Good with a female perspective to balance things out.
I disagree quite a lot with the bolded though. I want a woman who needs me, not to be some accessory to an ultimately selfish lifestyle. And women 'who don't need no man' is a red flag to me, cause who makes it a point to not need a man? That signals selfishness, lack of willingness to comprise and put herself second to the wellbeing of a family, which is what I think most men wants from a wife.
Depends on the career also. There's a difference between say someone pursuing an academic career or being the typical ball buster corporate drone.
The fact that your peer group is marrying divorced men with children, suggests to me that they're not getting first picks among men.
There's actually quite a bit of research on all of this, and I agree with you on some of it.
I appreciate that men want a woman who needs them - that's a very elemental part of the male psyche, of course. Women want to be perceived as attractive and cherished. My point here is that a woman is secure in her own skin and is confident in her ability to enjoy a fulfilling life without racing from man to man for satisfaction will ultimately make the better wife - less needy, more self assured, etc.
When an independent woman gets married, it means she chooses to get married. She doesn't usually feel forced into it or like she's running out of time. There's no sense of desperation there. I'm speaking very generally of course since every woman is different.
As far as my peer group, most got married in their mid twenties. I led the pack by getting married to a man six years older than me when I was twenty-one. (I also graduated from UT and started business consulting in the same year. We bought a house the next year - not exactly a young innocent.)
Of the friends I have kept up with who were not married by around 28, there are three types - the desperate ones who married weirdos, the ones in long term relationships who finally got married, and the ones who were advanced in careers (typically engineering or finance) and who chose to marry older men.
While these may not appear to be the best of the batch, there is a long standing tradition of men not liking women who earn more than they do or who are perceived as "smarter" than they are, so these friends ultimately wound up with men who outearned them and weren't threatened by them, most of whom happen to be older and divorced.
It's a hugely faceted issue, actually, and interesting to read about from a sociology perspective.
