Marry Him_The Case for Settling for Mr Good Enough

by Lori Gottlieb

  How do intelligent people make such stupid decisions?

  Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist at Rutgers University who studies the physiology of romantic love, says it might be because romantic love is like a drug addiction. When she put forty-nine people who were madly in love in a functional MRI machine to see which parts of the brain were involved with these feelings, she found that when you feel that strong chemistry with someone, the brain system that becomes activated is the reward system, which is what also lights up when you reach for a piece of chocolate, or a cigarette, or an amphetamine. These cells near the base of the brain produce a substance called dopamine—and dopamine is what gives us that “high.” It doesn’t matter to your brain whether you’re craving a smoke or a lover—the result is the same: longing, obsession, need.

  When you’ve got all that dopamine floating around, she said, it’s hard to remember that the high only lasts, on average, from eighteen months to three years. Some people sustain it longer, she said, but even then, the quality of the high changes.

  “We just finished a study where we put people in the MRI machine who were still in love after twenty-one years of marriage,” she said. “We no longer found activity in a brain region associated with anxiety, and instead found activity in the area associated with calm and pain relief. You’re still attracted to the person, you still laugh at their jokes, but that early anxiety is now replaced with calm. If they don’t send you an e-mail, you don’t sit at the end of your bed and cry.”

  But if the expected pattern is that crazy early love anxiety leading to calm and security, Fisher says it can also go in the other direction. The calm and security you feel with a person can later trigger romantic love—something most people craving the immediate sparks forget. In fact, it happened to Fisher.

  “There was a man who was following me around for some time, and I thought he was a pest,” she said. But whenever she hung out with him, she felt totally relaxed and comfortable. “Four years later, I fell in love with him. I never expected that to happen. And I’m still with him ten years later.”

  Fisher isn’t saying that chemistry isn’t important. It’s just that it helps to know that it might take time to develop. And, as Evan told me, even when it does develop, often we don’t think it’s strong enough because our ratio is off.

  “You should look for a chemistry that’s a six or seven and a compatibility that’s a nine,” he said. “Most of us look for a chemistry of a nine but end up with a compatibility of a four. People are consistently steering themselves into a ditch because of the all-consuming pursuit of chemistry.”

  Evan said the ditch looks like this: If there’s a ton of initial chemistry, it’s hard to develop a realistic picture of the person, and if the guy turns out to be unkind, or selfish, or unreliable, it’s hard to let go because you’re already hooked. But if you get involved with a guy who started out as a friend, as soon as you hit that inevitable obstacle or rough patch, you tell yourself, I was never attracted to him anyway. So in the name of chemistry, you give the wrong people a chance and let the right people go.

  ARE YOU HAVING YOUR PERIOD?

  Martie Haselton, a researcher who studies mate choice and sexuality at the University of California at Los Angeles, told me that what we think of as chemistry might be less about that romantic je ne sais quoi and more about hormones. In her studies, she found that the kind of men women prefer changes depending on where they are in their menstrual cycle (how’s that for unromantic?).

  According to Haselton, women prefer more masculine men on high fertility days of the cycle but on other days, they’ll pick someone more on the feminine side of things. So while on high fertility days, they’re drawn to behavioral dominance and competitive traits in men, on other days of the cycle, they go for the nice guys.

  “What women want is everything,” she told me from her office at UCLA. “They want the guy who will be a good long-term partner in a relationship, someone kind, caring, a good provider. These are more feminine traits. But what women also want is a very sexy guy, very good-looking, tall, muscular—the bad boy traits. They don’t usually come in the same package. But it’s even more confusing, because they find they’re attracted to something a little bit different depending on where they are in their cycles.”

  Interestingly, if a woman is on the Pill, she won’t get these cyclical changes. But, Haselton added, “If she goes off the Pill, whoops.” Now she may view her nice-guy boyfriend or husband less favorably on high fertility days. These are the days when she thinks, “Something’s missing.”

  I asked Haselton how people end up with good partners despite the fact that we can’t control our biology.

  “I don’t think biology is the problem,” she said. “I think expectations are. It’s normal to be more or less attracted to your partner from time to time, but now people think there’s a problem if they go through a natural phase of ‘not feeling it’ as much. And they also think they have to feel it intensely, and right away.”

  Evan, too, admitted that he used to think that way, and now he was a week away from his wedding to a woman he never expected to date in the first place. From everything he’d told me, it was clear that he’d never been happier, that he was in no way settling, and that he and his wife-to-be did have really strong chemistry now—it just wasn’t the immediate out-of-body kind he’d always been seduced by.

  FAMOUS LAST WORDS

  As Evan and I hugged good-bye at the end of our session, I was sad to see him go. As much as I’d resisted his advice at first, now I felt I might be lost without it. I told him I didn’t want to do anything stupid with Sheldon2 while Evan was off on his honeymoon.

  “You know everything you need to know,” he said, reassuring me. “It might be hard to make some changes, but I think you’re finally ready to try.”

  I believed him on one level, but I still wanted some final words of wisdom to hold on to. “If there’s one thing you want me to remember from all this,” I asked, “what would it be?”

  Evan thought for a minute, then left me with this:

  “There’s the way it was supposed to go, and the way it really goes,” he said. “You have to keep on challenging yourself. Your way of doing things so far has led you to where you are today. You have to go through a process to have the potential to meet someone you like. It’s up to you whether you choose to go through that process.”

  For the rest of the day, his words ran through my mind. There’s the way it was supposed to go and the way it really goes . . . You have to go through a process . . . It’s up to you whether you choose to go through that process.

  It sounded simple but slightly enigmatic at the same time. Then I had lunch with a former colleague, and what Evan said suddenly became totally clear.

  21

  Dump the List, Not the Guy

  The colleague was Lauren, a 31-year-old TV writer. We were talking about work, when she happened to mention that she’d broken up with her boyfriend of four months. A few weeks earlier, Lauren had said how much she liked this guy.

  I asked what happened.

  Nothing had happened, Lauren replied. He just wasn’t The One.

  But what about all those things she liked about him?

  “Well, I felt really comfortable with him,” she explained. “He was so nonjudgmental and accepting. In vulnerable moments, he always said the perfect thing. Stuff like that made the superficial concerns not matter so much.”

  Her superficial concerns were things like the fact that he was blond (she’s not into blonds); he was her height, 5’8”, and she wanted someone taller than her; and he was a bad dresser. Other things bothered her, like how he would lie backward on her bed and put his sweaty feet on her pillow. “Clueless,” she said. “I need someone who would know not do that in the first place.”

  She was annoyed by the way he sometimes spoke like Justin Timberlake even thou
gh he had a degree from a top university. She was annoyed that he wanted to have sex more than she did, even though, she admitted, it was the best sex she ever had.

  She overlooked these things in the beginning because, she said, “emotionally, he was exactly what I wanted—responsive, thoughtful, and kind. He didn’t expect the porn star bikini wax, which was nice. I could be my natural self. He wasn’t scared of the heavy things going on in my life—like that my mom had cancer. He was always thoughtful and asking about that, and gave me leeway when my mood was all over the place—he attributed it to my mom’s illness. Sometimes, though, I was moody because I just felt annoyed with him.”

  She didn’t think there should be so many annoyances early on in the relationship. There might need to be some small tweaks, but overall, shouldn’t this part be easy?

  “The key thing I’m pondering is whether I should communicate more about what’s annoying me to at least give the guy a chance to improve,” Lauren said, implying that the problem was that the guy needed improving. “Instead, I dump the guy thinking I can find someone who fits all of my collective needs in some telepathic way. Probably not a wise assumption.”

  Lauren was doing the opposite of what Evan suggested—she wasn’t willing to “go through the process.” She was doing what I’d always done, relying on a rigid mental checklist of what The Guy was supposed to be like.

  FORGET ABOUT “MY TYPE”

  Susan Page, a relationship expert and the author of If I’m So Wonderful, Why Am I Still Single?, believes in the process, too. A former campus minister at Columbia University in New York, she also served as Director of Women’s Programs at the University of California, Berkeley, where she helped found the nation’s first university-based human sexuality program. She told me that in her workshops with singles across the country, she’s noticed that the biggest impediment to going through the process is what she calls “pseudo high standards.

  “People hold back because of some issue,” she told me on the phone, “and they never get a real test of what it would be like to be in a committed relationship with that person. Single people would find someone more easily if everything wasn’t a test. When you adopt a spirit of goodwill toward something you don’t like in your partner, that leads to positive changes in your relationship. But many people break up instead. You should never settle for less than what you need, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be everything on your checklist, because you can’t know what qualities you’ll be attracted to in a particular person.”

  She learned this herself when she met her husband nearly thirty years ago.

  “I was a Methodist minister at the time,” she said, “and I assumed I’d be with someone of the same religion, highly educated, professional—a doctor, a lawyer, a professor. Someone who played bridge and loved to sing and dance. Well, my husband is Jewish, a junior college drop-out, an artist, he doesn’t sing or dance, doesn’t play bridge.”

  They met at a friend’s house one day and started talking. “I asked what he did,” she continued, “and he said, ‘I’m a studio potter.’ I thought, ‘Oh, great. He’s a hippie dropout who can’t get his life together so he’s making mugs and trying to sell them on the street.’ I wrote him off at this point. I liked talking to him, but I wasn’t thinking this was husband material.”

  Actually, the studio potter made a good living selling his artwork and even had a show on Madison Avenue in New York. They went out for breakfast a couple of days later, but she still didn’t think it would lead anywhere. He just wasn’t her type. That seemed to be that.

  But Page was an avid folk dancer, and one day, the potter showed up unexpectedly and watched her dance. Afterward, they went to a neighborhood bar and stayed there until 2 a.m. There still weren’t any sparks, but some rapport was starting to develop. Then they spent a Saturday at an art museum, and soon, to Page’s surprise, she was smitten.

  “He had the qualities I wanted that nobody puts on a list,” she said.

  Page said that a list is like the fantasy we have of finding “the whole package.” She often hears from single women that if a guy has 80 percent of what’s on the list, he won’t make the cut.

  “Since when is getting eighty percent considered settling?” she asked. “We create these fantasy men—he’s going to have this kind of career, this color eyes, be this age. How specific can you get before you rule out almost everyone?”

  BEING SURPRISED BY THE POT

  I ran the Lauren situation by Page, who said it was an all too familiar story.

  “People have a tendency to analyze far too much,” she said. “So many times we let our chatter in our brain talk us out of things that might be good for us. The converse is also true—if someone has a lot of things on your list, but your gut is telling you, ‘I don’t trust this person,’ that’s more important than the list.”

  Page told me a story about a guy she’d been infatuated with before she was married.

  “He had everything on my list,” she explained. “Professional, well-liked, charismatic. Cute, funny, well-established. But I realized early on that he was very narcissistic. I thought, there’s no real affection here. I was one more member of his audience. I was infatuated, but I stopped seeing him. It was very painful, but I did the right thing for myself.”

  Page said that lists may seem like a good way to clarify your thinking, but it’s actually hard to make one that doesn’t either oversimplify or take things out of context. Even if you make a list of qualities you want, for instance, they aren’t all weighted equally (is age as important as honesty?), and with many qualities you want, it’s not like people have them or they don’t. Often, they have some degree of that quality—like sense of humor or financial stability—which may not be at the level you had in mind when you wrote it down.

  Lists are also confusing because they’re about qualities a man has independently, but fail to take into account qualities he’ll have inside a relationship. He may be the right age, have the right sense of humor, and have the right job, but what is he going to be like when he’s with you? How are you going to feel when you’re with him? Will you get along well? None of this can be quantified on paper.

  Instead, it was from her husband’s work as a potter that Page came up with an analogy she finds relevant to relationships.

  “In America,” she said, “when a potter makes a pot, they put a glaze on it and put it in the kiln and know exactly what it’s supposed to look like when it comes out. But when the Japanese make a pot, they put it in a wood-fire kiln that could be any temperature, and when they take the pot out, it’s not always exactly like they thought it was supposed to look like. And they say, ‘Oh, wow, this is what the fire did to the pot and it’s gorgeous!’ They believe that there’s no beauty in perfection.

  “So instead of knowing what the person across from you is supposed to be like, ask yourself the pot question, ‘But what is it, and is it beautiful?’ rather than thinking, ‘It’s not this and it should look like this.’ The question you have to ask is, ‘Do I like it?’ instead of ‘How does it compare to what I thought I wanted?’ People can surprise you.”

  I told her about the enormous list I’d made months earlier when a friend put me up to it. She suggested that instead of making a list of what I want in a man, I should make a list of the qualities my ex-boyfriends had, and then think about how much or how little the checklist mattered to those relationships in the end. When she asks happily married people about how their husbands stacked up on a list, often they admit that their spouses didn’t meet a lot of the criteria—but they met more important ones.

  “It’s about reexamining the usefulness of your criteria,” she said. “When you meet the right guy, most people find a list to be misleading, if not completely useless.”

  BREAKING UP WITH MY LIST

  I took another look at my detailed Husband Store shopping list. I thought about how many times I should
have dumped the list, instead of the guy who didn’t match the list. Case in point: I’d gone on a second date with Sheldon2. When he picked me up and stood there at my door, smiling his adorable smile, he looked even cuter than he had on the hike. Soon a long meal in a funky café turned into dancing at a bar which turned into a walk on the beach, and before we knew it, six hours had flown by. I had more fun with him than I’d had on many of my dates with men who did meet my checklist criteria.

  So I decided to do it. I was going to break up with my list. But how?

  I could just ignore it, of course, but I felt like I needed to do it in a more concrete way. I needed to physically rid myself of all those unreasonable requirements in order to truly open myself up to other possibilities.

  I thought about shredding it in the trash, but that didn’t seem climactic enough for the occasion. A symbolic gesture seemed more fitting. Should I mail it off somewhere—to a sorority house, as a cautionary tale? Should I bury it somewhere, like a time capsule of misguided dating that I might dig up twenty years from now?

  I considered asking some single friends if they wanted to bring their own lists to the beach and burn them together in a big bonfire, but that felt too clichéd, and besides, breaking up with my list felt like something I had to do on my own. As corny as it sounds, I wanted to find a way to represent the personal shift I was making in how I would find a partner. Besides being embarrassing, the whole thing felt too private to share.

  So on a cold, cloudy winter day, I got in my car, placed my list—now floating inside a helium balloon with a long white string—next to me in the passenger seat, and headed for the ocean.