woman math

As I had forewarned, I would be blogging about the latest book on my reading list, Generation Me. This book fully describes my generation (or anyone under 35). Its extremely accurate and that is down right frightening sometimes. Of course, the author Jean Twenge says it best when disputing the Boomer's claim to the title the "Me Generation". While they may have forged the path to making "the self" trendy in the 1970s, "Today's under-35 young people are the real Me Generation, or, as I call them, Generation Me. Born after self-focus entered the cultural mainstream, this generation has never known a world that put duty before self. This book presents, for the first time, the results of twelve studies on generational differences, based on data from 1.3 million young Americans - focusing on the current generation of young people born in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.

One of my favorite quotes from the chapter on "The Age of Anxiety (and Depression , and Loneliness)" is in reference to the phenomenon that GenMe marries later than any other previous generations. This is all, of course, depicted in prime time TV. "Many people think of a single women when they imagine lonely young people ... the enormous wave of anxiety will practically knock you out of your chair. ... Yet there is a grain of truth in the media hype. The deadline for having children - somewhere between 35 and 40 - makes life extremely anxious for many single women. They constantly perform the calculation I call "woman math": "If we get married next year, I'll be 32; we'll want a year or two to be married without kids and it might take a year to get pregnant, so I'll be 34 and 35 before I'm pregnanta nd probably 36 when the child is born. Then if we wait until the first kid is two years old before we try for another one, I'll be trying to get pregnant at 38. Crap."

Ahhh ... I laughed forever when I read this! To see it all out there in black and white and realize ... yup - woman math ... I do that. You know, sometimes I hate how predictable I can be as a woman.