Bogus hysterical trend pieces. No one wants to marry "down"! Everyone wants to marry "up"! Then how the fuck do people keep getting married?

I'd like to see the trade off on earning potential for good looks on both gender sides. AS IF SUCH THINGS COULD BE ACCURATELY MEASURED.

High levels of education do not necessarily imply high income, for men or women. Says the woman who was 50 pages away from a PhD and currently in a job a high school graduate could hold. Even if I'd gotten the PhD, college teaching is not exactly the world's most lucrative field.

I wonder if, more than income, women want to marry men who have the same level of education they have. I know I fall that way at least. I happily married a penniless grad student, and would have married, say, an artist or a school teacher, but would be less likely to marry my car mechanic or plumber, though both probably make more than the artist or teacher.

If I had it to do over again, I'd probably be a plumber or an electrician or something. But I'd have wanted to go to college first.

Edited because "peniless" looks way too much like "penisless," and that would be mean.

Then how the fuck do people keep getting married?

THEY DON'T!!!! DON'T YOU KNOW OUR COUNTRY IS IN CRISIS???? THE FAMILY IS UNDER ATTACK!!!!!

Now that I'm getting a Master's degree, I have to dismiss like 88% of the population out of hand, and that's before we've even talked politics or salary!

It's ruff, mang.

Having been married for 11 years to the love of my life, who has a white collar job, I recommend (and he would agree), that anyone who plans on owning a home rather than renting should marry someone skilled in the trades. If it's too late for that, as it is in our case, they should encourage their children in that direction.

I miss my father, who could fix everything, and sometimes even did.

flea,

High levels of education do not necessarily imply high income

oh there's that. There is a huge gender disparity WRT to comparable levels of education. But the author of the fucked up NYT op-ed piece doesn't cover that shit either.

Bogus hysterical trend pieces. No one wants to marry "down"! Everyone wants to marry "up"!

Not everyone, just women -- men only marry for looks.

Not everyone, just women -- men only marry for looks.

And I'm pretty sure your "bookish" gals won't be goodlooking enough to snag a high-status man that way....

Folks, this is John Tierney. If he can think up a way to bitch about how white men are oppressed, he'll do it, whether it's logical or not. He'll even do it by starting out with an anecdote purporting to make white men look like twerps (e.g., men are uniformly champions at the highest levels of Scrabble competition, "because only men are psychotic enough to memorize letter-combinations for days on end"), but in the end, it's all about conservative social whining.

What's even more annoying is that he's a fricken token conservative whiner, to balance out Krugman's insane liberal rantings. Tierney is not even that interesting (compared, especially, to Safire, who at least sometimes pulled something unconventional or libertarian out of his hindparts). His one salutory trait is that, unlike his conservative colleague David Brooks, he's not the most irritating jovial bloviator on the planet.

Folks, this is John Tierney. If he can think up a way to bitch about how white men are oppressed, he'll do it, whether it's logical or not

Bingo.