Patti Stanger Blames Amy Poehler's Professional Success for Failed Marriage

Millionaire Matchmaker Patti Stanger has landed a gig blogging for People about celebrity relationships. First up: Amy Poehler and Will Arnett, who announced last week that they were splitting up after nine years of marriage. The couple — who had never been in the tabloid crosshairs — chose to keep details of their breakup private. Stanger, however, has her theories on went wrong, and per usual with her take on relationships, she applies sweeping generalizations regarding traditional and antiquated 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 just let our inner-cavepeople determine the way we live? Because if that’s the case, then I’m pretty sure they didn’t sprinkle Sensa on their food to make it taste gross so you’d lose weight.

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.)

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?

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 spouse 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.

That simply is not true. But as a very successful woman herself, perhaps Stanger’s ideas on this issue were developed to explain away why a “love and relationship expert” has never been able to make love and relationships work out in her own life. She’s protecting her brand.

But it’s doubtful that her argument here even applies to her own life. It’s more likely that Stanger’s romantic relationships weren’t so much plagued by her success as by the fact that she’s a huge asshole who says incendiary things on the regular. She’s just shitty. 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 the shitty kind of thing a shitty shit like her would do.

Patti Stanger Blogs: How a Woman’s Success Can Affect Her Relationship [People]

Related: Millionaire Matchmaker Patti Stanger Shoves Foot in Mouth Yet Again
All Of Patti Stanger’s Meanest Comments Now In One Place