No, Choosing Family Over Career Isn’t ‘Settling For Less’

Megyn Kelly made a pronouncement on X this week: “Ladies, it is possible to make your own money, have your own career, pay for your own swanky nyc apartment (etc), AND find a man who loves you, wants to have & raise kids w/you & wants to be w/you and only you. The only thing stopping you? Your decision to settle for less.”

Kelly is clearly referring to herself here, implying: I did it, so you can too. It goes to show how remarkably out of touch women in the media are, no matter what their politics may be. As one X commenter named “Wandering Warrior” noted, “Normally, Megyn, I absolutely love everything you do. But I’m going to have to fundamentally disagree with you on this. You’re a 1%. Doug knows it as well. Acknowledge this and tell the majority of women that the ability to do what you’ve done is extremely RARE.”

The last thing American women need is more life advice from the media elite. Far too many variables exist to make a blanket statement about love and career like, “Don’t settle.” Women have been saddled with some version of this narrative for decades, and the inflated expectations they consequently adopted landed them right where they are today: chronically unhappy, frustrated, and disappointed.

Newsflash, but most women don’t want Megyn Kelly’s life, and those who do need to know the trade-offs involved. The average woman in America who wants both a career and a family needs advice that actually works and acknowledges the biological differences between women and men that make their choices unique. 

The details of a woman’s life matter in these discussions. For example, technically I have a career. I make my own money. I also have a man who loves me, wanted kids with me, and wants to be with me and only me. (We’re empty nesters now.) 

But I am not, and never have been, the main breadwinner in my marriage. My work has always been part-time and was scheduled almost exclusively around my children’s needs. I worked mainly when they were asleep or, later on, at school. We never used nannies or daycare.

Did I settle because I chose to earn less for the sake of my family? Hardly. This is the message women need to hear but don’t. 

Indeed, my life is much more representative of what the average marriage-minded woman wants: family at the center, with possible part-time employment orbiting around that. No, this choice won’t offer a woman the ability to buy a “swanky nyc apartment,” but it will provide her with something better: a life of meaning.

Most women don’t want to be the primary breadwinner in their marriage either — and, as a general rule (whether it applies to you or not), it’s better if they are not. That’s because somewhere around age 30, women who haven’t yet found their person become walloped with a deep desire to nest, and when that happens, they look for a man who can provide. 

Women’s career aspirations tend to fade over time, not ramp up, meaning they prefer having a man on whom they can rely. Unfortunately, those men are few and far between these days. The good ones have usually been taken by young women who prioritized family over career.

Kelly once wrote that some men like the “fire and excitement that comes from a working wife.” That has not been my observation at all. More often than not, wives and mothers who work full-time and year-round are angry and burned out. Society groomed them for this role, and they don’t want it. 

Feminist Ideals Don’t Represent Most Women

For the past 25 years as an author and a life and relationship coach, I’ve witnessed the “having it all” narrative wreak havoc on women’s lives. In 2007, a report by the National Bureau of Economic Research observed: “As women have gained more freedom, more education, and more power, they have become less happy.”

The authors of the report suggested feminism raised women’s expectations faster than society could meet them but concluded: “As women’s expectations move into alignment with their experiences, this decline in happiness may reverse.”

The word “expectations” is key because as long as we live in a culture that touts feminist ideals — i.e. “You can have it all! Don’t settle!” — women’s expectations will always be out of alignment with their experiences. Feminist ideals do not represent what most women want.

The lives of the women who reach out to me look nothing like the women represented in media. The women who reach out to me are either thirtysomething singles who can’t find a husband and have given up, or they are married but feel trapped because they don’t see a clear path to stepping out of the workforce and staying home with their children.

This is when women realize their expectations are out of step with their experiences or their new reality — which at age 35 looks different than it did at age 25. Money and careers suddenly feel less important, and family takes center stage. The problem is that they’ve been steeped in different ideals and made professional, relational, and financial choices accordingly. 

For instance, they might have accrued a bunch of student debt, assuming they could pay it off later. Or they might have married a man with low earning potential and assumed it didn’t matter because she had a job. Or they might have pursued an all-consuming career that leaves no room for marrige and family. Or they might have purchased a home based on two incomes instead of one, thus assuring they’d be a slave to the workforce forever. 

Women do all these things because they’re told they can have everything if they just “don’t settle.” This advice destroyed several generations of women. Most women will not become successful broadcast journalists who can outsource motherhood and/or domestic tasks. And most don’t want to be the primary breadwinner.

That last point is particularly sticky. Back in 2013, Kelly lambasted Lou Dobbs for addressing a Pew study that revealed women are the sole or primary breadwinner in 4 out of 10 households with children — and how, in his opinion, this trend didn’t bode well for individuals or society. He said that when it comes to gender roles, the male is typically more dominant.

Since Kelly’s marriage is an exception to this rule, she took offense. She didn’t want to hear the truth about the very real problems in marriages in which wives earn more and thus demonstrated her considerable bias on this issue. But just because the data may not apply to Kelly’s relationship, that doesn’t negate the value of the data. 

Bottom line, women in media are the last people to whom young women should turn for life advice. The opposite of settling for more or having high expectations isn’t to settle for less or have low expectations. It’s to have realistic expectations and accept inevitable trade-offs.