She had a child and graduate school was not even on the horizon. She loves her son deeply. But deep down inside she told me she feels she's lost something. She wasn't bitter, she was realistic. I hear that over and over.
Women usually fall in love in their first years of college.
There's a great conflict for women about who comes first in a relationship. Let's face it, women tend to put the person they've fallen in love with first. So you see these smart ambitious young women come to college with all these big plans, but then they fall in love, and all their priorities change. It happens during college, in terms of the workload they take. It happens as they graduate, and many put off graduate school to feed the relationship.