Marry Him_The Case for Settling for Mr Good Enough

by Lori Gottlieb

  But the mere fact that, at 40, I outed myself in the Atlantic article by saying that I craved a conventional family with a good enough guy put me in the category, in some people’s minds, of the kind of woman who wanted it too badly. According to some readers, I was nothing short of an affront to the entire women’s movement. Here’s what some said: “Could you be any more desperate?”

  “How sad that your son is not enough for you.”

  “I am totally appalled by your need for a man.”

  “You are positively tragic.”

  “Get some self-esteem!”

  “You have taken codependency to a whole new low.”

  “I feel sorry for you that you had such an all-encompassing desire to reproduce. Now I feel sorry for you that have such an all-encompassing desire to be married.”

  “Don’t you think you owe it to yourself to be a little more comfortable with yourself before you look for a mate?”

  “Maybe if you change your outlook, and aren’t so needy, you might meet the right person.”

  “If my daughter grows up to want a man half as much as you do, I will know that I’ve done something wrong in raising her.”

  Somehow, post-Jane Austen, it’s become shameful for a woman to admit how lonely she is and how strongly she wants to be part of a traditional family. What kind of educated, sophisticated modern woman with an active social life has time to be lonely?

  You’re lonely? Get a life! Get a promotion! Get a hobby! Get a hair-cut! You go, girl!

  I remember seeing a group of women on a morning TV news show discussing the fact that they’d rather be alone than with Mr. Good Enough. Would they? Really? They’d rather be 40 years old and going to bars with a group of female friends who are all looking past them for Mr. Right to walk in the door? None of the women on the show was movie-star attractive, a fact that didn’t seem to shake their belief that they’d land Prince Charming. One even said she’d rather be alone because you never know when you might find true love—maybe you’d find it in the nursing home. The nursing home! Would she really like to be single until she’s 80? And even then, doesn’t she realize she’d have even more competition for the one single man (who probably has Alzheimer’s) in the entire retirement community than she has now?

  My 29-year-old colleague Haley told me that while she’d like to go through life with a partner, she doesn’t want to have to change for anyone. But is that empowerment or inflexibility? Isn’t change integral to compromise and being in a mature relationship? Has “girl power” made us self-absorbed, poor partners?

  It’s probably no accident that once women adopted this “I don’t need a man” attitude, many of us were left without men. In a 2007 Time magazine article entitled “Who Needs a Husband?” (um, me), Sex and the City’s Sarah Jessica Parker is quoted as saying that because women don’t have to rely on men for financial support anymore, “my friends are looking for a relationship as fulfilling, challenging, and fun as the one they have with their girlfriends.”

  What an idiotic idea! No matter how much I enjoy my female friendships, I don’t want my marriage to be like the relationship I have with my girlfriends. I doubt very many of us would. Factor in your girlfriends’ emotional requirements and quirks and mood swings and imagine how “fulfilling, challenging, and fun” it would be to live with them 24/7 for the rest of your life. Your girlfriend may listen ad nauseam to the minutiae of your day, but is she really the person you want to raise kids and run a household with?

  In that same Time article, one woman, a 32-year-old media producer, explains that she ended a seven-year relationship with her investment banker boyfriend because although she “totally adored him,” she felt like life with him would be “too limiting.” She wasn’t happy, she explained, because she didn’t think she could “retain her spirit.” Yet she “adored him” enough to stay with him for seven years. What’s going to happen to this woman ten years from now when she looks back on this decision?

  She might want to listen to what a 49-year-old single woman said in the article: “There was a point where I had men coming out of my ears. I don’t think I was so nice to some of them. Every now and then I wonder if God is punishing me. Sometimes I look back and say, ‘I wish I had made a different decision there.’ ”

  Another woman is quoted as saying that she can easily get her sexual needs taken care of without marriage. So what? In a Time/ CNN poll cited in the article, 4 percent of women said what they wanted most from marriage was sex, while 75 percent said it was companionship. Can she get that need easily taken care of outside of marriage—on a daily basis, and for the rest of her life?

  TEA FOR ONE

  Whether we admit it or not, being single is often lonely, especially by the time we reach our mid-thirties and many of our friends are busy with families of their own. It’s not that women don’t feel complete without a man. It’s that if no man is an island, most women aren’t, either. How lonely it was, before I had my son, to wake up in an empty house every morning, eat breakfast alone, read the paper alone, do the dishes alone.

  How tedious it was to do the post-date play-by-play each week, reassuring my friend that there’s nothing wrong with her, that the guy was lame, only to have her parrot back that same bland reassurance the next week, after my own dating escapade. How disappointing it was to waste my short time on this planet in a string of temporary encounters when I could be building a lifetime of shared experience with one committed person. How much longer could I spend my time analyzing phone or e-mail messages, wasting hours talking about a guy who would be out of the picture three days, three weeks, or three months later, only to be replaced by another, and another, and another?

  How bleak it felt to move to a new apartment alone, to shop for groceries for only myself, to have nobody to talk to in those intimate moments before bed except for girlfriends on the phone, chatting about—what else?—men! It was so boring. If we ruled out guys because they were “too boring,” nothing could be as boring as the endless merry-go-round of single life.

  Having a child in the house changes the specifics—you’re never alone and, in fact, you desperately crave some solitude—but the longing for an adult partner remains. When I decided to have a child, it had nothing to do with staving off loneliness. It had to do with hoping to find The One without the time pressure of a biological clock. If I was aware enough to know that a child would be no cure-all for a lack of male companionship, I truly believed, in an astoundingly naive way, that I could simply do things backward: child first, soul mate later. But as hard as it was to meet The One before I became a parent, I hadn’t anticipated that once you have a baby alone, not only do you age about ten years in the first ten months, but if you don’t have time to shower, eat, urinate in a timely manner, or even leave the house except for work, where you spend every waking moment that your child is at day care, there’s very little chance that a man—much less The One—is going to knock on your door and join that party.

  And then there’s the question of where you even meet single men once you’re a parent. They’re certainly not at toddler birthday parties or Gymboree, and the few I’d see at the grocery store weren’t exactly looking to pick up a mom singing “Apples and Bananas” to entertain the toddler sitting in the basket. (If the genders were reversed, of course, female shoppers would be all over that single dad.)

  The loneliness I experienced after having a child wasn’t diminished; it was different and perhaps even compounded. It’s both single-person loneliness, and the loneliness of not sharing the little moments of my son’s life with the one person who cares about him as profoundly as I do.

  But saying this aloud makes people uncomfortable. I remember getting an e-mail from a never-married single mom like me who told me that when she shared her loneliness on a single-mom list-serve, people told her to stop feeling sorry for herself and to “get a life.” One wom
an even suggested that if she was so unhappy being a single mom, she should put her child in foster care.

  “I got flamed for saying I get lonely sometimes,” this single mom told me. “But nobody flamed this other woman for telling me to put my kid in foster care!”

  What’s so hard to accept about loneliness and desire for connection? Is there really something wrong with our self-esteem or our values if we want someone to share the literal and metaphorical driving with? We’re so worried about not “settling,” but then we find ourselves unhappily “unsettled”—living in our single-person apartments, eating takeout for dinner in front of the TV, and hoping for a guy to show up so we can “settle down.”

  When I asked several women what “feminism” meant, I got a lot of responses that boiled down to having the same opportunities as men. But the more we talked, the more we came up against the fact that our needs are different and that we might not, in fact, want the same things. And when it comes to dating, we don’t have the same opportunities as men, especially as we get older.

  This might seem obvious, but somehow I thought that I could just have a baby on my own, put my dating life on hold for a year or two, and then get right back in the game. I thought that’s what “equality” and “having it all” meant.

  Then, when I was ready to date again, I went to a Thursday night speed dating event. I was now over 40 and everything had changed.

  Let me tell you about that Thursday night.

  4

  Speed Dating Disaster

  I’d heard about speed dating for years, but this was my first attempt at actually sitting down with complete strangers for five minutes each before rating them on a scorecard. It may sound like an odd way of meeting mates, but what the format lacks in substance, I figured it would make up for in volume and efficiency. You basically go on ten mini blind dates in the span of an hour. If, when the evening is over, you check “yes” next to a guy’s name—and he checks “yes” next to yours—you’re given each other’s contact information to continue the conversation later.

  The event I chose that Thursday night was for singles 40 to 50 years old. At 41, I could have signed up for the 30-to-40 group—the speed dating company said there’s a one-year grace period—but I figured I’d stick with guys my own age.

  As I got dressed for the event, I was kind of excited. After all, I’d get to meet ten new single men, which was a lot more than the zero single men I was meeting during a typical day of working from home. I thought it would be fun to “get out there” again, even if I didn’t find a romantic connection. How bad could it be?

  A PLANE BROUGHT ME HERE

  At 7 p.m., I arrived at a trendy restaurant near the beach where, in a private corner, two-top tables were arranged in rows. Nine other women—seven of them appearing to be no older than 42—were already there. Six had a male counterpart seated across from them. That was the first surprise: There were only six available men for ten available women.

  I checked out the six men. Surprise #2: All but one looked older than 50, and one guy looked so old that he bore a striking resemblance to my best friend’s father. (So much for the one-year grace period.) So there we were: eight early-fortyish women, two late-fortyish women, one mid-fortyish man, and five men over 50. We were instructed to get to know the person seated across from us until we heard the bell, then the men would move one chair over to the next table.

  Seats were assigned. The bell dinged and it was time to begin.

  My Guy #1 was Sam. He was bald and wrinkled and wearing a plaid sportcoat with patches on the elbows. We had just five minutes to chat, but after the first minute, I wondered how I was going to make it through the next four. It started off innocently enough. “Are you from Los Angeles?” he asked. I smiled and said that, yes, I’m a local, and then I asked where he was from. New York.

  “Oh,” I said, trying to make the best of the fact that I was sitting across from someone who looked like a grandpa in Vegas. “So, what brought you to the West Coast?”

  “A plane,” he replied, barely containing his grin, like he was the first person ever to make this joke. I smiled weakly. There was a long pause.

  “Actually, it’s a very long story,” he continued, despite the fact that this was “speed” dating. A simple “I liked the weather” or “I moved out here for college” or “There was a job opportunity” would have sufficed. Instead, he told me about how he doesn’t get along with his family, so he moved as far away from them as he could; how he couldn’t finish his Ph.D. because his dissertation advisor had a heart attack; how he tried to transfer schools but he didn’t get in; how he moved in with this woman he thought he would marry, but then she left him for another guy; how he ended up working for a temp agency, and how that didn’t work out because . . . ding. Thankfully, the bell rang and it was time for him to move to the next table.

  Guy #2 was Paul. Paul was another grandpa (thinning gray hair, turkey chin). When I asked what kind of work he does, he told me he was “in transition.” I asked what he was transitioning from—and to. He said he used to work as a teacher, which he loved, but he hated the politics so now he was playing a lot of golf. He’d really like to move from his cramped one-bedroom rental, but since he wasn’t working, he couldn’t afford a two-bedroom. He wanted to change careers, but it’s hard when you’re 55 because employers only want to hire “youngsters” these days. He was in the middle of a tirade about the principal at his school when I heard the blessed ding. The next guy sat down.

  Guy #3 was Sandy. He was cute and the youngest guy there—mid-forties, maybe. “Everyone asks me what Sandy is short for,” he said the second we made eye contact, even though I’d asked no such thing. “It’s short for Sanford. You know, like Sandy Koufax. The baseball player? His name was Sanford, too. Sanford Koufax.”

  He smiled proudly. Sandy was a speed dating veteran. He said he’d been doing it for years. He told a lot of jokes that sounded like he’d been telling them for years. He had terrible grammar, and each time he made a mistake, he asked me what the correct word was—“you know, you being a writer and all.” He was a sweet guy, in a little-boy kind of way, but we were like oil and water, and after five minutes of his shtick, I was eager for the ding.

  Guy #4 was Roger. He was handsome in an older man way, like Bill Clinton. After some small talk, Roger told me that he’d moved to Los Angeles in 1973. “Remember the gas shortage and waiting in all those long gas lines?” he asked. I was six, I wanted to say, but instead I smiled gamely and asked what he did for a living. He owned an employment agency, but business was bad. He asked what I do, and I told him I’m a writer.

  Roger leaned across the table. “Do you need a job?”

  I thought he was kidding, so I said, “Not at the moment, but I’ll let you know if that changes. Maybe you can help me.”

  He didn’t get the joke. “You shouldn’t wait until you’re between jobs to find something. You should look while the iron’s hot.”

  “Thanks,” I said, humoring him. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “Writers have it so easy,” he continued. “What do you do all day, hang out in your pajamas?”

  “Um, not really,” I said.

  “Oprah?”

  “Excuse me?” I asked.

  “Do you watch Oprah every day? All the writers I work with—they don’t do anything.”

  The bell dinged. Roger slipped me his card. “Really, I can help,” he said as he moved over to the next table.

  I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  HIS DAUGHTER IS 34

  There was no Guy #5 this round because, due to the dismal male-female ratio, at any one time four of the women were seated alone. The event coordinator sat across from me to help pass the time. He was cute, thirtyish, and funny. I told him that this was my first speed dating event—wasn’t the age range supposed to be 40 to 50?

  “I know,�
�� he said empathetically, “we use the honor system, but this happens every time. The guys in their forties won’t come to this event because, you know, they want to meet women in their thirties. We’ve thought about enforcing the age limit, but if we tell men in their forties that they can’t go to the younger event, we’ll lose all our clients.” The cute coordinator moved on to keep another partner-less fortyish woman company.

  I was alone for round six, too. I started talking to the woman next to me, who was also waiting this round out. She was a tall, blond dentist in a sexy suede dress. She was funny and smart and outgoing. Turned out that we jog at the same park and had just finished reading the same book. After chatting for five minutes, I could imagine becoming friends with her. For the first time all night, I was bummed when the ding sounded.

  Finally I got my Guy #5. His name was Kevin. He had a water filtration business. I happened to be in the market for water filters, so I asked if his system filters out fluoride.

  “The dentist over there asked me the same question!” he said, amazed by the coincidence. “How weird is that?”

  I didn’t think it was weird that a dentist would ask about fluoride and so would a woman with a young child, but he repeated this at least three times. After a series of how-weird-is-thats, he answered my question with, “I’m not sure. Is fluoride a compound?” I wondered how he could own a water filtration business and not know something so basic. Fluoridated water shouldn’t be an obscure topic to someone who filters water for a living. Most of the national water supply is fluoridated.