It seems like there are two purposes to marriage, and they are fundamentally opposed.
One is to accomplish things together: to make an income, to run a household, to rear children. For this purpose it’s best if the two people have complementary skill sets.
The other is the whole love thing, and on just about every dimension people seem more attracted to people who are more similar to them.
In the past the former purpose was considered the more important one, and you didn’t even have to worry about who would provide an income (or freshly killed animals or whatever) and who would vacuum the carpets, because gender roles took care of that for you.
But now that the second purpose is considered paramount, mating is becoming more and more assortative to the point where every smart, ambitious person I know is married to a more or less equally smart and ambitious person, probably in the same field. And then they both have demanding jobs and compared to 99% of the population their comparative advantage would not be housework and childrearing, but someone has to do it and so it defaults to the woman who now has to work a second shift after she comes home from running her hedge fund.
(Or they don’t have children, or they delegate childrearing to hired help. Anecdotal evidence suggests the latter leads to dissatisfied children.)
Like, optimizing for comparative advantage is great in theory! I’d like to advise smart and ambitious women to go forth and find housespouses! But my confidence in the efficacy of this is very low as a result of actually knowing many smart and ambitious women, who seem to agree that they would like to date and marry guys who at minimum are as smart as them and have pretty good career prospects, and ideally the higher-status the better.
And you’d expect optimizing for comparative advantage would work better in the other direction, but actually two professors of my acquaintance immediately come to mind who married attractive, unintelligent women, had unhappy marriages and divorced soon after, and are now happily married to women of similar intelligence and career status and have multiple kids together.
Clearly the solution to all of this is that women aren’t allowed to have jobs anymore. But this seems sort of economically inefficient as well as politically untenable.