You are who you date
by Mira and Charles on May 11th, 2010Journalist asks, “Are women OK with dating less educated men?”
They say you are what you eat. It is perhaps even truer that you are who you date. The question today comes from a writer from a major broadcast news organization. She had seen a U. S. Census report that said that more women are holding advanced degrees than men. As a matter of fact, women are also graduating from college at a higher rate than men these days. Her question was, What does this mean for dating? Are women OK with dating blue-collar men or men who are less educated than they are?
This is a fascinating and important issue. And here’s what we said:
There are actually two issues here: class and education. When it comes to class, women are very reluctant to “marry down.” They do not want to marry into a social class lower than the one they grew up in. So a woman whose father was a successful surgeon is unlikely to want to marry a carpenter. Especially if the carpenter’s father was a carpenter too. It might be very different if the carpenter’s father is a wealthy investment banker and the carpenter has a trust fund and graduated from
But it’s different when it comes to education. Wide educational differences can be more easily tolerated, and that’s because education has only a very rough relationship with class. A woman with a master’s degree might be someone with a Harvard MBA whose father is a bank president. But she might also be a kindergarten teacher with a master’s is early childhood education whose father owns a small struggling convenience store and whose brothers are plumbers.
The Harvard MBA woman might marry a man with only a college education, but it would have to be from a good college and he would have to be on a comparable career track. The kindergarten teacher might have no problem marrying a guy with a blue collar job and a high school education.
Bottom line: it’s all about class, not education. Class remains the huge undiscussed issue when it comes to relationships. It has to do with how familiar the other person is, how comfortable it feels to be with him or her. And few things determine how familiar and comfortable we are with each other than class. Class will determine vocabulary (“dinner” vs. “supper”), food preferences (Cheddar vs. Cheetos), child rearing (self-actualizing vs. authoritarian), religious observance (reserved vs. emotional), leisure activities (sailboats vs. motor boats), cultural references (
Now it’s true that class is an enormously complicated and nuanced issue in the
1. We prefer people from our own class background.
2. An important factor in a relationship’s success is similarity in class background. Difference in class background is a risk factor for that relationship.
We can pretend these things aren’t true. We can wish they weren’t true. But they are true. And we ignore them at our peril.
After all, marriage is the place where we are closer to someone else than anywhere else. And the closer you are to someone, the more you share a tight space, the more little differences matter. I knew one woman who couldn’t stand eating with her husband because he scraped his fork against his teeth when removing the fork from his mouth. And a
Do these differences matter in your relationship? Our book Too Good to Leave, Too Bad to Stay is the ultimate guide to what differences between you mean for the future of your relationship.
