I don’t know any single men of a certain age who would have preferred to have gotten married. I know many single women who would have preferred that their lives had worked out differently.
The brutal fact is that if a never-married man in his 40s or 50s decides, well, better late than never, he’s got options — some of them in their 20s or 30s. A never-married woman tends not to have the same array of choices.
And — here’s the tricky part — what if the never-married woman is, say, the dean of Harvard Law School? Or solicitor general of the United States? Or a Supreme Court justice? Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac, Henry Kissinger famously said, but its magical properties seem to work best on the female sex…
The smarter and more successful the woman, the more complicated the dating dynamic: how to leaven that intellect and competence to make the package a bit less threatening.
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