This NYT quiz (you need to hit the link at the end of the piece) on marriage seems to be making the rounds. It’s by Stephanie Coontz. It has some interesting data in the answer key, though I suspect there’s some legedemain at work. For example, the first answer in the answer key purports to demonstrate that it is “false” that women are “more eager to marry than men.” But her facts don’t entirely speak to that. Rather, they point to how women are less likely to stay content within already existent marriages and that men are more likely to see marriage as an “ideal lifestyle” (Annoyingly, the quiz text is a graphic so I can’t cut-and-paste). I don’t dispute that the situation is more complex than stereotypes suggest, but that doesn’t mean that the stereotypes are without foundation. I’d be very surprised if the data showed that women in serious relationships turned out, in the aggregate, to be the less eager party to get married. I’d also be shocked if the data showed that young women, again generally speaking, weren’t more likely to look for men who would make for good husbands than men are likely to search for women who would make for good wives.

How those marriages hold up over time in the eyes of women has a lot less to do with whether or not those women were eager to get married in the first place.