“It’s less about picking the perfect _____ and more about being a good _____.”
Comments inspired by a newspaper interview with Richard Reeves
Maybe impelled is a better word than inspired. The interview was in the Washington Post on August 26. It was published under the headline “How to be the kind of man women actually want to marry.” Headlines are not typically written by authors, much less interviewees, but the headline writer in this case pretty much nailed the gist of the piece.
In the interview Reeves said, “My son said to me once, the reason you pay on the first date is not that you’re signaling I’m going to be the breadwinner. What you’re signaling is you have some economic resources.”
Imagine in the early days of the women’s movement when women were tired of being valued heavily, even primarily, even exclusively for their domestic skills, a woman resigned herself to her lot by assuring herself and other women “The reason you offer to cook a meal for a gentleman suitor is not that you’re signaling I’m going to be the cook. What you’re signaling is you have domestic skills.”
One wonders how that young Mr. Reeves would explain the still-romantic tradition of a man proposing marriage by bending the knee and offering up a diamond ring, the bigger, the more expensive, the better.
The elder Reeves also told his interlocutor, “One of the paradox of choice examples is that there are, like, 48 different jellies at the supermarket. I don’t think the problem is there are 48 jellies or 4,000 people to date on Bumble. The problem is that you don’t just go and say, yeah, I’ll have that one. That’s good. I like strawberry. I do not find myself standing in the aisle trying to choose between strawberry with a hint of mandarin and strawberry with a hint of orange. I just need a good enough jelly. So it’s the perfectionism that’s the problem, not the choice.”
Who needs to hear that message and take it to heart? It’s women on the dating scene, isn’t it? Aren’t they the ones with the lofty standards? What if a man is not a good enough jelly, but is quite a scrumptious condiment of another kind? What if the current fashion and must-have among women were to get as much pectin into their diets as they can, and more specifically pectin that has been to college? What happens to men who are really fabulous salsas, for example, completely free of high fructose corn syrup? Must they reinvent themselves? Or might it be better for women to become more accepting and adventurous in their pantries, more willing to let salsas be salsas, to be more open to different taste sensations, even though her peanut butter and jelly sandwich is her beloved, reassuring comfort food?
What would salsa be with a big glob of pectin mixed in? It couldn’t be advertised as “genuine,” could it?
Let’s be honest. We aren’t talking about pectin. We’re talking about money. And men are increasingly not liking what they’re hearing. “I make a lot of pectin on my own. You need to make at least as much as I do.”
Isn’t it possible for a man to be a quite wonderful husband even when none of the things he’s really competent at is making a six-figure salary or launching a successful startup or being the scion of someone who was?
Why, oh why, is it not blindingly clear — after six decades of reeducation about traditional over-emphasis of domesticity for women — that many men, many of the potentially very best husbands and fathers, are now seeking to place economic skills lower on their list of most valuable attributes and qualifications for being a fabulous husband and father? And that many more men would venture forth from their foxhole depressions with that same hope for familial aspirations if they were confident that their non-dollar value would be recognized, appreciated and embraced?
And why is the incompleteness, the imbalance of this observation from Reeves not the first action item on his agenda? “In the old version of marriage, there was an economic dependency of women on men and an emotional dependency of men on women. And we worked very hard to reduce the economic dependency of women on men. Hallelujah, here for that, genuinely. But we understate the extent to which men need that purpose, that need to be needed. They got that through marriage. Women don’t have quite that same need because they already know that they are going to be needed to have children and raise and nurture those children.”
Why are we not working on reducing this emotional, familial, social subservience of men and seeing those categories of deficit as our best channels for getting out of the mess that we’re in?
Or is that precisely the cultural progress that many women — far too many women — are seeking to stymie for fear that their plentiful options for achieving happy lives depend in large part on traditional men being willing — even desperate — to sacrifice their own choices? Do many women — far too many women — see those deficits in men as leverage for their own greatest powers?
When we talk about backlash against embracing inter-gender fairness and harmony, which backlash against which movement by which people in which direction are we most likely now to be apprehensive about? Which Genie is out of which bottle, never to be shoved back in? Which Genie is only now beginning to say, “Hey, let me out of here!” too? And who might have an inkling to be apprehensive about that?
We know that no one unilaterally gives up power willingly. But smart people will, in the interest of fairness, balance, harmony and synergy, share it gladly.
Reeves himself implicitly acknowledges that attributes other than making money are essential for men in marriage: “the truth is that marriage is a crisis-driven survival plan. The first few years of parenting are described by anthropologists as a parenting emergency. How are you going to make it through these next few weeks? Over time, your roles are going to evolve, and they’re going to become a different person. Not in their essence, perhaps, but people are going to get sick. People are going to lose jobs. A lot of stuff is going to come at you. It’s like driving along a mountain road while you’re in constant rock falls. That’s what life is like.”
There it is. Happy marriages need more than money. Rich people get divorced. Rich kids can be emotionally impoverished by parental lovelessness.
Reeves rightly observes the displacement of men: “We’ve made it to a world where marriage has become a choice rather than a necessity. I think we can only see that as a primary good, but we can also be grown up enough to say, hold on a second, this is going to have all kinds of secondary consequences for men if we’re not careful. We’re going to have a lot of surplus men.”
But still we focus on men’s making of money as their price of admission into the arena of love and belonging.
Can we say to women the corollary of what Reeves says to men? “It’s less about picking the perfect husband and more about being a good wife.”
Thank you, Jack. I remember being out with a woman that made LOTS more than I did. She wanted to stop in at this sidewalk cafe. I said, "okay if we go dutch?". She said, "that's fine, we are just friends, anyway. There sure are lots of amateur prostitutes out there.