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From: jer@peora.UUCP (J. Eric Roskos)
Newsgroups: net.singles
Subject: Effects of career-location on interpersonal coherence
Message-ID: <2038@peora.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 20-Mar-86 09:11:54 EST
Article-I.D.: peora.2038
Posted: Thu Mar 20 09:11:54 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 22-Mar-86 06:08:48 EST
References: <496@ssc-bee.UUCP>
Distribution: na
Organization: Concurrent Computer Corporation, Orlando, Fl
Lines: 73
Keywords: LDRs, careers, intelligent SOs

> Unfortunately, competing passions have often hampered their search for
> companionship.  Despite all the changes of the last 20 years, many men
> still want to end up with a woman who'll be at home at the end of the day,
> waiting anxiously to serve them dinner.  At the same time, lots of women
> will search for men who can be counted on to support, protect and define
> their existence.

This paragraph starts out in a promising way, then quickly degenerates into
a stereotype.

The article discusses well-educated, professional people, who have deferred
marriage in order to go to graduate school and then establish a career.
I have considerable doubts that the ideas above of what "men" and "women"
want from each other applies that much to these well-educated people.

One reason for this involves simple intellectual companionship.  Now, I
have known such well-educated women (including an XSO) who did essentially
search for (and eventually found) a man who "can be counted on to support,
protect, and define [her] existence"; actually this requirement is less in
conflict with reality than the requirement stated above that "men" have,
since it can involve a woman who is well-educated but emotionally immature
seeking someone to provide emotional support, an image of security, etc.

On the other hand, the requirement "men" are described as having doesn't
fit well with reality; I doubt many well-educated women who have taken up
a professional career are willing to sit home all day.  This means that if
one seeks such a person, he will likely have to settle for a relatively
uneducated, unprofessional person.

But this leads, I've observed, to some considerable problems.  As I have
gotten closer to 30 myself, I have observed more and more of my
professional male acquaintances getting married; and have observed with
some interest that they often marry women who they can't seem to relate to
on anything but an emotional level.  I find this strange, and further
incomprehensible that anyone could maintain a relationship of many decades
that way [I've recently debated this subject extensively myself, and have
concluded that such a relationship tends to be generally insufficient
simply because in the long run it is simply uninteresting; a person of any
inner fortitude is not going to *require* emotional support continuously,
nor emotional reinforcement; this leads in the long run to a divergence
of interests between the two people, which I think would tend to
separate them].

But then if you have this requirement, that a long-term SO should be
someone you can relate to on an "intellectual" level, then finding such a
person is very hard.  I know from my own experience that such people
usually are in other cities; and even if they start out in the same city
as you, soon the search for employment (which is by no means guaranteed to
persist anywhere near as long as the relationship) forces each person
often to move to cities distant from one another, or make major career
sacrifices to stay together.  Thus I think the "competing passions" more
often take the form of the career vs. relationship rivalry more through
requirements of the career per se, than of some sort of primative, hidden
desire for the other person in the relationship to abandon all their goals
to provide some vague sort of "support" for one's own.

This, I think, is a major problem in the present day, and has led me so
far as to wonder at times about the nature of our current society.  Such
speculations on my part at present are incomplete, and very complex;
suffice to say that to me, it seems to be a big problem.  I've come to
conclude that if one aspires to become well-educated and pursue a
challenging career, one must expect to make major sacrifices.   This is
one of them.

[I noted with some irony and amusement recently, when I watched the movie
"2010" for the first time, that in 2010 Heywood Floyd and his wife seem to
have solved this problem by creating a "cottage industry" in which she
studies her dolphins there at their house; at least, she has a swimming
pool with dolphins in it, and she appears to be a marine biologist.  This
is a convenient solution for a movie, but hardly practical for most
real-life cases.]
-- 
E. Roskos