From the issue dated November 21, 2003
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v50/i13/13b00501.htm
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OBSERVER
The Choice She Makes
By BRENT CHESLEY
I plan to be the best in my profession," the bright young woman told me. "But first I'm going to marry an amphibian."
Well, okay, the young woman didn't really use the term "amphibian." The young woman -- I'll call her Honoria -- was enrolled in my business-communication class. She had come to my office to discuss her plans for the future. Honoria had identified her dream job, the one that she wanted to have 20 years down the road, and she'd found the names of half a dozen people who currently have similar jobs. She had studied their careers to discover how they had gotten where they were. She'd found common elements in their career paths, and she had created a timeline for herself. She planned to work in one type of job for a couple of years, then get experience in a related field, and then earn a master's degree in communications. After she completed that degree, she saw herself doing three other types of work before she had the credentials for her ideal job. Honoria estimated that the whole thing would take 15 to 20 years.
Speechless, I sat back in my chair. I encourage students to learn how people get dream jobs, but I'd never seen a student who had done such thorough research and come up with such a realistic plan for herself. I envisioned her, bright-eyed and industrious, pursuing her dream in an exciting city such as Chicago or New York.
"There's just one thing," Honoria said, lowering her head slightly.
"What's that?"
"My boyfriend, Kermit."
Well, okay, she didn't really say "Kermit," but that's what I'll call him. Honoria said that he'd never attended college. Since high school he had hopped from one minimum-wage job to another, waiting for Honoria to finish her education so that he could marry her. He had just decided that they should move to a sparsely populated part of a distant state after they married. I'll call the place Rural Pond.
"Does he have relatives in Rural Pond?" I asked. "A job lined up?"
"No," said Honoria. "He's never been there. Kermit just thinks it would be fun to live in Rural Pond."
"What do you think?"
Honoria frowned. "I'll have a hard time getting going on my career. Rural Pond doesn't have any opportunities for people like me." She bit her lower lip. "What do you think I should do?"
Over the years I've seen this scenario a number of times. An intelligent young woman, often the first in her family to attend college, excels as she prepares to enter a profession. Upon graduation, however, she yokes herself to a young man who uses one of two tactics to ruin her plans. He insists upon either living somewhere unsuitable to her career or having children at once -- children that she will stay home to care for.
Let me make clear my objection to Honoria's wedding plans. I don't want to isolate people who have college degrees from people who don't. I'm also not opposed to people trying something just for the heck of it. I think that a person who hasn't found a passion in life should move to a different part of the country to see what happens. Kermit ought to try living in Rural Pond. He also ought to try photographing the Indianapolis 500, feeding the homeless in New York, scuba diving in the Caribbean, and many other activities until something clicks for him. The problem that I foresee for Honoria and Kermit is one that confronts any couple in which one person wants to enter the professional world and the other person hasn't chosen a career path -- and shows no respect for hers. They are starting out with irreconcilable differences.
What was I to tell Honoria? I wanted to point to her detailed projection of her career and say, "This represents you, a person who knows exactly what she wants to do for the next 20 years." Next I wanted to produce a blank sheet of paper from a drawer in my desk. On this sheet I would write, "I want to move to Rural Pond. I have no contacts there and no job prospects, but it might be fun." Then I wanted to place the sheet of paper next to the detailed plan on top of my desk and say, "I don't see any similarities. I think that either of these people might as well marry an amphibian and hope for marital bliss."
I didn't say that, of course. I wouldn't be cruel to Honoria, who had come for advice, and I saw no purpose in demeaning poor Kermit, who wasn't there to express himself. Besides, I'm uncomfortable about a male professor's counseling a female student about her personal life. A direct statement of my disapproval seemed inappropriate.
I suppose that I could have asked Honoria to write a book report on Barbara Dafoe Whitehead's Why There Are No Good Men Left (2002) or Andrew Hacker's Mismatch: The Growing Gulf Between Women and Men (2003). Both books explore the problems that a professional woman faces today in finding a marriage partner. Of course, if Honoria learned how challenging it is for a successful woman to find an appropriate match, she might just give up on her professional plans entirely and move to Rural Pond.
Perhaps I should have sent Honoria to the sociology department to take a class about marriage. There she could have learned that marriages are more likely to last if the partners are both at least 28 when they exchange vows. If Honoria and Kermit held off for six or seven years, he might hear his calling, or he might mature enough to help her to pursue hers, or they might find more suitable partners. But who in our culture will wait seven years for anything?
Perhaps I should have told Honoria to talk with some of the returning students on our campus. Unlike many liberal-arts institutions, my college has a large contingent of nontraditional students, most of them female. Many have recently divorced, while those still married often discover that college opens up for them a life that their spouses reject. When those women refer to their partners, they say things like, "He turned out to be a loser, and he wanted me to be one, too." Better yet, I could have put Honoria in touch with the Honorias of earlier years. I've had a number of traditional-aged students marry less than wisely. Three or five or seven years after graduation, they show up at my office, often with children in tow, and say things like "I don't know what I was thinking" or "I acted like a fool."
Perhaps Honoria simply wanted an authority figure to tell her that she ought to break up with her boyfriend.
Instead, I began relating my own experience. I told Honoria how my wife -- also a professor -- and I have made major decisions. Early in our marriage, when I was teaching full time and Laurie was still a graduate student, we made choices that would benefit my career without endangering her chances of completing her doctoral program. When Laurie finished her Ph.D., we shifted gears to make choices that would suit both our careers. At one point she was offered a job that matched her interests perfectly. The only drawback was that the college wasn't close to mine. We solved the problem by moving to a town halfway between the two campuses. For six years, I drove two hours to work and two hours home at night. Laurie made a similar commute. We made that choice because it allowed Laurie to pursue her career but didn't force me to sacrifice mine. In recent years, Laurie has become an administrator at a university much closer to my institution. Our choices now favor her career without undoing mine.
Instead of telling Honoria to dump Kermit, I gave her a model for making choices: Partners need to respect each other's goals, and they need to find solutions that work to the advantage of both.
I can only hope that Honoria and Kermit will use the same model. If they do, they probably will recognize their incompatibility and go their separate ways. It's also possible that he may find his life's direction, and she may get to live her dream in Chicago or New York.
Brent Chesley is a professor of English and business communication at Aquinas College.
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Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 50, Issue 13, Page B5
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