I feel totally on the outside of like 80% of these comments in a bad way for saying that.
I started copying and pasting lines and responding to them but on edit it seems pointless.
I would just say that good relationships work in both directions, 1+1=3 idiom, and come in vastly many forms.
Intimacy doesn't fade in a good relationship it grows stronger.
For sure the type of women you seem to be looking for exist and enjoy that type of relationship.
But a lot of people, of all genders and orientations, find the things you don't seem to think are good qualities, are in fact the things 'that they can get along with.'
And I would maybe suggest instead looking more at the 'programming' of gender and roles.
Women aren't simply a transaction or variable in your equation of an ideal relationship.
$15/hr * 40 hrs/week * 4 weeks/mo = $2,400/mo and that's only during working hours. Which, chances are you're going to pay more than that, as that doesn't include that person's healthcare, that's pre-tax, and more.
Sure one can pay for a child care center, but that's not covering the whole cleaning and doing the chores around the house. Its also only 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.
An at-home caregiver (note: I didn't say wife either spouse can do) can provide an immense amount of value.
Yeah 2400 probably sounds right though come a bit differently. That buys you 10 hrs of shared child care and a cleaner every month. Totally worth it if you both make decent money
If that's what someone is looking for in another person, then yes. But the concept of "better" is purely contextual. What seems to be better for marriages, or any team of people, is when the participants bring fulfill different roles that serve the shared mission. Two people doing fundamentally the same thing isn't necessarily helpful, although some people may thrive together that way.
That kind of labor is ultra expensive these days. You need 500K or more for this to be realistic to have done for you at anywhere approaching 24/7 levels
Would a 21 year old woman with a high school education who is extremely attractive be more sought after by more men than a 40 year old woman of average attractiveness who has a PhD? I'd guess yes, and I don't think it'd be a close contest. I'd guess about 90 percent of men would go with the former if they had a real choice between the two.
It's not that the PhD doesn't add to the attractiveness. It's just not the most important variable for most men. You might differ, but unusually intellectually curious men on HN aren't really representative. Most people have very little intellectual curiosity.
You studying social subjects that almost only women study is the exception, you can afford to be picky about this. Lots of guys would love to have a woman who shares their interest, but since so few women study technical topics they have to settle with women they have little in common with. And at that point whether they studied some social topic or no topic and did other stuff isn't high up on the list.
I don't even know what to say to this. Is [picks from list] speech pathologist, dental hygienist, nurse, payroll clerk or hairdresser NOT a job that involves a fair amount of knowledge, training, and skill?
Just because it's not EE or CS doesn't mean there isn't a wealth of technical and scientific understanding (or even just an understanding of the legal environment) going on behind the scenes of a profession.
So you're probably not going to find a girl who has exactly the same job as you and wants to date you -- but if you ask them to explain their profession to you, you might just learn there's a lot going on under the hood.
"they have to settle with women they have little in common with"
Again, this is just a lack of imagination. I studied a bit of chemistry, my wife studied a lot of chemistry, we appreciate that chemistry is cool. Just because I went with computers and she went with medicine doesn't mean we have "little in common"; we just find other topics to geek-out about.
"Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don't."
― Bill Nye
Thanks, that is some insight into why men who are primarily concerned with technical subjects would be unsatisfied with the dating market. However, I wouldn't claim that "almost only women" are concerned with the humanities subjects I mentioned above. Film criticism and scholarship on many branches of literature and music are still fields that draw either predominantly men, or have a pretty even gender balance.
If you take the subject and the adjacent subjects you get mostly women though, even if specific courses are more balanced. It is the same in technical courses, some of them like chemistry and biology have more even balance but overall there aren't a lot of women.
You seem to have this assumption that the only expression and development of interests comes through taking courses. I have a degree in CS, yet care much more that my partner shares my non-technical interests than my technical ones, cause I can talk shop all day long at work already...
I didn’t actually argue that. The erudition I have always sought in dating or marriage material does not depend on the degree I have, and in fact my own degree is in a field different than the canon of art to which I mentioned above. But sure, having a degree of some sort does greatly boost the chances that one will have had access to an academic library (or awareness of alternatives like LibGen), and potentially made use of it for subjects beyond one’s own degree programme.
The proportion of women with degrees differs from country to country, and often isn’t “the average woman” at all. And sure, having a degree is certainly no guarantee of erudition, but in most countries, women without a degree are even less likely to possess the kind of erudition I was talking about. To the point where a degree does function as a basic prerequisite.
My point is that when degrees are so easy to get that an average person has one then they don't have any meaning as a filter. There are plenty of reasons not to get one that aren't "I don't like learning" so it doesn't work as a filter in the other direction either.
Well, no, they said "No woman would seem dating and marriage material to me if she weren’t similarly erudite and we would have some common ground in that respect" but being erudite in no way requires or is the same as having a degree. That's just one way of many to get exposed to things.
I knew a few women who went to college specifically for the purpose of finding a man to marry, with their goal being a stay at home mother and wife to a lawyer or doctor or something wealthy sounding.
They were as physically attractive as they were emotionally shallow. There is much much more to a person than an education.
This gets said so much on fora with men who regard themselves as “redpilled”, but it makes no sense to me personally. As a bookish and arts-inclined person, so much of my worldview, the things that occupy my thoughts during the day, has been formed by the canon of literature, music, films. No woman would seem dating and marriage material to me if she weren’t similarly erudite and we would have some common ground in that respect. It has been the number-one factor driving all my relationships over my life.
Often the man claiming that men don’t care about a woman’s education, goes on to say that what matters is that the woman knows, for example, how to cook. That, too, has never made sense to me. I live in a country where for the childless, eating out good healthy food is not appreciably more expensive than cooking at home, and a woman who chooses to take advantage of that and use her valuable time for other pursuits, would seem more attractive.