Stefanie O'Connell

And it was not just that they were facing backlash from these men, but these men would actively put them down, almost a kind of putting these women in their place.

in a very patriarchal sense of the word.

And I think one of the things that struck me as I was reporting the piece was just how much the women were really responding, not by saying, okay, well, I'm going to shrink my aspirations or sell my house, but instead saying, oh, if this is the landscape of dating in a modern context, I don't want to be part of it.

Yeah.

So one of the things that's very clear is that women are not necessarily opting out of partnership, but they are not willing to sacrifice their other goals for the sake of partnership.

And that was a theme that came up when I was interviewing some of the experts for this piece, was really pointing out how in a very recent past in which women do not have equal opportunity to access things like financing, lending to purchase homes, to

make enough money to be able to buy them.

Women were really dependent on men in ways that meant they kind of had to trade off any other kinds of aspirations or standards they might have in order to be seen as desirable.

So if you literally can't own your own home without a male cosigner, then part of getting access to a home isn't just finances, it's about making yourself palatable to a man.

And so in that landscape, there was just a different standard of priorities for what trade-offs you were willing to make.

And I think we have not reckoned with the fact that as much as we know we're in a different landscape, there hasn't been a reckoning with how this changes the dynamics of dating because people don't understand just how much heterosexual relationships have really been about trade-offs that women had to make.

not that they wanted to make and so we have this language of give and take around relationships like well you get this and i get this but that was very much an uneven trade in a way that i think we haven't really recognized until recently as more and more of these stories are coming up where women are just pursuing their ambitions the way men do

And yet it is being seen as a problem.

And it's only a problem in a world in which we've all been conditioned into thinking that, oh, of course women should sacrifice what they really want and what they really want to achieve for themselves.

And so I think in the data that what we are seeing now is that women are...

organizing their lives around their independent ambitions in ways that they are not waiting to prioritize those other goals until they find a partner so if they want to buy a house if they want to do to have even a child they have a willingness to do those things alone

And men, on the other hand, are more likely to hold off and wait until they're partnered and wait until like all those other relational pieces are in place before they make the financial priorities something they pursue.

So the researchers call this a pattern of male backlash.

So I just want to say that all of these kind of anecdotal things that we're sharing are also evidenced in the data.

This is not a one-off thing.