"What a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinity security," and, "What a man is is an arrow into the future and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from"..."The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket."

 As I begin my exploration into the world of Sylvia Plath, there is one theme that dominates the struggles of Esther. There always seem to be two forces pulling on her life, the traditional values of how she "should" live her life, and what Esther really wants to do. Much like Virginia Woolf, Plath writes of the frustrations of women trying to express their desire to write creatively in a world where that it is often discouraged. Even though The Bell Jar takes place in a much more modern era, the tendency for women to feel the only professional job they can take is a menial or secretarial one still existed. If Esther could not launch her writing career, the only options still practically open for a woman in her situation were to become the wife of a career man and raise a family, or become a secretary.

In the 1950's you had the stereotype of the "nuclear family" that supposedly dominated every woman's dreams of what she wanted to do with the rest of her life. As opposed to in Woolf's or Plath's eras, today there is so much more diversity in how the family life is structured. If Esther had lived today, surely she would have not felt so much wrongness in wanting to live freely with or without a husband.

How did it come about that married life today is often so different?  According to Pew Research Center, the share of women ages eighteen to thirty-four that say having a successful marriage is one of the most important things in their lives rose nine percentage points since 1997 – from 28 percent to 37 percent. For men, the opposite occurred. The amount of men with the same opinion dropped from 35 percent to 29 percent.

Now why is this happening that men are finding it less appealing to get married than women? According to research done by Suzanne Venker it's because due to the decline of this family model "women aren't women" anymore". According to many others though it is because many people of both genders do not feel as great of a need to get married, especially at a young age anymore.

There is a logical fallacy here. The definition of a family unit is ever diversifying and changing in modern times, but is that the cause of this drop in men finding marriage essential. Just because this social change happened does not mean that it is the cause of the statistic. Is there another factor in play here changing the way we view marriage?