Princeton alum Susan Patton garnered some publicity by writing a letter to the Daily Princetonian suggesting that the women attending the school take the opportunity to find a mate there:
A few weeks ago, I attended the Women and Leadership conference on campus that featured a conversation between President Shirley Tilghman and Wilson School professor Anne-Marie Slaughter, and I participated in the breakout session afterward that allowed current undergraduate women to speak informally with older and presumably wiser alumnae. I attended the event with my best friend since our freshman year in 1973. You girls glazed over at preliminary comments about our professional accomplishments and the importance of networking. Then the conversation shifted in tone and interest level when one of you asked how have Kendall and I sustained a friendship for 40 years. You asked if we were ever jealous of each other. You asked about the value of our friendship, about our husbands and children. Clearly, you don’t want any more career advice. At your core, you know that there are other things that you need that nobody is addressing. A lifelong friend is one of them. Finding the right man to marry is another.
The reaction and pushback was swift, to say the least. Princeton alum Maureen O’Connor calls the advice sexist (“pushing women — and women alone — to define themselves by their spouses and to make life choices according to an outmoded understanding of romantic attraction”) elitist (“this embarrassing window into how Ivy Leaguers talk to each other should be as cringe-inducing to modern audiences as Patton’s take on gender relations is”) and Nina Bahadur also offers a plethora of criticisms of varying quality.
I can understand at least some of the objections. That this advice seems so frequently geared towards women (by a woman with two sons, in this case) has to be grating to women who resent the notion that mate-seeking is of primary or greater importance to women than to men. There is, of course, a rationale behind this view. My own experience aside, women are more likely to rely on her husband for income than vice-versa. And Bahadur’s protestations aside, women complain quite regularly that men do not place sufficient emphasis on intelligence or even look at intelligence as a negative value, which (to me) has the implication that they would value intelligence. Both of these things, are part-and-parcel to precisely what a lot of women view as being wrong with the world, however, and I can understand the reluctance to chart a course accepting a status quo you want to see changed as a given. So the pushback here is, at least to some degree, understandable.
Is it productive? Is Patton right? That, I don’t know.
Someone else pointed to this Atlantic article on the virtues of getting married later in life. It’s looking primarily (though not solely) at income. Which is one metric. It also discusses divorce rates.
Some of this can be chalked up to simple self-selection, though. Which is to say, when getting married later is “the responsible thing” that’s what responsible people are going to be doing, regardless of the merits. If wearing puce every day is “the responsible thing to do” then people who wear puce every day will show better results than people who don’t. Further, getting married later (and finishing college, which the article also focuses on) are indicative of longer time horizons and greater impulse control, which are both conducive to higher earnings.
At the same time, marriage can very much complicate the natural progression of a woman’s (or man’s) career. I had to put my career aside for my wife’s, but I didn’t have to put my college career aside because I’d already graduated by the time we met. There is nothing to stop a group of people from going to college together, but it requires some givens that aren’t always there. In my wife’s case and my own, we didn’t graduate at the same time and she went to medical school a distance away from where she completed undergrad. Would I have had to transfer? Would she have had to forego medical school? Given that Patton specifically exhorts underclassmen girls to date the range, that will inevitably lead to different graduation points. Sacrifices have to be made that don’t have to be made under the post-collegiate progression. At that point, you’re simply looking at situations involving career sacrifices, which are much easier to rebound from than dropping out from college or needless transfers.
My conservative soul, however, is at least somewhat sympathetic to where Patton is coming from. She is absolutely right that nowhere after college will you be surrounded by such good opportunity. There is almost something cruel about the post-collegiate progression in that respect. It becomes really hard to meet people after college. Especially if you’re not the outgoing type. And, ahem, especially if you’re a guy who works in IT. There is Internet dating and the like, but my success with that was always limited. The Internet (as with BBSes before it) was helpful in meeting the people I did, but the big hits of my life (Julie, Evangeline, Clancy) did not involve online dating sites (as such).
And there are times I really question the wisdom of the status quo. I was not really ready to get married until sometime after I graduated from college. Had I married the girl I was with when I was in college, I’d be divorced or miserable now. It’s impossible to separate that, though, from the society from which I come. If getting married when you’re twenty were common, it would have changed a lot of dynamics. The self-selection issue wouldn’t be there. The “Am I missing something by settling down so young?” questions would cut less deeply, and so on. When social institutions support early marriage, such as in Utah, divorce rates are not appreciably different than elsewhere. The Mormon timeline seems to demonstrate that there is another way. Of course, the Utah experience is not something that non-Mormon (or non-religious, anyway) women are likely to want to embrace. Apropos the above, Utahn women attend and graduate college at lower rates than women nationally (though they graduate at higher rates than men).
Conservative commentator Jonathan Last is making the argument in his new book (that I have not yet read) that we have a “fertility gap” between the number of kids that people are having and the number of kids they want to have. Which means that, not only are people having fewer kids than Ross Douthat might prefer, but they’re having fewer kids than they want. Late marriage plays a role in this. As does the social structure that so often encourages it. Clancy and I wanted three, but due to biology and age we’re likely two-and-done. In a social structure where getting married younger was a norm, that might be different. This is a cost of the post-collegiate progression and one that Patton’s advice – if widely accepted – might mitigate.
The other criticism of Patton’s piece is the (alleged) snobbery. From a personal standpoint, though, her suggestion is probably sound. People from Princeton don’t need to marry people who went to Princeton, but they’re probably going to want to marry people of a similar background more often than not (yes, even the men). People who went to college are generally going to be looking for the same thing, and people who went to ubercollege… ditto. Though on a personal or individual level, this is sound, it would potentially exacerbate class divides with assortive mating. Which means that it might not be as good a thing for society as a whole. What effect it would have, given that assortive mating is already occurring, is unclear.
Patton defends her original letter (and speech) here and here.
At the same time, marriage can very much complicate the natural progression of a woman’s (or man’s) career.
Truer words were never spoken. At the risk of my wife seeing this and reading it the wrong way, and simultaneously in the hope that my daughter will stumble across it and learn something, I have to say that my life and career would have turned out a lot different if I had delayed, not only marriage, but serious hooking up, until I had established myself better.
In my case, though, it wasn’t about balancing two career start-ups. My wife wasn’t working at the time, but she was dealing with kidney failure, dialysis, and an eventual transplant. That entailed taking substantial personal time off for trips to the doctors and transplant center in Wichita (we were living and I was working in the KC metro area). It also meant I couldn’t really concentrate on my job the way you need to starting out.
It was just all too much. Like trying to start a heavy truck up a hill. And the situation at AT&T then, right after the break-up of the old Ma Bell monopoly, was already dicey enough. I just never could really recover after that with nothing to show on my resume. With a car payment, rent, and a wife to support I didn’t really have the option of starting over. I was just stuck.
One major thing at a time.
Julie and I had a couple pregnancy scares when I was in college. Had either of them turned out the other way, the result likely would have been a shotgun wedding and my collegiate career would have been redirected.
I think her point about not having as target rich an environment after college is actually poor. I’m sure she thinks Princeton kids are super mature at 21. In some ways i’m sure she can back that up, they are certainly highly goal directed, able to work hard and likely very intellectual. That doesn’t mean they are mature, know themselves, understand relationship or know what they want in a life partner. If your searching among college kids expect to get a lot of immaturity and people who don’t know what they want in a mate. Also there will be times when people will have many people around them with similar interests: when they are established in their career they will meet all sorts of people who have very much the same interests as them. I would bet a big national conference in someones field is a great pond to fish from.
On the first part, the phrase is “young men with prospects.” They may not be mature, or settled, but they are likely to get there. And you grow together. Of course, my judgment when it came to women was bad and so I would not have grown together with the right person. On the other hand, some of that has to do with societal expectations, I think. People will continue to be immature as long as society tolerates it. If we expected more of 20 year olds, we’d probably get more. At least the relationship maturity in Mormonland was such that they seem to be far more ready to choose a life partner than I was when I was their age.
I don’t really agree with the second part, though that might be more particular to me (introverted, male-dominated field) than it is for others. But it’s a common complaint, that when we get out of college, we are no longer surrounded by age-appropriate and generally single people. (Heck, my first job I was the only American there under 40 outside of the warehouse.)
I’m still a bit skittish on the “choosing a life partner at 20” thing. And concerned about the career sacrifices along the way. But I still think she’s dead-on about the selection pool. Particularly at a more… homogenous?… environment like an Ivy League school. (I went to a diverse state school. One of the reasons things didn’t work out with Julie was our rather different backgrounds. But in the Honors College, there were a lot more people that I was compatible with. I’d figure Princeton to be more like that.)
People marry for at least as many reasons as there are people in marriages. Really, a marriage is a partnership: if you can manage just fine on your own, you don’t need to get married. In my opinion, which is worth precisely as much as you are paying for it, people ought to spend some time on their own as individuals, before they get married. Sorta tones up the personality. Nobody will ever fall in love with you, nor you with them, without seeing something admirable and needful in the other person.
You must first be someone worth loving before you can love anyone else properly. For some people, college might be enough to firm up the soul. But you never have any money when you’re in college. It’s good to a single person for a few years: your early career will always feature a lot of extra work. Young people ought to be free of encumbrances for a few years. Get out, see the world. Be someone.
You’ll be no good to anyone else, arriving at the altar half-baked and needy. Sex won’t hold it together though it’s a wonderful period of any relationship. Soon enough, you’ll start entertaining regrets about your life and your choice, because your spouse won’t be any more ready for you that you are.
There are advantages to marrying young, I suppose. Your personality is more flexible. If you want children, this is especially true. I’m glad I got my children raised before I was old. But I had my encumbrance-free years. I became someone.
But there is a note of truth about college in what Susan Patton writes: your college friends are your life partners, the most important friends you will ever make in life. Lose contact with them at your peril. These are the people who you watched grow, the people who watched you grow. I went to an excellent college and I’ve kept my friends for all these years. I know nobody from my Army units any more — well, there is one, but we enlisted together.
The happiest married couple I ever knew were a pair of dance teachers, Spaniards, who said “Always keep a few millimetres of space between yourselves.” And no matter how lowly your dwellings might be, never let it be so small you don’t have a room with a door on it, just for your spouse. Always marry someone wiser than you. Let them go on being who they were when you first loved them.
My gripe with Patton’s piece had less to do with the whole “ladies, land a man when you can!” aspect (which, were I a lady, I suspect I would have found quite galling indeed) and more to do with the utterly nauseating Ivy League smugness it veritably oozed.
It reminded me of an exchange I once had with a friend, a Yale alumna. She was chatting with a group of us about some location or another, the specifics of which elude me now. However, in describing the people there derisively, she called them “state-school types.” by which she obviously meant crass and loutish and undesirable in general. This association seemed so obvious and accepted to her that I guess it didn’t occur to her that any of us could possibly object.
I was, sadly, forced to interrupt her and mention that I had actually attended state schools up through my graduation from medical school. If memory serves, she offered a perfunctory apology but didn’t seem all that worried that she’d just insulted a friend of hers and come off as a horrible snob in the process.
Some of the snottiest people I’ve met are Ivy League graduates (sadly, mostly from Yale) preening about their precious, precious school. (Most Harvard alums I’ve met actually seem more apt to downplay where they went. Not all, but most.)
“Some of the snottiest people I’ve met are Ivy League graduates (sadly, mostly from Yale) preening about their precious, precious school. (Most Harvard alums I’ve met actually seem more apt to downplay where they went. Not all, but most.)”
Interestingly, this downplaying really gets on my nerves. I consider it a form of humble bragging. It is a way of giving your credentials without saying them directly and it causes me to eye roll. Everyone knows what a person means if that person says they went to school “in New Haven.”
Though you are right that school pride is a tricky, tricky issue on many levels. I don’t think there is anything wrong with school pride but it should not be done at the expense of other schools. My undergrad alma mater was elite but not Ivy League. We might or might not have a reputation for fanciness but I am not going to hide where I went out of a false sense of modesty. If people react poorly and think I am a snob when I say “I went to Vassar” that is their problem, not mine.
I’ve met both the humble brag variety of Harvard-minimizers and ones who really seemed to mean it when they said “it’s really not all that great in the following ways.”
Slightly OT, I had a friend in medical school who insisted on telling people she studied “biology.” It drove me bananas, since it was clearly calculated to eventually lead to her being “forced” to divulge that she was a medical student. (She was a big-time attention-seeker in all kinds of ways.)
And the people I’ve met who have been the most brazen with their school snobbery are, sadly, from Yale. There’s nothing wrong with taking pride in one’s academic accomplishments. I would be a big, fat liar if I didn’t admit that it made me happy when I could tell people I was on the faculty at Harvard medical school. (I am at the academic equivalent of “minion.”) But the handful of people most openly derisive of those who had gone to supposedly inferior schools (including Princeton, described as being so far below Yale that “it may as well be Columbia”) were Yalies.
Yeah that kind of attitude is galling.
Though I never heard Princeton get that kind of snobbery. Nor Columbia. Cornell and Brown seem to be the punching bags of the Ivy League in my experience. Interestingly those are my two favorite Ivies.
Cornell’s a cow college. Nobody there’s too terribly impressed with being at it.
Although I’m a state schooler, I’m sometimes guilty of the false humility trope in other areas.
Of course, I can’t admit that I am guilty of false humility, because once I do, I’ll look humble, even though it’s all a ruse 🙂
That was one of my initial visceral responses. Which I am sure comes as a surprise. But then I thought… oh, of course that’s how they’re going to view it. So I kind of shrugged it off. But I hear you.
1. Not everyone has the great luck of finding someone to be serious about in college or university. My romantic/sexual life in college was absolutely non-existent. It took me until about 24-25 to start getting dates and most of those were of the one-coffee date Internet variety. Hard rules about everyone should marry young is going to render a lot of people stressed and miserable. I take this kind of personally especially now because I see a lot of my friends from high school and college getting married, buying property, having kids and I am dealing with the great luck of deciding on a career change that coincided with the Great Recession.
2. I don’t think there is anyway that we can prove people are having less kids than they want. And if it is true, I largely blame conservative economic policies and their continuing hostility to anything resembling a welfare state and good social programs. If people had a sense of job security, a feeling that it did not take a good decade to establish a career and savings, and universal healthcare instead of employee-based healthcare; maybe they would have kids earlier and have more kids. Maybe not but I think a large reason why many people have kids later and fewer kids is because it takes much longer to become established and secure in American society. A friend of mine just got his first full-time job with benefits and PTO at 30 or 31. Right now, I work full time but the job only offers a 401(K) and no insurance or benefits. How am I supposed to have a kid? My rent and health insurance basically cover one pay check a month.
3. On the elitism angle, I think men might be more elitist than women when it comes to dating. At least in terms of college degrees. On a another Internet community I used to belong to, women would give me a good deal of heat because I wrote that I could not see myself dating or marrying a woman who was not a college graduate. It was the women in the community who were prone to comments like “Some of the smartest men I know did not attend college” and making rebellious-statements against the college-industrial complex.
1. Might that have been different, though, if more people were looking for a partner rather than “having fun” in college? I think I’ve always been a proto-husband and never a Good Time Charlie, so I think I probably would have fared better than I did in a world where looking for a partner were a higher priority than a Friday night date. If I have a subterranean bias in all of this, that’s probably it.
2. I don’t know that you can “prove” it, but I think it can be supported. Basically, polls subtracting “How many kids do you have?” versus “How many did you want?” You’re going to get some false answers from people who would prefer to forget that they wanted children or more children and people who don’t want to say they didn’t want little Alan who is sitting right over there. But I would expect that to even out.
As for whose to blame, I’m not sure that anyone is. Last has said that government support is something that should be looked it to address the issue. But blue states have lower fertility than red states and European social democracies generally have lower fertility than the US does (though we’ve been slipping). Which may or may not say anything. I wonder how the the actual vs. desired fertility numbers work out.
But anyway, I would primarily look at things such as “cost of living” and “cost of having children.” You wrote a post touching on the subject recently. I think it’s particularly an issue in the urban areas (far moreso than the suburbs and rural areas, even if they are in states with more limited Medicaid and such). But I don’t think it’s a product of liberal policies per se. If there is causation, I suspect it works the other way, but it may simply be correlation (I’d probably bet on that?).
3. I think this is an area where rhetoric doesn’t match reality. Which is to say, I think that women are more likely to defend the notion of marrying outside the tribe (education, race, etc.) but are less likely to actually want to do it. I think I’ve seen something to that effect on the race issue. They’re more likely to think that interracial marriage is okay, but less likely to want to do it themselves.
“3. I think this is an area where rhetoric doesn’t match reality. Which is to say, I think that women are more likely to defend the notion of marrying outside the tribe (education, race, etc.) but are less likely to actually want to do it. I think I’ve seen something to that effect on the race issue. They’re more likely to think that interracial marriage is okay, but less likely to want to do it themselves.”
I am not really sure this is true but I only have anecdotal evidence to support it. All heterosexual interracial couples are going to require a man and woman by definition and I know plenty of interracial and interreligious heterosexual couples.
Though I will admit that dating within or without of a tribe can be an ideological hotspot for many people I know this from how the discussions go in Judaism.
One of the oddest things I encountered in my life was The Bell Labs Club at Holmdel, NJ. The Holmdel location had more than 4,000 employees, many of them young, located in relatively barren (as far as things for working 20-somethings to do) Monmouth County. So there was The Club, which approved (and funded with company money) sub-clubs. In addition to the traditional golf, bowling, and softball (IIRC, at one point Holmdel fielded five entire softball leagues), there were numerous less usual groups. Among those I recall: the jazz band and folk music club performed regularly; juggling; ballroom dancing; film (showing an eclectic range of movies in the auditorium on Friday evenings in the winter); model railroading; photography; bicycling.
The Holmdel Ski Club organized maybe 20 trips per year, ranging from one-day outings in New York to weekend trips all over New England to week-long trips out west. To tie this back to the OP’s theme… One of the years that I was on the Ski Club’s executive committee, at one of the weekly status meetings, I suddenly realized that the ten members of the committee were actually five couples, four married and one dating, all of whom had met on Ski Club trips.
Interestingly my mother went to college between 1964-1968. This was when it was still acceptable for women to say they were trying to get their “MRS” degree.
My mom said she never understood how her fellow female students could believe gangly 20-year old boosts about how said guy was going to be able to get the woman a big house in the suburbs, etc.
People should marry when they think they are able to. Its not something that you should rush into, unless you want misery or are really, really lucky with who your spouse is going to be. Plus, there is a lot to experience in life that best to do when you are young like a lot of travelling. Being married doesn’t prevent, it gives you an activity partner, but kids do. There really isn’t anything wrong if you are enjoying your youth.*
Even if you launch into your graduate studies and career after college, its probably still best to be single. A spouse could provide support but you also have a chance of being bogged down by studies or work during the honeymoon period of the marriage, which will kind of hinder it. Its hard enough to support one person as a graduate student; supporting two or more is worse. I think its best to be somewhat financially settled before marriage.
*I suppose that you could make some form of philosophical argument against enjoying youth based on the idea that in aggregate its really bad for society, its a type of privilege and an unaffordable luxury. I had a friend in high school who moved to Kansas City after college because he got a job there. When I visited him during a cross-country trip, he said that people shack up much younger than they do in New York and it was kind of shocking to him. I suppose different places have different ideas about this.
A part of me thinks we’re too cautious about marriage. That finding someone within orbit and then devoting yourself to making it work is actually better than finding the absolute, best right person. And our desire for the latter leads to disappointment.
I am not sure I agree based on how many people I know with marriages that lasted a year or so because they got married too quickly….
Problem is, I know a number of people who dated for years and years and either never got married or got divorced shortly thereafter. One advantage of a short-short deal over a long-short or long-none is that at least getting married too quickly and divorcing leaves more time to try again. Julie and I dated for over four years and it was only when contemplating the next step that I realized it wasn’t going to work. Then the same thing happened with her next boyfriend. Confronting the question of marriage earlier would keep things moving.
Some of this depends on how quickly we’re talking about. I’m not talking about a situation like Clancy and myself where we were seriously discussing it less than month in. But if you don’t know after a year, you need to ask yourself “Why not?”
Kazzy’s point about “college years” versus “real life years” is valid, though I think on some degree that’s a function of social expectations. If we’re expected to find a mate in college, I think we start looking more at the important stuff. It was my general nature to evaluate long-term prospects very early in a relationship, though (particularly after Julie). I’m not saying I was perfect at it, but I very much noticed the sort of thing he overlooked. Maybe some people are incapable of that?
“If we’re expected to find a mate in college, I think we start looking more at the important stuff.”
Yes, but I still think we’re limited.
I won’t know what a partner is like when she comes home from work on a Thursday after already working 50 hours that week and still having Friday to go until that happens. You can’t simulate that in college. You’re going to be married in real, adult world. And college ain’t that. Or, to avoid being presumptuous about the college experience, for many of us who attend four-year undergraduate schools that are campus-centric, that ain’t the case.
I don’t think that everybody or even most people are going to meet their perfect chance. Its going to be Mr. or Mrs. Good Enough more than Mr. or Mrs. Right. However, we live in an age where marriage is about love and companionship rather than economics or politics. People are raised to expect a high-level of compatibility and marriages tend to end badly when that doesn exist. Giving people’s expectations about marriage, which are a bit unrealistic, its best for more people to procede cautiously. The most stable marriages seem to be the ones that people did not rush into. Delayed gratification in action.
And I’d like to echo New Dealer’s point that not everybody has romantic luck in high school or college. I didn’t start to date till after law school for a variety of reasons.
I went to a Women In Science talk where the biologists there spent the entire time talking about when was the best time to have a baby.
I was displeased.
Best age? Best time of the year? Best time of the month?
(I didn’t mean to minimize your complaint, which is valid. I was just curious.)
During grad school. again, biologists, with their crazy “wake up every 3 hours and do something”
I think after about 9 months works pretty well for humans.
At the risk of overgeneralizing, I feel that my experience is somewhat instructive as to the difficulty in finding a long-term partner in college…
I was in a serious, committed relationship throughout my senior year of college. Serious enough that we talked about things like marriage and children in the abstract. We were very much in love and happy together, though there were some large and obvious differences…
– She was more conservative than I, though I was more conservative then than I am now.
– More importantly, she was much more traditional than I am/was, especially when it came to gender roles.
– Though we both identified as “middle-class”, we were not from the same socio-economic status; I was the child of a teacher and a firefighter and she of a high ranking corporate executive at a Fortune 500 company and a homemaker.
– She had, I’ll say, far more expensive taste than I.
But none of this really mattered in college. We all lived in the dorms and ate in the dining hall and went to class 15 hours a week. College was an equalizer for many of these things. And so we thought we’d be together for the long haul.
We didn’t make it through October after graduation. And, really, we were miserable for several months before that. The differences that were largely muted in college came roaring to the forefront after graduation. She entered the world of corporate finance, started wearing “power suits”, and worked 80 hour weeks. She moved to Murray Hill, a neighborhood she loved and I hated. I ultimately returned to Boston, working at my college’s on campus day care center and staying very connected with my college friends who also stayed local.
The reality is, we weren’t built to last. Staying together was a pipe dream build on the assumption that the real world would be as easy for us to date in as college was. It wasn’t. We’re no longer in touch, but I know that we’ve both since gotten married and settled down, presumably with people better suited for each of us.
Now, I realize this is but one story. There are many people who meet in college, remain together, and get married; I know many of them. But college can often serve as a buffer from the real world and, if it buffers you from certain realities that will be very pressing once it is over, it can give a false sense of security about the strength of a relationship.
It is why I believe in special “relationship math”. If someone tells me that they’ve been with their SO for 12 years, but 4 of those years were in high school and another 4 in college, you have to convert. Those 12 years maybe count as 6 or 7 “real” years. It is also why getting married after 2 years of dating in your early 20’s seems much more rushed than doing so after 2 years of dating in your early 30’s. There’s some sort of weird time compression that happens, largely because you are closer to being the fully formed you at that point and generally have a better sense of what you’re looking for.
My comment below was meant to apply to you but overall I think you bring up really good points.
I should also make clear that none of the attributes I’ve ascribed to her make her a bad partner or person… just a non-ideal partner for me. Nor I for her.
‘Though we both identified as “middle-class”, we were not from the same socio-economic status; I was the child of a teacher and a firefighter and she of a high ranking corporate executive at a Fortune 500 company and a homemaker.’
Only in America could you both be described as middle class!
Well, that was a point of contention. I would explain to her that she was not middle class. She would respond with, “I went to high school! With Mexicans! And I didn’t get a Porsche on my birthday like other kids I knew!”
Somehow, I missed the writing on the wall.
It also didn’t help that we attended a private college with an absurd amount of extremely wealthy kids. It’s very possible she was in the middle third of SES at our undergrad.
I didn’t mean to imply anything about her. If anything it is a uniquely American sociological issue.
Oh, yes, yes, my apologies. In re-reading my comment, I realized it could possibly be construed as saying that her characteristics were why we didn’t work. I just wanted to make clear to all that it was the gap between us that was the issue, not either of us as individuals.
Sorry for the confusion. Your comment had nothing to do with it.
i’m only half joking when i tell people to never date outside their class. half of what you end up saying to each other just sounds like the craziest shit to the other person.