Choosing carefully

Penelope Trunk can be more than a bit of a lunatic at times, but in her rational phases, she often makes a fair amount of sense.  Here she explains that if a woman wants to have children and stay home to raise them, it's probably a good idea to seek a husband and father who is at least theoretically capable of paying for their expenses:

How to find a husband who is a breadwinner. The first thing to be aware of is that everyone looks like a breadwinner in their twenties. Because most salaries are going up up up because there is nowhere to go but up when you start at entry level. And most people can get jobs pretty easily when their salary is not very high. But at some point, the salary gets high enough that you have to actually be good at what you do to continue getting jobs at that salary. Then some people start getting stuck and they have to rethink what they thought they could accomplish.

Other people simply cannot move up. They are as far up as they will go. This happens to most people around age 30. Definitely by 35. So the best thing to do is to assume anyone over 30 is making as much as they will make in their life. This is playing it safe, but better safe than sorry, right? (By age 40 almost no one’s salary increases.)

A capable breadwinner—someone who does not require a second earner to support a household—usually does not have an F in their Myers Briggs score. I’m sorry to burst a lot of bubbles here. Not that there aren’t exceptions, but marriage is a big deal, so statistics matter. If you are marrying an F and you want to stay home with kids, make sure the F is earning enough to support a family when you marry him. Otherwise it’s not likely he will earn that much.

Of course, this plays directly into the ALPHA carousel BETA marriage plan of which so many men complain.  The problem is that the calm, rational T personality tends to be less appealing than the intense, emotional F whose dynamic approach to life is so vivacious and exciting.