We are currently hosting a female friend of my wife at our place. As you can imagine, when women get together, they discuss womanly topics, which includes talking about other women. They were talking about some chick who spent her 20s on pursuing a dead-end career. Our guest mused that she may be looking for a way out and added that “she is reaching marriage age anyway”. Alas, this remark turned into the starting point of a blog post.

In my recent post on unhappy career women, I remarked that, anecdotally, a lot of women seem to want to get out of their corporate career, but this happens in response to realizing that they have been duped. The fulfilling career they expected just never materialized. The same sentiment seems to be embodied in the statement of our guest. However, there is one important caveat: if this woman really wanted to get married, she would have gotten married already, and not when her competitiveness on the sexual marketplace has been waning for quite a while now.

Any woman in her late twenties or early 30s who tells you that she has been thinking of settling down is simply admitting that she has made one poor choice after another. Her job is probably completely irrelevant, both for her and society at large. What is worse, plenty of women spend however much they earn, so you can plausibly ask what such women gain by spending ten years in the workforce before marrying. I have known women who spend a quarter to half their salary on fashion, and sometimes they do not even wear all of the clothes they buy, or only a few times. As you know, the next season is around the corner and now she needs to look “fashionable” again.

Of course, there are people who benefit from frivolous female economic activity, but it is not the women themselves. The same is true of the casual sexual history of women in their 20s. A few guys get to enjoy pumping and dumping them, but in turn those women can only expect to ruin her pair-bonding ability. Considering that women tend to reveal with their face how unhappy they are with their life, I think it is not much of a stretch to say that ten years of a boring office job that barely pays enough for a small apartment, fashion, and take-out food is effectively a waste. For women, this is a net-negative, just like banging a bunch of random dudes is a net-negative for them.

Interestingly enough, not all women blindly fall for the empty promises of society regarding the supposed joys of the office-drone lifestyle. In fact, you can find plenty of women who play the game much better. Back when universities had an approximately even share of men and women, plenty of women used the first few months of freshman year (freshpeople year?) for searching for a boyfriend while others partied until the last term of their final year, and then frantically looked for a dude to settle down with. You may think that the latter ones are a bit smarter because they can select guys based on the job they have lined up, but this does not work if the top-performers have been picked off in their first year at university already.

In any case, I think there is great dishonesty behind claiming that the late 20s or early 30s are the time for a woman to settle down. I would argue that those women probably wanted to settle down with some dude all along, but just never found any guy who either wanted them or who was good enough for them. In case such a woman is unable to find a guy at that age, she will keep making similar statements until they become completely ridiculous. I recall some articles online where women claimed that they finally feel ready to settle down in their 40s or 50s. For them, marriage probably always has been just around the corner.

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