Reply #6: Funny you should ask... [View All]

[Crankie Avalon]

...I just read this article at Salon about what at least some men supposedly want, anyway:

Wife shop!
They're the men who ask about your family's disease history, whether you'd live on the Upper West Side and if you'd be willing to convert -- on the first date. Did their biological clocks all go off at once?

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By Rebecca Traister

March 18, 2005 | Three years ago, a professional acquaintance asked me out for a drink. Cute, in his late 30s, Peter was from a privileged background, confident, with a reputation as a cad. I was not particularly attracted to him, but figured I would take him up on the drink. No sooner had I settled into the booth than his questions started: "Where are you from?" Philadelphia. "Where did you go to high school?" Quaker school. "Are you Quaker? You look Jewish." I'm not religious. "Would you raise your kids religiously?" Uh, I hadn't thought about it. "Wait, how old are you?" 26. "Oh, that's too young." Too young for what? "Too young to be looking for a serious relationship. I really thought you were older when I asked you out."

Peter hadn't walked into the bar to get to know a woman he found intriguing, or even to get laid. His business was finding a suitable bride, and had I been "old enough," his next question might well have been how many goats my father had secured for my dowry. Peter was my first wife-shopper, but not the last. Reports of these kinds of encounters -- with men who investigate your family's disease history over a get-to-know-you beer or decide after two dinners to invite you on vacation with their college roommates and their wives -- have become increasingly common among my female friends, urban women often assumed to be husband hunting themselves. In some cases, the men we're meeting are more interested in settling down than we are -- almost as though they have their own internal biological clocks.

According to a new book, they do. In "The Male Biological Clock," Dr. Harry Fisch, a urologist at Columbia University, asserts that men over 35 are twice as likely to be infertile as those under 25, and that a drop in testosterone after 30 can contribute to a psychological need to drop domestic anchor. And as the increase in fertility technologies and professional commitments for women pushes the average age of marriage back, some men are assuming a take-no-prisoners approach to shopping for a life mate.

Link to rest of article (you'll have to watch a brief ad to get the free site pass, first): http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2005/03/18/wife_shoppers/index.html