It’s almost like being an Olympic judge who gives men a “husband” rating: Everyone starts off with a 10, and then the judge deducts points for anything less than perfect. He’s not funny enough? Take off two points. He’s got a unibrow? Take off another one. Wouldn’t a better way to date be starting off at zero and giving people points for assets like kindness and warmth instead?
I’ve always mentally deducted points when deciding whether to date someone. If, for example, I wanted someone smart, funny, and cute, but he turned out to be smart, funny, cute, and nerdy, I’d forget that I got the “smart, funny, and cute” and focus instead on the nerdy. I’d focus on the disappointing aspects instead of feeling lucky to have found the positive ones.
That’s what entitlement can do.
YOU’RE BOTH DYSFUNCTIONAL
Toning down the attitude doesn’t just help in dating—it makes marriages better, too. That’s what Gian Gonzaga, a psychologist and senior scientist at eHarmony who met his wife while working in the famous “marriage lab” at UCLA, told me. His research, which involves studying six hundred couples over the span of several years, focuses on relationship satisfaction and the predictors of marriage success.
“Happily married people believe that their partners are better than the average person, even though that’s statistically impossible,” Gonzaga explained. “We call those ‘positive illusions.’ It’s not that people don’t complain about their spouses or have disagreements. It’s that at the end of the day, they still see them as superior to most of the people out there.”
In dating, he said, this works the opposite way for many single people who can’t seem to find the right person. Instead of viewing the people we’re dating through a positive lens, we view ourselves as superior. That’s why people often attribute what’s lacking in a relationship to their partner. But Gonzaga says it goes both ways.
“We tend to be attracted to people who are similar to us in terms of emotional stability, intellect, and competence,” he said. “So if you date people who always seem dysfunctional, you’re probably equally dysfunctional. If this person is neurotic, you probably are, too. To attract the kind of person you have in your mind, you have to be that kind of person. It’s not that all the guys you dated weren’t good enough for you. People need to realize that they bring their own selves into the equation.”
In successful relationships, Gonzaga said, couples appreciate each other’s good points instead of focusing on the flaws—because we all have them. A woman in Indiana tried to tell me the same thing. Laura, who has been married for twelve years, observed: “We women like to imagine ourselves as goddesses who are worthy of a man’s total worship and devotion, and we are incensed when he fails to give us that. Unfortunately, we get bed hair, body odor, wrinkles, thickness in the middle, and bad attitudes. We would not easily excuse such things in men, yet we expect men to overlook them in us.”
I HAVE TO TALK ABOUT SEX AND THE CITY
I know, I know—it’s become such a cliché to talk about Sex and the City that I almost don’t want to bring it up. But I can’t resist because it seems related to this attitude of entitlement.
On the one hand, the media made a huge deal when the movie based on the mega successful book and series earned nearly $200 million in the United States alone, because it showed that audiences would pay to see strong women on the big screen. But I think it also showed something else: that we can’t seem to tell the difference between “strong” and “self-centered.”
In case you were one of the few single women who missed the movie, Samantha tells her wonderful boyfriend, who stood by her through breast cancer, that she’s leaving him because, “I love you, but I love myself more”—and the entire audience cheered! Now, this was a boyfriend who was loyal and loving and hot and put up with her demands and went through cancer with her, and she decided to leave him because she’s in love with herself. And this was supposed to be empowering? Reverse the genders (she sticks by him through a grueling bout of prostate cancer; he bails!), and I’m betting the entire audience would have booed and called the guy a total ass.
Samantha isn’t the only character with a raging sense of entitlement. Carrie is a nightmare Bridezilla who’s outraged when her fiancé tells her he’d be happy to marry her at City Hall. He says he cares not about a wedding day, but about being with her every day.
So what does she do? Carrie and her equally self-absorbed friends go off to Mexico on her would-be honeymoon and—guess what?—complain about men. Her circus of a wedding day didn’t go as planned, and now she’s on her honeymoon without her beloved husband-to-be. Is this “strong” or “spoiled”?
The TV series wasn’t much different. Each week, the characters would dissect various men. There was no room for imperfection, and if the guy didn’t also feel that his girlfriend was perfect, well, obviously, she should dump him.
“If you’re not totally in love with me and crazy about me,” Carrie once told Big, “and if you don’t think I’m the most beautiful woman you’ve seen in your life, then I think I should leave.”
Any rational adult knows that back on planet Earth, few men think the woman they’re with is the most beautiful person they’ve seen in their life—and vice versa. But like the SATC gals, many women expect men to fawn over them as though they’re queens.
That’s precisely why these otherwise attractive heroines seemed to have everything but the man. They treated love the way 16-year-old sophomores do, forgetting that 16-year-old girls aren’t exactly ready for real-life marriage.
“Do you really think there are a lot of women out there like Carrie?” my friend Elizabeth, a single 31-year-old editor in North Carolina, asked me. Before I could reply, she went on to describe a guy who would write her sweet notes and who she was sort of falling for through his writing.
“He listens attentively to my daily trials and asks me lots of questions about my life, which, I find, most guys are not good about doing,” she said. “He also responds to all e-mails and texts quickly and wittily. He seeks out cool concerts for us to go to. He told me I was exactly what he was looking for. What girl doesn’t want to hear that?”
But, she continued. “At the same time, he just seems sort of awkward with me, and his place is plastered with Tar Heels stuff. It seems juvenile. It’s like a high school boy’s room, minus the pinups. It feels like the sports equivalent—Tar Heels porn. He doesn’t go hiking. He doesn’t speak a foreign language. None of those things seem to fit my idea of the guy I wanted. Am I that girl?”
GROUNDS FOR DISMISSAL
Maybe a lot of us are. My friend Mark, a divorced dad, sent me an e-mail exchange he’d had with Melanie, a never-married woman he met online. They seemed to click, so he and Melanie were making plans to meet in person.
Melanie
From:
To:
Sent: Friday, June 13, 2008 2:21 PM
Subject: Re: Checking in
Mark—what about tomorrow Sat. @ 11 am?
Mark
From:
Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2008 23:30 PM
To:
Subject: Re: Checking in
Works for me. Meet you in front of Aroma?
Melanie
From:
To:
Sent: Saturday, June 14, 2008 7:36 AM
Subject: Re: Checking in
I’ve lost interest. You are dismissed.
Mark
From:
Date: Sat, 14 Jun 2008 07:43 AM
To:
Subject: Re: Checking in
Seriously? What happened?
Melanie
From:
To:
Sen
t: Saturday, June 14, 2008 7:58 AM
Subject: Re: Checking in
Didn’t hear from U til almost the next day, indicating I was not a priority . . . That does not work 4 me.
Mark
From:
Date: Sat, 14 Jun 2008 8:10 AM
To:
Subject: Re: Checking in
Well, I guess that’ll teach me for not having a BlackBerry and being away from my computer yesterday from noon ’til late night, attending my son’s college graduation ceremony and dinner with him afterward in Irvine. Because when you don’t respond to someone’s e-mail within a few hours, it couldn’t possibly be because you’re away from your computer, gotten into an accident, on a trip someplace, attending an important event, etc. The only possible reason is that you’ve placed the one who’s e-mailed you into a low-priority status. Thank you for that insight that only jumping to conclusions can provide.
Melanie
[NO RESPONSE]
I asked Mark if he ever heard from Melanie again. “A few days later,” he said, “she apologized and said she’d been under stress, and perhaps had overreacted—but still didn’t want to meet.”
According to Melanie’s e-mail, “The momentum was lost.”
Mark said this kind of self-centeredness is common. “There was also the childless woman I was dating, who gave me an ultimatum,” he said. “I could either accept my children’s invitation to a Passover seder with them at their place—or be with her and her relatives on Passover. If I accepted my children’s invitation, I could forget about continuing the relationship with her.”
What did he decide?
“You’ll be stunned to know that she and I are not together anymore,” he said dryly.
I asked other women what they thought of Mark’s e-mail exchange with Melanie and the ultimatum from Mark’s former girlfriend. Words like “insane,” “inflexible,” and “selfish” came up.
Still, we had to admit that, in a twisted way, we could understand why these women felt shafted: a dream guy wouldn’t leave the woman waiting by her e-mail for nine hours. A dream guy would want to be with his beloved on a holiday more than with anyone else. (It’s okay, of course, for a woman to prioritize her children over her boyfriend—and if he requested otherwise, he’d be considered selfish.)
The problem is, a dream guy doesn’t exist (precisely because we’ve dreamed him up) and, even if he did, is this really the guy we’d want to be with? A guy who doesn’t have a life except for us? A guy who doesn’t spend the holidays with his own children?
Of course not. But imagine the conversations that Melanie and the Passover Chick, as she came to be known, had with their girlfriends about why it was necessary to dump Mark.
“What a jerk,” they probably said, as their friends nodded and sipped their wine at yet another all-girl bar night where they searched for eligible men.
YES, HE’S WITH HER
Melanie may seem extreme, but many of us who carry around this sense of entitlement in dating don’t even realize it. One woman who has been married for five years told me an interesting story.
When she was single, Danielle went to a married friend’s dinner party. She was seated next to a guy she liked talking to very much, only to learn that the woman on his right was his fiancée. The woman was less attractive, charming, and witty than Danielle was. (I believe this: Danielle is very attractive, charming, and witty.) After everyone left, Danielle was hanging out with her friend who’d given the party, and complained that she was tired of meeting men who were already taken. She couldn’t understand why all these other women managed to end up with great guys, but Danielle was still alone.
“What does she have that I don’t?” Danielle asked, about the woman engaged to the guy she was interested in. Without missing a beat, her friend shot back: “Two things. One: compassion. And two: his love.” Compassion, her friend said, is what leads to love.
Her friend had seen Danielle get excited about guys over the years, just like she was about that night’s dinner party guest, only to find something “wrong” with him a month or a year later. This was a wake-up call for Danielle, who realized right then that if she continued to judge potential mates and always find them wanting, she would end up alone. The next guy she dated, she ended up marrying.
“After that conversation, I approached my next relationship completely differently,” she told me. “I focused on appreciating what I liked about him, and being compassionate about the things I thought were wrong. And I realized I hadn’t been appreciative of my boyfriends in the past.”
Danielle admitted that she hadn’t been aware of how her sense of entitlement affected her relationships. “I used to think, ‘I’m just not getting what I want,’ and break up with a guy. Then I realized, when I met my husband, that if I went in with this attitude of expecting things from him instead of appreciating who he was, I would be sabotaging myself. I made a conscious decision to feel pleased by what he offered to the relationship, instead of complaining about what he didn’t. And I realized that I had no right to complain about something if I wasn’t giving it in return! He said to me one day, ‘I like being romantic, but I don’t see why I have to be exclusively in charge of romance in this relationship.’ And I realized that I expected all the romance to come from him, when maybe it would be nice if it went both ways, you know?”
As Dr. Broder explained, too often in dating we expect to be given a lot of things from men—constant compliments, vacations, meals, 24/7 emotional support, romantic gestures—and those men who don’t meet our standards in any of these departments get the boot, unnecessarily.
One woman I spoke to broke up with a guy because she felt that her boyfriend didn’t call and check in enough during the day. Never mind that he was a doctor, which made it difficult to break away. She wanted someone who was “more available.” The funny thing is, she thought the problem was that he needed to change. It never occurred to her that she might need to become a little more understanding. It never occurred to her that she might actually be happier and grow as a person if she made some changes on her end of the relationship.
A barber in Montana told me that this attitude is turning men off.
“I have boatloads of eligible men as clients,” he said, “but many of them have told me that they’re ready to write off dating entirely. They say that the modern American woman brings nothing to the relationship except this deep-seated hunger for him to be her everything—unless something better comes along.”
Or as a 29-year-old single dentist in Atlanta put it: “Women are always asking, ‘Where are all the good guys?’ And I say, ‘You can’t see them with your nose in the air.’ ”
I thought of all the conversations I’d had with single friends over the years about how there just weren’t enough good men out there. But now I was starting to discover something else. Maybe there were plenty of good men, but we were turning them off with our over-the-top expectations.
Maybe we needed to get over ourselves.
It’s a humbling realization, but I knew it was true. I needed to get over myself. I, too, seemed to be suffering from this modern malady. It seemed clear that if I wanted to meet someone, I’d have to stop complaining about the men who were out there and focus instead on making better choices.
But how?
PART THREE
Making Smarter Choices
The perfect is the enemy of the good.
—Voltaire
10
Don’t Be Picky, Be Happy
Here are two actual questions posed to Slate magazine’s advice columnist: Dear Prudence,
I have a dilemma. I’ve been dating this guy for a little over two years. For a while I thought I should marry him . . . he’s intelligent, ambitious, kind, and we don’t fight or
argue very often. But there are things about him that make me think we’re not meant for each other. I’ve recently moved in with him, bringing with me all my belongings, as well as my two dogs and two cats. I love him, but I don’t feel like this is even close to the fairy tale relationship I’ve always longed for. I guess what I need to know is, is there even such a thing as a fairy tale romance? I know I will always be loved and taken care of with him, but is that enough? Would I be settling if I agree to marry him? My last relationship lasted way too long (five years), and I knew we were never going to marry. I just don’t want to waste five years with another man, only to decide it isn’t meant to be. Do you think I should talk to him about it?
—Wondering
Dear Won,
Talk to him and say what? “Could you please be a little more like Prince Charming?” Unless you have a concrete idea of what he could do to help your fantasy along, like flowers every Friday or poems on your pillow, Prudie would not suggest you share with him your desire for a fairy tale romance. The qualities of his that you mention—intelligence, ambition, kindness, and a minimum of arguing, would certainly sound like Prince Charming to a boatload of women. And, my dear, he even welcomed your livestock when you moved in! As to your question—is there such a thing as a fairy tale romance? Prudie would say yes, and in fact she has had one. Alas, they do not endure. Fairy tales are to romance what fireworks are to the night sky. They are transient states . . . and while temporarily thrilling, not what one builds a life around.
Marry Him_The Case for Settling for Mr Good Enough Page 13