The Dating Game

Blakeley Kiri,
Forbes Global 10/06/09

The Dating Game

Attention eligible bachelors: Sabina Ptacin would like to meet you. She's the owner of two successful companies and is energetic and sociable.

She looks a bit like the actress Kate Winslet, with green eyes and sandy blonde hair. There's only one problem: She spends so much time working, she breaks more dates than she keeps. "I'm not going to marry either one of my jobs," admits Ptacin, who nevertheless often puts in 100-hour workweeks.




Loretta Talbot, a senior project manager at Wyeth, the pharmaceutical giant, wants a relationship too. She has a zest for life and enjoys photography and sailing. But it's not a sure thing that a man will call for a second date once he finds out how much real estate she owns.

Finding one's soul mate is never easy. But for women who are pursuing influential careers--women like Ptacin, Talbot, even Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor--the course of true love can be especially tricky. It's not just a matter of trying to find the time to date when you're working around the clock. Women face far more complex hurdles. Unlike their male counterparts, who generally become more desirable in the romance arena as they achieve higher career status, powerful women are often handicapped by their success.

And antiquated social mores still dictate that no matter how commanding a woman is at work, she should let her date choose the wine in a dimly lit restaurant.

"Successful men are viewed as highly desirable for women, but successful women are viewed as really scary by men," says Patricia Cook, who runs a boutique executive recruiting firm and has worked with hundreds of senior level executive men and women. "A man needs to be confident and secure in himself in order to be with a woman who earns more than he does."

Time Is Not On Her Side

A compatible partner can be hard to find, especially when time is hard to come by. Justice Sotomayor married her high school sweetheart just before starting Yale Law School in 1976, but they divorced seven years later. She subsequently acknowledged the difficulty she faced as a young ambitious lawyer who often had to cancel dates because of late nights at the office or sudden business trips. "He begins thinking, 'Gee, maybe she's not that interested,''' she has said. She had hopes of remarrying in her mid-40s, but that fiancé broke off the relationship and ended up marrying a younger woman. At 55, Sotomayor remains single.

The experience is shared by younger women like Ptacin, who turned 31 this year and spent the last half of her 20s co-founding a public relations firm, Red Branch, and a community for women entrepreneurs, Collective-E. She put off romance to focus on her personal and professional growth. Now both of her New York companies are humming along, and she's ready to pursue a relationship.

But her seven-days-a-week workday begins at 7 a.m., and the e-mailing and problem-solving can go on until as late as 10 p.m., not to mention the evenings she's out at business events or traveling to visit clients in Toronto, Washington and other cities.

As an entrepreneur, Ptacin has to "triage" her daily commitments by order of importance. Her businesses usually take precedence, especially when she suspects a prospective suitor isn't going to turn out to be Mr. Right. "You don't have the luxury of dating someone who might not be a good fit for you and just seeing what happens," she explains. "There's no time to date just for fun."

Not surprisingly, she adds, "I end up canceling dates a lot." Once, when Ptacin had rescheduled a get-together for the fourth time via text message, the man picked up the phone and "really went off on me," she says. "He asked if we were ever going to go out or if he should just move on." She let him move on.

Since the '70s women's work hours have increased steadily, especially for those in managerial, professional or technical occupations. According to a study published in 2004 by Harvard University Press, 17% of women in those fields worked 50 hours or more each week, compared with 8% of women in other occupations.

When there are only so many hours in a day, something has to give, says Ann Smith, a Wernersville, Pa., marriage and relationship therapist. "It's hard to be great at two things at the same time," she says. "You can't put 120% into the office and give the same amount of focus to your romantic life."