marriage is for the guys now

yet another study has determined that men are now no longer scared of marriage but are just as interested as women.  This may be because women’s interest has declined as they also discovered that women value their independence & freedom & are not as eager anymore to sacrifice them for marriage.

“A bride at her second marriage does not wear a veil. She wants to see what she is getting.” Helen Rowland

Time reported on the match.com survey in Debunking the Myth of the Slippery Bachelor & mention:

Single men are, on the whole, as likely to want to get married as single women, the survey found. They are more likely than women to be open to dating people of a different race or religion, more prone to falling in love at first sight, more eager to combine bank accounts sooner and more likely to want children. (That distant choking sound you hear is thousands of women finding this news hard to swallow.)

The study — of 5,200 people ages 21 to over 65 who weren’t married, engaged or in a serious relationship — was funded by Match.com, which has a vested interest in understanding the partnerless. But it was carried out by an independent company in conjunction with Rutgers University anthropologist Helen Fisher, social historian Stephanie Coontz and the evolutionary-studies program at Binghamton University. (Evolutionists are all over mate selection, which is the academic term for dating, because those who successfully pair up and procreate send their DNA into the next generation. Think of it as survival of the flirtiest.)

But the figures need to be parsed carefully. While overall, as many men as women wanted to marry, age played a big role in their preferences. Younger (ages 21 to 24) and older men (50 and up) were more favorably disposed to legal lifetime unions than their female peers. In the between years — the decades when women must pay heed to a uterine deadline — the ratios shift the other way.

Men’s greater inclination toward parenthood, however, seems to hold across every age group. While more than half the single men ages 21 to 35 wanted kids, only 46% of the women did. After that, the difference widens further, and not just out of biological reality. Only 16% of childless women in the still fertile years from 35 to 44 wanted kids; 27% of the men did. Plus, more women than men were prepared to say definitively that they were skipping parenthood.

“Women are much more interested in their independence than men are,” says Fisher. They value certain parts of their single lives more than men do: according to the survey, women are likelier to want to have their own bank accounts, their own interests, their own personal space and solo vacations, even if they’re in a committed relationship. They also care more about nights out with buddies.

From the get-go, women are fussier about whom they’ll consider for a partner. More men (80%) than women (71%) don’t care about the race of a love interest, and many more men (83%) than women (62%) are flexible on their date’s religious beliefs. It’s not simply, the figures suggest, that guys are more pro-marriage than has been believed; it’s that women are less so than the stereotypes would have it.

“Marriage is the death of hope.” Woody Allen

USA Today also covered this report but focused more on the gender preference swaps in Men, women flip the script in gender expectation:
Kathleen Gerson, a sociology professor at New York University who did not participate in the survey, says the attitudes echo her findings on 18- to 32-year-olds born in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, which reflect “a blurring of gender boundaries.”
“Men do feel more empowered to acknowledge their desires for commitment and their desires for connection,” says Gerson, author of The Unfinished Revolution: Coming of Age in a New Era of Gender, Work, and Family, out in March.
“Men and women are looking for similar assets and are not judging a potential partner on the basis of gender-related traits — that a woman is looking for a paycheck object or a man is looking for a sex object,” she says. “They’re both looking for the whole package, more so than in the past.”
Among other findings:
•Singles can fall in love with a friend. Seventy-one percent fell in love with someone they did not initially find attractive after having great conversations or shared interests or both; 35% fell in love with someone even though they felt no sparks initially.
•Love can last. Twenty-nine percent report remaining intensely in love with their last partner two to five years; 8% for six to 10 years; and 18% for more than 10 years.
•Hookups and one-night stands can turn into partnerships. Thirty-five percent have had a one-night stand that turned into a long-term relationship.
Garcia, an evolutionary biologist, says young people “want romantic love” and are finding it “through sexual encounters.”
“They are finding relationships through hookups,” he says, noting that more than half of the young men and women in his research say they hooked up to start a romantic relationship.
The survey did not define a “hookup” for participants, but Garcia’s research calls it “a sexual encounter between people who are not dating or in a relationship, and where a more traditional romantic relationship is not an explicit condition of the encounter.”
Palmieri’s research also has found this focus on individuality, which she calls a “dramatic shift from the idea of being blended with your husband and taking his identity and bank account.”
“It may be because marriage is more fragile that people may want to maintain their separateness, even within marriage,” she says.
But some behaviors of these singles don’t reflect changing beliefs, especially among women, the study shows. Although 87% of women surveyed said they would pick up the tab on a date under some circumstances, 89% have not asked someone out, and almost half (48%) typically wait for the other person to call after a first date.

“Marriage is one long conversation, checkered by disputes.” Robert Louis Stevenson

Well it’s easy to see why guys may be more interested in marriage.  Everyone could do with a wife, even us gals.  Some men couldn’t be as successful as they are in business & their careers if it wasn’t for the fact that they have a wife who runs the ‘home’ business.  Enough said.

I’d like to leave you with a very funny video by comedian Bryan Erwin on Marriage and stuff.  Enjoy….

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