by Erin St John

Created on: March 20, 2007   Last Updated: April 23, 2007

Dating can be a stressful endeavor for men and women of all ages and walks of life; however, for many professional women, the challenges of dating go beyond the normal worries associated with navigating intimate personal relationships. When longstanding societal expectations are at odds with one's sense of achievement and self-worth, troubles are bound to arise. Professional women have had to negotiate this balancing act for decades, and unfortunately, it is not always getting easier.

After years of work in college or graduate school for a coveted degree and entrance into the professional realm, many women have spent years managing their own lives, and find that they enjoy the freedom that financial and emotional independence provides. While this phenomenon is equally true for men, many single women feel more intense pressure from families and friends to find a partner. Even the language used to characterize unmarried men and women is different: bachelor does not have the same negative connotations of spinster. Although the latter term has fallen out of general use to a large extent, professional women still face societal pressure to partner up even if that is in direct contradiction with their enjoyment of independence making the dating world a more stressful place with higher expectations than their male counterparts face.

At the same time, professional women who do jump headfirst into the realm of dating often bring higher expectations of potential partners than their younger, non-professional peers. Having had extensive university study and demanding careers, most professional women expect a high level of intelligence and eloquence from the men (or women) that they date. Finding an intellectually compatible partner is a more demanding prerequisite for professional women; without feeling that a potential partner is on the same intellectual level, many highly educated women have trouble emotionally connecting and forming serious attachments. By projecting their own expectations for themselves onto their dates, professional women sometimes run the risk of setting themselves up for disappointment when men fail to deliver. For whatever reason, either societal or physiological, high-achieving men do not seem to have at least generally the same sort of rigorous intellectual standards that their female peers do.

Having put off relationships for a career or an advanced degree, many professional women simply find dating stressful because they have been out of the pool'

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