Читать книгу Why Men Marry Some Women and Not Others: How to Increase Your Marriage Potential by up to 60% - John Molloy T. - Страница 20

Whether they’ve grown up in poor, crime-ridden neighborhoods or upscale suburbs, men want to marry women who are in some ways their better. A majority of men want the woman they marry to meet their ideas of refinement, elegance, and decency. Often those are the reasons they were attracted to her in the first place.

Men brag about the women they are about to marry; for many, their future spouse is a status symbol. The whole idea that only gorgeous young women are trophy wives is nonsense. All wives are “trophy wives.” When we interviewed grooms-to-be, to the astonishment of my mainly female research team members, the main message the men conveyed was that they were proud of their brides.

A great example of this was two particular grooms who at first glance seemed to have nothing in common. A researcher and I met them outside a marriage license bureau in Florida. One was the son of a former congressman. He was also third-generation old money, a graduate of an Ivy League law school. The second was raised by a single mother in the inner city.

The bride of the second man could not stop telling us how he had transformed himself from a gang member to a man with a steady job. The researcher who interviewed her said she beamed when she announced he had just been promoted in the Fortune 500 company he worked for. She started by telling the researchers he had quit school in the ninth grade and had to work very hard to earn his GED. When I interviewed him, he bragged that he had passed the test for the post office on his first try. But, he added, if he had not, he would have kept on taking it until he did. He then went to community college at night, and after completing his course applied for his present job.

The first man told us he worked with very rich and powerful people, so the woman he married had to be very special. Then he explained with obvious pride that his bride would fit into his world because she was as accomplished as any woman he had ever encountered. He boasted about how wonderful she was with people. He told us of how she had shown grace and poise when she helped him entertain two dozen of his clients. He found it difficult to believe she was only twenty-five. This rather sophisticated man—a true blueblood—said it was his experience that women from the best families and the best schools usually don’t achieve that degree of sophistication until well into their thirties. He informed us that she had handled some of the richest and most powerful people in the world with the grace and artistry of a grande dame.

Immediately, the man raised in a slum chimed in, “I know just what you mean. I was blown away by my girl’s sophistication, too. We went to a restaurant, and she put her napkin in her lap and ordered me to put mine on my lap. Wow—she almost knocked me off my #@*&# chair.”

I use these two men as examples for several reasons. Both women were very attractive, but neither man mentioned it. These very different men made statements that reflected the feelings of 46 percent of the men we interviewed coming out of marriage license bureaus. This convinced the female researchers that men are not quite as shallow as most women believe.

But the main reason I cite these men is that both—along with almost half of the others who had just gotten engaged—said they knew there was something special about their women as soon as they met. Like nearly half the men we interviewed, these men admitted that sexual attraction was a factor in their choice of a bride, but claimed it was not what clinched their decision.