 impossible to love, honour, and obey." A little more than one hundred years later, in August 2006, a Forbes.com column advised men: "Don't marry a woman with a career" because she won't look up to you. Economist Sylvia Hewlett warns that "the more successful the woman, the less likely it is she will find a husband or bear a child."
But these claims ignore the massive changes in men's attitudes as well as women's roles. Sure, every woman has dated some jerk who is threatened by her accomplishments. But instead of pandering to his insecurities, she should run like mad in the opposite direction. This is the kind of man who often ends up marrying a mail-order bride from the Philippines or Russia, provided by a match-making service that boasts that its women are "not the type who will talk back".
Most men today tell pollsters that they would be happy to date or marry a woman with higher earnings or education than themselves. And that is actually happening. In a dramatic reversal of trends prior to 1980,
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| 42 per cent of college-educated married women who work now out-earn their partners |
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women with college degrees and high earnings are now more likely to marry than women with less education and lower earnings, although they usually do so at an older age. When there is a difference in educational attainment between husband and wife, it is now more often in the female's favour.
Researchers Caryl Rivers and Rosalind Barnett report that 42 per cent of college-educated married women who work now out-earn their partners, and their marriages are just as stable as those in which the husband makes more than his wife. In fact, Barnett found that as the wife worked more, the husband's marital quality of life actually improved!
Reams of studies show that today, unlike in the past, egalitarian values and flexibility about gender roles are huge predictors of marital quality. Men with traditional values about male breadwinning are now more likely to divorce than their open-minded peers. Only a wimp needs to earn more than his wife to feel like a man. 
FIRST POSTED OCTOBER 16 2007
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Are women really less happy now? 
Why feminism is good for marriage
We expect too much from marriage
