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> 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

> 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.

majormajor 5y ago
You think a better relationship would be built on a "cook and clean and take care of kids for me" role? I can pay to have that done for me these days!
- ravenstine 5y ago
  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.
- Der_Einzige 5y ago
  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
- vel0city 5y ago
  $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.
  - rdtwo 5y ago
    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
    - vel0city 5y ago
      > That buys you 10 hrs of shared child care and a cleaner every month. 10 hours a month doesn't cover doing a full time job. What world do you live in where one can do a full-time job for 10 hours a month?
Mediterraneo10 5y ago
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.
- ravenstine 5y ago
  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.
  - shkkmo 5y ago
    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.
deadite 5y ago
>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."
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
anotherman554 5y ago
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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Doz5w2W-jAY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Doz5w2W-jAY
dillondoyle 5y ago
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.
- stevenhuang 5y ago
  Yeah he lost me in the first sentence. > what exactly is a man buying into with a relationship with said woman? What a strange and confused perspective, to pose such a question.
Jetrel 5y ago
> 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.

majormajor 5y ago

You think a better relationship would be built on a "cook and clean and take care of kids for me" role? I can pay to have that done for me these days!

ravenstine 5y ago
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.
Der_Einzige 5y ago
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
vel0city 5y ago
$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.
- rdtwo 5y ago
  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
  - vel0city 5y ago
    > That buys you 10 hrs of shared child care and a cleaner every month. 10 hours a month doesn't cover doing a full time job. What world do you live in where one can do a full-time job for 10 hours a month?

Mediterraneo10 5y ago

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.

ravenstine 5y ago
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.
- shkkmo 5y ago
  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.

deadite 5y ago

>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."

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

anotherman554 5y ago

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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Doz5w2W-jAY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Doz5w2W-jAY

dillondoyle 5y ago

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.

stevenhuang 5y ago
Yeah he lost me in the first sentence. > what exactly is a man buying into with a relationship with said woman? What a strange and confused perspective, to pose such a question.

Jetrel 5y ago

> 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.