Just Stop It, Princeton Mom: There's No One Way to Do Womanhood

You may remember the uproar last spring over a letter to the editor of the Daily Princetonian—Princeton University's student newspaper—where a '77 graduate advised female students to start looking for a husband...now. If you happened to miss Gena Kaufman's coverage of it on Smitten, the letter was rather directly titled "Advice for the Women of Princeton," and, wow, it's a doozy.

Yes, in 2013, Susan Patton told students at an Ivy League college that their only chance for real happiness was to find a husband who was their "equal" while on campus. And she's back. On Valentine's Day, the Wall Street Journal published an essay by Patton (not surprisingly, she has a book, Marry Smart: Advice for Finding 'The One', coming out in March) that offered shockingly out-of-touch advice that was insulting to women and men. For example, Patton writes:

"An extraordinary education is the greatest gift you can give yourself. But if you are a young woman who has had that blessing, the task of finding a life partner who shares your intellectual curiosity and potential for success is difficult. Those men who are as well-educated as you are often interested in younger, less challenging women."

Yikes. So all educated men are supposedly looking for "less challenging" women? I wonder if that applies to her own two sons, whom she mentioned in her letter? (Both "Princetonians," by the way.) This strikes me as a really unfair characterization of men—Patton makes them out to be prizes to be bagged and tagged, and refers to looking for a mate as a "competition."

Look, there are a million ideas out there on how to enjoy single life in your 20s and 30s (even in your 40s, 50s, and beyond), just as there are plenty of examples of happy couplehood at all ages. What Patton and some defenders of the single life who've written responses to her piece are missing is a simple fact: Not everyone takes the same path. And at the end of the day, what we need a lot less back-and-forth about whether married women or single ladies are "doing it right" (and by "it" I mean, you know, life) and a lot more support for one another.

To me, the real reason Patton's advice is so offensive is she too readily assumes that the path all women aspire to is marriage, a house, and 2.5 kids. The message we need to be hearing (and repeating) is that no matter what we decide, all that matters is that we're making the right choice for ourselves. The good news? We don't need somebody else's rule book to do that!