Newsflash: Serious women in the early 20s don't date

An odd piece of pseudo-journalism in the Post this morning. It is a story in the Style section that outlines how women in their early 20s today have a strong aversion to emotional ties. This article has a very Cosmo sort of feel to it - snippets of "insights" from nameless women layered amongst the writer's own therapy issues.

Anyways, this article talks about how hooking up is now the preferred way to spend time with men and that dating, for serious women in their early 20s, is dead. Deader than a doornail.

The "insights" that confirm this?
1. Romance is a waste of time, it takes effort and is generally annoying (this is an amalgam of insightful quotes)
(If these women are this jaded in their early 20s, they may overtake the Castro queens (in terms of bitterness) by their early 40s).

2. Confessing love implies weakness.
Insights: I'm just a weepy girl who relies on someone. I want to be independent and I want to love someone and need him but that is contradictory. I don't want to give into love because I am scared he won't call me. I will be heartbrokedn and then feel like a stupid girl that should have known better.

3. Love is distrating to higher and more important goals.
Insight: She didn't see how she could afford to invest time, energy and emotion in a loving relationship during the busy senior year of her life.

To be fair, there is a bunch of quotes from "experts" on the benefits of dating.

But I am disturbed that this sort of slavish devotion to goals is somehow held up as a virtue. And that dating during the early 20s is some sort of antiquted notion for the frivolous underclasses. This article should be expanded into a wonderful parody of what young, serious women thought that "wimmin's lib" meant and where they got it wrong. That would be both funny and revealing.

This article is almost an affront to those women in their early 20s who do choose to date (in the traditional sense) and who do not view their vaginas as another mouth to feed. This can be summed up as: "Serious women do not have time for men's non-sense when there are goals to be met". But in this twisted universe, a quick hook-up is fine to fill the occasional need for intimacy (read: periodic weakness). And they try to validate this garbage by talking about how many goals they have and how much there is to do and blah blah blah. These women are suffering from: "age-appropriate dating nihilism"

These women, who are so goal driven in college, are going to emerge as empty voids. In the mid-20s, these voids will be watching Friends re-runs every night at 7pm after going to the gym and eating low-fat diets and bringing work home so they can be "taken seriously", or even better - going to "professional school" to become a Woman of Consequence. These voids will actually address reality at 28 and become fantastically horrible creatures upon their 30th birthday when no one has married them. And why would any reasonable guy marry any of these shrews? The guy would become her pawn to meet the goal of "married at 30" and then promptly discarded as the first serious battle in the marriage (i.e. who is going to take care of the spawn). These sham marriages (if the women actually does capture some poor unsuspecting guy) are not because of love - but because of "The Goal".

Can you imagine the bitter creature that will come out of the divorced chrysalis?

I would find it interesting for the journalist to ask these goal-driven women in their early 20s the following: "How do you envision managing a serious relationship with a man who (because of the woman's ego) will also be goal oriented and motivated?" "And why is that such an unworthy goal?"

The answer to that would be the "insight".