Women Are Looking for Sex, Not Status

Well, bringing you the important news.

At Telegraph UK, "The days of women aiming to marry 'above their station' are over - and it's good news for all concerned, says Cristina Odone":

When a prosperous bachelor appears within a five-mile radius, I go into Mrs Bennet mode. I cluck, I plot, I schedule dinners and Sunday lunches. My match-making focuses on marrying off my women friends to the best possible man: preferably solvent, well-bred and amusing. In the process, I’ve tried to push together the most unsuitable of singles: the City workaholic and the ski bum; the tweed-clad grouse-slaughterer and the vegan Fair Trade nut.

Now, however, I can scale down my ambitions. A new study shows that women are in fact perfectly satisfied with men of their own standing. The watershed year, apparently, was 1970: whereas women born in the post-war decades aspired to marry up, those born more recently no longer seek to star in their own rags-to-riches fairy tale. Their ambitions are for their own careers, salary, and pensions. Put crudely, what they want from the men in their lives is not a leg up, but a leg over.

The role model here is not Kate Middleton, but Zara Phillips. When Princess Anne’s daughter wed a middle-class rugby player, she showed what I took to be a refreshing indifference to status. In truth, she was part of a trend. Kate, who improved her standing by marrying Wills, is the old-fashioned type; Zara, a top sportswoman, needs no man to lift her out of her circumstances. She took on Mike Tindall not to raise her status, but to set her pulse racing.

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And actually, nowadays, at least in the U.S., it's the women who're better educated and more successful. So, if we can generalize some of the findings, things should be looking up for the guys on this side of the Atlantic.

More here: "Aspirational marriages a 'thing of the past'."