Bad news for Mrs Bennet When a prosperous bachelor appears within a five-mile radius, I go into Mrs Bennet mode. I cluck, I plot, I schedule dinners and Sunday lunches. My match-making focuses on marrying off my women friends to the best possible man: preferably solvent, well-bred and amusing. In the process, I've tried to push together the most unsuitable of singles: the City workaholic and the ski bum; the tweed-clad grouse-slaughterer and the vegan Fair Trade nut. Now, however, I can scale down my ambitions. A new study shows that women are in fact perfectly satisfied with men of their own standing. The watershed year, apparently, was 1970: whereas women born in the post-war decades aspired to marry up, those born more recently no longer seek to star in their own rags-to-riches fairy tale. Their ambitions are for their own careers, salary, and pensions. Put crudely, what they want from the men in their lives is not a leg up, but a leg over. The role model here is not Kate Middleton, but Zara Phillips. When Princess Anne's daughter wed a middle-class rugby player, she showed what I took to be a refreshing indifference to status. In truth, she was part of a trend. Kate, who improved her standing by marrying Wills, is the old-fashioned type; Zara, a top sportswoman, needs no man to lift her out of her circumstances. She took on Mike Tindall not to raise her status, but to set her pulse racing. It's part of a wider trend. Women no longer need a man to show them the ropes, boost their confidence and help them see the world. Self-improvement comes from books or courses, not Mr Darcy's influence. Those who want to shed their estuary English, conquer shyness or tone their bodies do it for their own sakes, not to please an upmarket husband. That's good news for women - but even better for men. The pressure is off. Males no longer serve a social purpose as an escalator to higher status. They can relax, safe in the knowledge that women regard them as lads rather than ladders. And now that you can be liked for yourselves, boys, what about coming over for a bite to eat? I've got this lovely friend... My match-making may face competition from an unlikely source: Waitrose. According to those in the know, on Thursday nights the Belgravia branch turns into the capital's classiest singles hotspot. I can see the appeal: the gourmet products lend themselves to romance, inviting experimentation and sharing, which is the essence of both cuisine and courtship. Trolleys, pushed by men and women dressed to please, nuzzle one other amid the oysters and Coquilles St Jacques, as the love-hungry trade lustful glances over the organic asparagus. But why, I asked an habitué, do they choose a Thursday night for prowling the aisles? Surely a weekend would be better? No, I was told: trawling for talent on a Friday or Saturday night would look desperate. Hopefully, Rihanna, the pop singer with a talent for making explicit videos, will soon find a husband (with or without the help of Waitrose) to save her from her worst excesses. Certainly, David Cameron's proposal to limit children's access to overtly sexual internet videos must have her in its sights: Rihanna seems unable to record anything without taking some of her kit off or indulging in lewd gyrations. Given her huge under-age fan club, this is worrying. I'm the first to condemn censorship, but self-regulation seems beyond this singer's ken. When Rihanna stripped off in his field to shoot a video, a pious farmer called Alan Graham ordered her to cover up, and find "a greater God." He's right: divine intervention might stand a chance of keeping lubricious material off our children's computers and making pop stars behave. Cameron's new rules don't.