Mistake #2: I assumed that Andy was a maximizer like me.
To my surprise, over the next nine years, Andy seemed truly content. After I moved back to Los Angeles, I’d get e-mail updates with links to photos of him and Jodi and their three children, and instead of feeling sorry for Andy, I felt envy—and confusion. Was he really as happy as he seemed in the photos? Didn’t he feel lonely in a marriage with someone he’d once described to me as “bland”?
When I asked him about it now, he explained it like this: “She’s bland in ways that aren’t important in the big picture,” he said. “I’m a talker, and I love the banter, and I’m intense about things, and she’s just not. It mattered more when we were dating. It still would be nice to have in a spouse, but it has so little to do with the day-to-day of marriage that it matters very little now.”
Is his marriage perfect? No. But he wasn’t expecting it to be. “A lot of my friends get married and when they don’t have the kind of mythical marriage they’d envisioned, they become dissatisfied—like, ‘Hey, I didn’t sign up for this. This wasn’t in the brochure!’ ”
Andy knew he wanted to marry Jodi, he told me, because while they didn’t have intense emotional fireworks (there was definitely physical chemistry), there was a sense of calm and comfort in their courtship. They’d grown up in the same area, their parents knew each other casually, and they had similar upbringings.
“When I saw pictures of her growing up and compared them to pictures of me growing up,” Andy said, “it was almost as though we were in the same pictures. That made it feel right. That made it feel like home. She had a lot of the qualities I was looking for—ethical, professional, solid family upbringing, attractive, kind. About the stuff that wasn’t there, I thought, is this really going to be important five years from now?”
Andy believes that people who are adaptable have better marriages, because priorities change so much over time. “The children milestone was a big pivotal moment for me,” he said. “Once you become a parent, you realize it’s not all about you anymore. Being with a good mom to my children became a much higher priority to me than having the most scintillating dinner partner.”
When Andy was dating Jodi, he remembers, he was at Blockbuster and had spent an inordinate amount of time reading all the DVD covers, unable to decide which movie to rent. When he finally picked one, he’d wasted so much time that it was too late to watch the whole movie. So, he started thinking to himself, “Are you going to shop for the perfect movie or rent one and go home and watch it? How long are you going to stay in Blockbuster before you just choose a film?” He realized, he told me, that wondering if he could do better would be torture because anytime you think you have the opportunity to upgrade, you trade one known negative thing for an unknown negative thing.
“It bothered me that Jodi didn’t have certain qualities I’d want, but I also figured that I could spend the rest of my life coming up with reasons that I shouldn’t be with person A, B, C, or D. The older I get the more I realize how short life is, and I feel very lucky with my life now. My wife and I may not share witty banter, but we share the incredible bond of watching our kids reach milestones together. And it’s uncanny how similar we are when it comes to parenting. Maybe I wouldn’t have been on the same page in terms of day-to-day life with someone more exciting, and maybe we would have fought all the time. I’d much rather be in my marriage than that marriage. I made a conscious decision to take inventory of the things I like and value in Jodi, and the things that aren’t there aren’t worth being miserable about. I have friends who do the whole 10 p.m. Googling thing—what about that girl from high school? And while it’s tempting, you have to remember that the Internet is just a modern-day Harlequin romance filled with real characters.”
Now the comment Andy made years back in announcing his decision to marry Jodi—“We want the same things”—struck me differently. The reason his family Web site photos make me so envious is that I, too, hope to find someone who wants the same things I do. Ironically, the qualities about him I used to find nerdy are the qualities I find appealing about him now. His movie trivia quotes seem endearing and would be great fun to share with kids. His penchant for a cappella singing and amateur filmmaking have been put to hilarious use in his family home videos. His lack of slickness is what makes him such a trustworthy and honest partner. And, incidentally, he’s lost the weight and the goatee, and he sure looks cute to me.
I’m not saying that Andy is my soul mate or that it would have worked out if we’d dated. I’m simply saying that I wish I’d entertained the possibility when the possibility still existed. Looking back, I can’t believe that there was a man in my life I adored spending time with, and who wanted the same things in life that I did—and I didn’t even consider dating him. Even today, he’s still one of my favorite people to talk to. If I could go back in time, I’d date someone like Andy in a second. Not because I’d be settling, but because different things are important to me now—and should have been all along.
Matt—The Guy I Assumed Was Perfect
To say that Matt was my ideal guy is an understatement. He was brilliant, creative, quirky, successful, handsome, and self-deprecatingly funny—on paper at least. I’d never met him, but I’d read an article about him in a glossy magazine, and I thought, That’s the kind of guy I’d love to date.
Of course, I recognized how delusional it was to fantasize about a total stranger, but the truth is, I still wanted to end up with someone like Matt. If you’d asked me back then if I thought that was realistic, I would have said no, but on some level, I would have been lying. In my dating life, I constantly overlooked men like Andy in order to hold out for men like Matt.
Nearly ten years later, I was cleaning out some old boxes in my office, and I came across the article I’d ripped out of that glossy magazine when I was 31. I was about to throw it away, but after talking with Evan about misguided assumptions, I Googled Matt to see what had become of him. He was now 45 years old and, as the article predicted, he’d become a well-known and celebrated architect. He was still very handsome. He had a son. And there it was, on his company’s Web site—his e-mail address. I sent him a note telling him about my book, and asked if I could talk to him. He wrote back a funny note and said he was game. Wow, I thought. My dream guy is nice, too.
I assumed he had it all—looks, personality, talent, charm, and a loving family. I assumed his wife had hit the jackpot.
And indeed, when we first spoke, my assumptions seemed spot on. Matt was just as charming, thoughtful, engaging, and interesting as I imagined him to be. The thirty minutes I’d requested turned into three hours. He was exactly the kind of guy I always went for. But—get this—he wasn’t married. He’d never been married. His son was the result of an accidental pregnancy with a former girlfriend. He was single and available.
How could this be? How could a guy who was so appealing on so many levels not have found a partner? The more we chatted, the more it became obvious. He was a toxic maximizer. Nobody was good enough for him. Not the girlfriend who became pregnant (she was “fascinating and intelligent” but “she was sensitive in ways that bothered me” and “her hands were so big—I wasn’t attracted to that”) and who is now happily married (presumably to someone who can deal with sensitivity and large hands); not the girlfriend who was “wrong about small things a lot of the time—like which direction to go on a road trip—which spoke to a lack of competence”; not the girlfriend who had a different way of communicating than he did. Maybe he and these women were truly incompatible, but he did stay in two of these relationships for five and seven years, respectively.
So there must have been some positive aspects to these relationships, right?
“It’s not like I can’t stay with someone,” Matt explained. “But at the time, it felt like I would be settling if I did. I’ve never had trouble finding people I enjoy being with and who want to be with me. It ma
kes you live in this world where you think, I can throw this one back into the sea and find another.”
Now, at 45, Matt told me that most of his friends his age are married with kids and the question of why he, too, hasn’t gotten married is one he asks himself often.
Could it be that he just hasn’t met the right person? Or that he hasn’t been realistic enough?
“I think I’m realistic,” he said, after a long pause. “I’ve always been attracted to very intelligent, capable, accomplished, insightful, open, positive women. But I don’t say I would never date a divorced woman, or someone with kids, or have any rules like that.”
I asked if he would be interested in a woman who was intelligent and insightful but perhaps less accomplished. Hypothetically, yes, he said. But honestly, he wasn’t so sure.
“I think I’ve gotten less good at settling,” Matt admitted. “I’ve waited all this time and I’m not going to settle now. A lot of my friends have been divorced.”
I used to think that way about divorced couples, too—but I hadn’t considered that most people don’t go into marriage thinking they’re settling. Most go into marriage believing that they’ve found The One. I doubt that the divorce rate is high because the people who supposedly settled are calling it quits. More likely, the divorce rate is high because the people who thought they were madly in love are realizing that they’d been looking for the wrong qualities in a spouse.
In fact, it occurred to me as I was talking to Matt that the very qualities I was attracted to when I read his magazine profile a decade earlier probably correlated with personality traits that wouldn’t necessarily make for the kind of family-oriented husband I was seeking now. An ambitious, brilliant, creative guy can be a great dinner companion, but a guy who works seven days a week, sees his son just two weeks per year (and commented that, were he to have more children, “I think I would get bored with infants”), and has little tolerance for imperfection wouldn’t be such an appealing spouse. His personality and impressive mind might be exciting in a boyfriend, but they’re rarely compatible with someone who would be happy basking in the routine day-to-day of domestic life. All the experts I spoke to said that shared values were more important than shared interests, and while as a couple, Matt and I would likely never run out of things to talk about, as parents running a household together, we’d also likely never run out of things to disagree about.
At one point in our conversation, Matt asked an interesting question. He was talking about his seven-year relationship, and how despite his wanting it to work, too many things bothered him about his girlfriend. “This comes down to a bigger issue,” he said. “How much should people change to make a relationship work?”
I’m not sure if he was talking about himself, his girlfriend, or both. But I found it curious that—like so many single people—he viewed the problem as being one of needing to change rather than needing to accept. Because as my married friends have often said, it’s not about changing the other person; it’s about accepting things about the other person that you’d like to change, but can’t.
Later, Matt told me that he’d tried online dating, and I asked to see his profile. It was like catnip to me. A few years ago, if I’d seen his essay online, I would have been setting the wedding date by the time I hit the “send” button on my e-mail. But when it comes to the kind of spouse I’m seeking now, if I had the choice between someone like him and someone like Andy, I’d definitely pick Andy. And I wouldn’t look back. Ten years ago, if someone had told me I’d pick Andy over Matt, I would have found that absurd, if not impossible. But here I am—still single, along with my former Fantasy Guy.
Jeff—The Guy I Assumed Wasn’t Brainy Enough
Back in 2006, when I was trying out some scientific-based dating sites for an article I was writing, I dismissed a guy whose profile appeared in my in-box. Why, I asked in the article, would the dating site have matched me—an avid reader attracted to literary types—with the guy whose essay read as follows: While I do read books, I have a notoriously short attention span for them. As a result, partially read copies of numerous really good (so I’m told) books are scattered around my apartment. When these get set aside, it’s because I’ve gotten sucked into magazines . . . Every few days, the magazines lose out to DVDs.
I assumed we weren’t a match and dismissed him without so much as an introductory e-mail. But then, one day, he sent me a note saying that he was reading the Atlantic and was stunned to come across his very own online dating profile in print. Isn’t it funny, he remarked, that he was reading one of the country’s most esteemed literary magazines when he learned that I’d written him off as not literary enough?
“I thought that was hilarious,” Jeff said three years later, when I called him up in Northern California to talk about the misunderstanding. Jeff was a year younger than me, highly educated, and worked as a software entrepreneur. We had a lovely conversation about, believe it or not, books he had recently read! He was funny and self-aware and we seemed to have a lot in common, both in terms of values and interests. But now, of course, he had a girlfriend (who, not surprisingly, was in her early thirties).
Jeff told me that he understood why I’d jumped to conclusions based on his profile, and said that he, too, has learned not to make assumptions when it comes to romantic relationships. With his current girlfriend, for instance, he said it used to bother him that they had different senses of humor.
“I used to think that sense of humor was a pretty strong indicator of compatibility and how your brains think,” he said. “And in some ways that’s true—the things that excite us intellectually are different. I like puzzles and games and trivia. Those things aren’t terribly interesting to her. There’s a bit of sadness that I can’t share that with her, but over the past six months, we’ve really grown and learned things about each other that have surprised us. We’re both really reflective and we communicate well. We can talk about anything and not get defensive. We’re both into running, we’re involved in community service, and we enjoy and appreciate one another. In other relationships, I was immature. I always managed to find things that were missing.”
When I’d first seen Jeff’s profile, I’d done the same thing. Instead of focusing on how attractive, smart, and funny he seemed, I saw one negative—that he didn’t love books the way I did—and ruled him out. The worst part is, it was a false assumption. His profile simply didn’t reflect how well read he was, or how curious he was about a certain kinds of reading material. And in the end, even if he hadn’t been well read, how much would that matter in the long run if he was smart and interesting in the ways I discovered on our phone call?
As with Andy, I’ll never know what might have happened with Jeff. But this isn’t about Jeff or Andy or Matt anymore. It’s about not making this mistake with the next guy.
13
Pulling Another Sheldon
I realized, of course, that I’d done the same thing with Sheldon, the Ivy League-educated single dad that Wendy the matchmaker had tried to set me up with a month earlier. She’d challenged each of my false assumptions, but by the time I came to my senses, Sheldon was dating someone else.
Meanwhile, Wendy tried to find another guy for me, but of the men she looked into, the never-married guys wanted to meet childless but fertile (read: under 35) women only, or they didn’t want kids at all. The divorced dads she could find tended to be men in their fifties and about to launch their kids into college in the next few years, and they weren’t interested in getting involved with a woman with a toddler. (Nor were they interested in meeting a fertile woman with no kids but who wanted them—they were done with little kids.) Wendy only worked with people she vetted for the important qualities—kind, responsible, stable, marriage-minded, of good character. So that ruled out the guys who weren’t looking for anything serious, didn’t have their shit together, or were emotionally questionable (still not ove
r the divorce, depressed, immature).
Sadly, she’d come up dry.
I started to wonder where all the divorced dads my age were. I mean, given the national divorce rate, there had to be tons of them, right? Wendy told me that the younger divorced dads exist, but they don’t stay single very long, and the divorced moms do, which leads to an excess of single women. Wendy also encounters divorced dads who don’t want to marry again or even commit to a long-term partnership because they’ve been taken to the cleaners by an ex-wife—but they still want the companionship of a girlfriend.
Plus, when it comes to kids, younger single dads are marketable because women value a man who loves his children. Younger single moms are a liability because men devalue the idea of dealing with somebody else’s children.
Ten years ago, I had no idea that dating would get this hard, but now it was finally sinking in. Or so I thought.
That same week, Julie Ferman, the matchmaker who owns Cupid’s Coach, graciously offered to do a free match for me. I was thrilled. So I filled out a Cupid’s Coach profile and made an appointment with her.
ANOTHER GUY GETS AWAY
The first thing Julie did on the day of our appointment was ask me a lot of questions that weren’t addressed on the profile: What kind of guys did I date in the past? What worked? What didn’t? What was my family like? What was my childhood like? What was important to me? What was I passionate about? That took about an hour. Then she started clicking on her computer. Tap, tap, tap. She was going through her matchmaking database.
“I’m looking for my top five candidates,” she said, clicking away. “I don’t present more because it’s too overwhelming. If I give people too many choices, it becomes a Match experience, so what’s the point? Then a year has gone by and they’ve spent the money and nothing has changed.”
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