GirlsGuideTo | WTF? “It’s Her Fault”

Millionaire Matchmaker and all-around not nice person Patti Stanger has started blogging for People about celebrity relationships. Great. Her first victims? Amy Poehler and Will Arnett, who announced last week that they were splitting up after nine years of marriage and broke all of our hearts. They obviously kept the details of the split private because you know, that what people do. Stanger, however, has her theories on went wrong, and of course, she applies generalizations regarding traditional and seriously out-of-date gender roles, while providing no data or studies to back up her claims.

According to Stanger, the marriage may have failed because Poehler was the primary breadwinner and more successful than her husband, and that "goes against nature." Men need to provide for their families, because that's the way that cavemen were. Does that mean that we should all just let our inner-cavepeople determine the way we live?

Stanger continues:

"Even if your man is the most progressive male on the planet and is completely comfortable with his woman bringing home the bacon, the rest of the world isn't that open-minded. There will undeniably be comments and questions about your relationship dynamic. At first, these may seem like not much more than a silly annoyance, but these comments burn and eventually, they'll wear away at your man's confidence. He'll start to notice the difficulties of your untraditional financial situation."

(She also notes that successful women are too busy checking their email, and thus, their men feel left out.)

Umm hasn’t the rise of women in business, thanks to the recession, proved this completely out of date? Of course, there are undoubtedly some relationships that are affected by a man feeling threatened by a woman's success. What Stanger fails to point out is that this isn't a marital problem—it's his problem. Even if the caveman argument has some truth to it, men have had hundreds of thousands of years since then to work out their hunter/gatherer insecurities. Isn't it time they've adapted?

Our verdict: WTF? I’m just annoyed. First of all, let’s leave ~~Gob~~ Will and Amy alone because even though they’re splitting, I’d like to still naively believe they are great so my belief in love doesn’t die. Stanger might be right, but she might be wrong. Amy Poehler seems too progressive to have fallen for a guy that can’t handle her being more successful than herself and Will plays a character on “Up All Night” that is a happy stay-at-home dad...and Stanger is incredibly unlikable.

Her words are of course offensive, but she probably is right in some regards. It probably is difficult for some men to accept that they can't make as much money as their partner, and it probably does become an issue. But after all of this hypothesizing about busy, working women, Stanger doesn't actually give any tips on how to budget time, how to talk to your guy about the issue, or how to make a marriage work under these circumstances. It would seem, then, that she believes that a marriage in which a woman was the more successful of the two actually could never work. And using her platform on People to blame a man's shortcomings on a woman's success—essentially equating professional success to personal failure—is just a crappy, annoying thing to do.

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