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.
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.
I personally think that the more educated people a society has, the more interesting people there are to meet.
While you were in college all the non-dull non-college people were out there having different life experiences than you-- learning things you don't know about.
In many ways education makes us more homogeneous. To an extent this can help make each other seem more interesting because it gives us common language and intellectual frameworks to have discussions, it dispenses with some boring preliminaries. But beyond that point, I think sharing common education makes people actually less interesting, not more.
Particularly, that kind of feeling inadequate in spite of success is a likely a form of imposter syndrome. Many other people experience it, including people with degrees (there is always someone else with more or more illustrious degrees). Many people feel better just knowing that other, even obviously super-accomplished people, have felt that way and many people seem to more or less age out of it.
While I can't refute the existence of that social stigma, at least I found that there isn't much of that in actuality... but that doesn't prevent it from existing in your head. Of course, there are people who always find something to be snooty about. If it's not the pedigree of your academic credentials it'll be about the brand of your sneakers. Surrounding yourself with thoughtful and emotionally healthy people can help.
At least that is what I experienced and heard from others.
Cheers
> Of course there are dull people out there but do you think that most people without college degrees are dull
I meant precisely what I said. I don't intend to make a broad statistical statement based on my limited personal annecdotes.
> While you were in college all the non-dull non-college people were out there having different life experiences than you-- learning things you don't know about.
I don't have a college degree. There are many thing I don't know about, which is why I like talking to educated people.
> In many ways education makes us more homogeneous.
I strongly disagree. ”Education” only creates homogeneity to the degree to which educational institutions focus on indoctrination over education.
I strongly support enouraging education for people of all genders, ethnicities, intelligences and socio-economic backgrounds because I think it will make the world a more interesting (and better) place.
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.
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
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."
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.
> what exactly is a man buying into with a relationship with said woman?
What a strange and confused perspective, to pose such a question.
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.
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?
It's not that the PhD doesn't add to the attractiveness. It's just not the most important variable for most men. You might differ, but unusually intellectually curious men on HN aren't really representative. Most people have very little intellectual curiosity.
For a life partner i would and did pick the PhD tho
I don't even know what to say to this. Is [picks from list] speech pathologist, dental hygienist, nurse, payroll clerk or hairdresser NOT a job that involves a fair amount of knowledge, training, and skill?
Just because it's not EE or CS doesn't mean there isn't a wealth of technical and scientific understanding (or even just an understanding of the legal environment) going on behind the scenes of a profession.
So you're probably not going to find a girl who has exactly the same job as you and wants to date you -- but if you ask them to explain their profession to you, you might just learn there's a lot going on under the hood.
"they have to settle with women they have little in common with"
Again, this is just a lack of imagination. I studied a bit of chemistry, my wife studied a lot of chemistry, we appreciate that chemistry is cool. Just because I went with computers and she went with medicine doesn't mean we have "little in common"; we just find other topics to geek-out about.
"Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don't." ― Bill Nye
[1] list was https://fourpillarfreedom.com/visualizing-u-s-occupational-e...
that's basically it: debt is not attractive.
They were as physically attractive as they were emotionally shallow. There is much much more to a person than an education.
This gets said so much on fora with men who regard themselves as “redpilled”, but it makes no sense to me personally. As a bookish and arts-inclined person, so much of my worldview, the things that occupy my thoughts during the day, has been formed by the canon of literature, music, films. No woman would seem dating and marriage material to me if she weren’t similarly erudite and we would have some common ground in that respect. It has been the number-one factor driving all my relationships over my life.
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.