I wanted to comment on the letter that Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, a director at the National Marriage Project, wrote to the WSJ yesterday in response to an article that had appeared last week on marriage trends among the young and restless crowd (20-30s). Ms. Whitehead wrote:

"...point to recent research that indicates well-educated women are more likely to marry than their less well-educated peers. What I do say is that the belief that "there are no good men left" exists among well- educated women despite the evidence to the contrary. The reason, I argue, is that today's educated women face a search for a mate that is more prolonged, more challenging, and less institutionally supported than it was for earlier generations of college women. The old campus-based mating system that paired off men and women for marriage during the undergraduate years no longer works for today's highly educated women who are postponing marriage until their late 20s or early 30s. Yet no new system, better geared to contemporary women's education and career patterns, has arisen to take its place. Thus, though the marital prospects of these women are good, the road to getting there can be rocky."

Given the overwhelming evidence of the popularity of dating or dating-as-a-predominant-theme heavy shows on TV (part of which I think is driven by prurient onlooker-ism similar to the kind engendered by roadkill) as well the perpetual popularity of this topic in public discourse (for example, some of the most trafficed posts, such as this one titled "Dating while Desi", at Sepia Munity, the South Asian American blog) clearly this subject occupies quite a bit of mental and emotional space in our waking (and perhaps sleeping) hours. While Ms. Whitehead points out to an important structual difficulty - the absence of appropriate fora such as frat-house debauches where post-college-degreed human simians can signal to, and meet similar minded simians - because of the shift in educational patterns among women[1], Ms. Whelan the writer of the original WSJ article (in response to which Ms. Whitehead wrote her letter) makes few additional (and far more interesting) observations on this subject. First, Ms. Whelan brings some good news in that article to the single (and thus despairing?) uber-educated women:

"Marriage rates are increasing among college-educated men and women, even if the marriage age is older: According to the 2006 Current Population Survey data, among 35- to 39- year-old women, 88% with advanced degrees have married, compared with 81% of women without college degrees. And once married, these smart, successful women are no less likely to have children. But the naysayers are never satisfied. In August, Forbes.com published a much-debated article titled "Don't Marry a Career Woman" warning that women who make more than $30,000 a year, who work 35 hours a week or more outside the home, or who have at least a college degree are more likely to get divorced. The author cited several small-scale studies but ignored the larger trends to be found in census data.

In fact, increased education leads to better marriages and stronger families. College graduates are less likely to divorce -- and more specifically, families with highly educated mothers are half as likely to split. So says an upcoming article in Demographic Research by Steven P. Martin, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland. Looking at marriages that began between 1990 and 1994, Mr. Martin found that, of marriages in which the wife had a college education (or more), only 16.5% dissolved in the first 10 years, compared with 38% in which the wife had only a high-school diploma. Indeed, in a Harris Interactive poll that I commissioned earlier this year on this topic, 71% of men who earn in the top 10% for their age groups, or who have a graduate degree, said that a woman's career or educational success makes her more desirable as a wife, and 68% believe that smart women make better mothers. Not surprisingly, then, 90% of high-achieving men say that they want to marry -- or have already married -- a woman who is as intelligent as they are, or more intelligent."

Even though I personally find her final observation - brains wanting to commune with brains, and being sucessful in that in the long run - to be heartening, for that to happen, Ms. Whelan concludes, supplicants at the atlar of matrimony have a long traverse ahead of them, mainly through the darkness and doom of the valley of "soulmates" (read closely lines I marked up in bold below):

"Still, there is no denying that the social norms of marriage are changing. Young people haven't had to marry in order to have sex for a long time, but cohabitation is perhaps more socially acceptable than ever. Women don't need to marry for financial security, which gives them more time to consider their options. They can achieve success in their careers and pay their own rent. So when young men and women think about getting married, they are actually looking for love. When asked which traits they find important in a spouse, the answers of both men and women are much different than they were even a few decades ago. As recently as the 1960s, between half and three-quarters of women in their early 20s reported that they would marry someone they weren't in love with if all the other desired characteristics were there, and in a 1956 survey published in the research journal Social Forces men ranked "mutual attraction and love" as less important than a woman's maturity and dependable character. Now that Americans are seeking a "soul mate," finding that true-love spark may take some time."

[1] This reminds of a conversation I had with one of my "conservative" friends last weekend in which we were discussing the changing equilibria in American divorce rates as well the divorces of some of the people whom we know in common; my theory was that these rates and divorces can't be looked at in isolation from the larger social trends of how we consume, live and die. In other words, I was asking her to hold her horses, and not attribute divorce rates to a perceived increase in "immorality" or "selfishness" in the marrying kind (women in specific for her former sister-in-law got half of her brother's considerable wealth), since statistically it has been found that women who initiate divorce proceedings do so for some very good reasons. I also pointed out to her that in the "good old days", when divorce rates were undoubtedly low, women were also discouraged, actively or tacitly, from using their brains, i.e., getting an education they wanted or desired, and from working in many of the jobs women work in currently without a second thought. She replied by stating that in her family all her sisters gave up their careers after marriage to be stay-at-home moms. To which I riposted with a questions: would she rather have had a marriage to a doctor or a airline piolt like her sisters did vs. the sucessful globe trotting career (she founded and ran a forty person PR firm) she enjoyed before her retirement?