The Princeton Mom Still Thinks You Need To Find A Man To Marry In College (Video)
Author Susan Patton, also known as the "Princeton Mom," has been touting some pretty f*cked up ideas as of late, with her opinion pieces in The Daily Princetonian and The Wall Street Journal about how women should be in college to find their future husbands (I guess the whole getting-an-education thing is just a pesky sideshow, right?).
And for some reason, the media keeps entertaining her with column space and airtime. In a segment with MSNBC's "Morning Joe," Patton was at it again, advising young, smart women to get married ASAP because obviously finding a hubby is like the most important thing ever.
Patton was on the show to publicize her new book, "Marry Smart: Advice for Finding the One," which we can only assume will be filled with as much poor and elitist, "Stepford Wives"-aggrandizing information as her previously published pieces.
The bottom line (for those of you who don't want to trudge through the sh*t this how-to is undoubtedly spewing): 75 percent of a woman's time in college should be placed on "planning her personal happiness." For Patton, this totally translates into finding a man.
Apparently "work can wait" and the time to have children shouldn't be missed or compromised by, um, I don't know, professional development and personal goals outside of family building.
And in a freaky turn of events that makes you wonder if this whole segment's bias was planned down to a T, host Mika and another one of the show's female workers agree — asserting that working hard to have career success might have caused them to miss the boat on the "best pool of options" as far as guys go.
Another one of the show's workers, however, was still able to claim that she eventually wanted to have a family, but there were other considerations she valued more in college:
"My parents put me through four years of really expensive college to be able to have a future, not have a husband."
I understand the importance of finding a partner who is supportive and encouraging. And Patton does precede her (outdated) opinions by saying that her advice is targeted towards women who want to have "traditional" families.
But the emphasis on putting the majority of a woman's efforts — 75 percent — on finding this guy before even the age of 23 (when most of us graduated) is totally ridiculous, whether you want to be married with children in the future or not.
Patton's main point is that career-oriented women looking to settle down in their mid-30s after being secure in their jobs for some time won't be able to compete with younger women who, for some reason, she believes are more attractive to men by mere virtue of their age.
But I'm thinking my fellow career-oriented women would agree that those men — the ones solely looking for a hot young thing as opposed to an educated and successful professional — are not the ones we'd be looking to enter into holy matrimony with, anyway. The Pattons of the world can have them.
While a good guy or girl in one's life might be a nice piece to the puzzle that is achieving overall happiness and personal success and whatnot, whatever happened to learning to love yourself first?
Ladies should focus on being the best version of themselves, and that means going to school for school, having a slew of different (and crazy, and bad, and happy, and weird) experiences, and being able to be alone before entirely settling down and planning that picket white fence, if that's even your thing.
Patton advocates for a plan, and I get its appeal. Nobody wants to look back with regrets because you definitely can't live your life in reverse.
But at the same time, there's a lot that's unexpected about life that can incidentally open a person up to a bunch of new options that might actually lead to even better opportunities. And these things certainly don't have to impinge upon SOs.
So instead of following Patton's shortsighted advice, maybe we should just slow down and make the decisions for ourselves as they come.
via MSNBC, Top Photo Courtesy: Susan Patton
