Marry Him

by Lori Gottlieb

  “Love should increase over time, not start at a high,” she said. “Real love is developed over time. It’s about learning to trust, bond, and build family together, with or without children. So I’m in favor of not overthinking yourself to death in the beginning. Women, especially, tend to rule people out too quickly. In my experience, it’s the women who won’t go on second dates more than the men.”

  Clampitt wasn’t the first to point out that women tend to be pickier than men. Was this true—not just on first dates, but in general? I thought about the three hundred things women said that men do wrong on first dates. That seemed pretty extreme.

  So I had to find out: Are women really pickier?

  16

  Are Women Pickier Than Men?

  “Oh, come on,” I said to my friend Kyle, a married journalist in New York, when we were talking about picky daters. I didn’t believe his theory: that if a woman is basically attractive and normal, most men will give her a chance.

  He explained it like this: “If a girl seems like she isn’t going to have too many unexplained crying jags or have too many antidepressant prescriptions or want to endlessly discuss the minutiae of the relationship, or go through our e-mail or Google the names of our exes, that’s a huge plus for us. It’s like cha-ching! Yahtzee! Touchdown!”

  He may have been half-kidding, but there was some truth there, too: Men do have slightly less stringent requirements than women.

  In a 2007 Time/CNN poll, 80 percent of men and women said they thought they’d meet their perfect mate eventually. But when they were asked if they would marry someone else if they didn’t find Mr. or Ms. Perfect, 34 percent of the women said yes, compared with 41 percent of men.

  Lisa Clampitt, the New York City matchmaker, wasn’t surprised. Her male clients are often more open-minded than the women. If she asks a guy to move his upper age limit from 30 to 35, he usually will. If she asks him to consider 5’2” instead of 5’6”, he’ll probably do it.

  “Men are open to different styles, whereas women have a hard time with that,” Clampitt said. “They have a lot of rules about who they’ll date and who they won’t. They can’t let go of their ideal guy.”

  Dan Ariely, the behavioral economist at MIT, studied more than twenty thousand online daters and also found that women were pickier than men. Basically, if a woman was above a certain threshold of physical attractiveness and seemed warm, the guy was interested. The men didn’t microanalyze dating prospects for income, education level, what kind of work they did, height, or race to the degree women analyzed men in those categories.

  “Women have a more concrete picture in their minds of what the guy is going to be like,” Ariely told me. “Men have more of a vague notion, and they’re not so rigid about the details.”

  Okay, but that’s about initial attraction. Once they were in relationships, I knew plenty of men who nixed women for what I considered to be lame reasons. Ben, a 45-year-old banker, told me that he’d broken up with one girlfriend because her ankles were too thick, another because they didn’t share the same taste in furniture (“I felt we could never agree on how to make a home together”), and another because, believe it or not, they were “too similar.”

  Too similar?

  “We had a lot of fun,” he explained, “but I ultimately realized we weren’t different enough to make the relationship interesting long-term.” When I asked Ben what sorts of issues girlfriends might have had with him, he cited things like lack of attentiveness to their stories, being a terrible procrastinator, and letting his body “go to pot” (yet he couldn’t deal with his girlfriend’s ankles?).

  A cute lawyer broke up with two women whose company he enjoyed very much, except at dinner parties: one was too talkative (“She dominated the conversation”) and the other was too shy (“I always felt responsible for keeping the conversation going for her”). He didn’t seem to realize that if he got married and had kids, he wouldn’t be going to as many dinner parties and that how much he enjoyed his wife’s company one-on-one would become most important.

  “I’m looking for just the right balance,” he explained. “Kind of like the Three Bears.” (I guess women aren’t the only ones who believe in fairy tales.)

  “Well,” Ariely said when I shared these stories, “sometimes it’s less about being picky and more about having intimacy issues. Both men and women can have intimacy issues, but in general, in psychologically healthy people who also want to get married, women make more calculated decisions than men. Less is needed to make men fall in love. Ask men and women what percentage of people they’d date, and women will give a much smaller percentage. Why? There’s the evolutionary story. But I think there’s also a cultural one.”

  From an evolutionary perspective, he said, women have had to be particular because they needed someone to help them raise their babies. In more recent times, though, cultural standards seem to have made women inordinately picky—and not just about the baby-related things like income and good genes. To check that out, I asked dozens of women what they wanted in a partner, and got all the usual responses: someone attractive, funny, smart, kind, and financially stable. But if I probed just a tiny bit more, they also wanted—actually, required—a partner with a dynamic emotional life, a guy who would listen to her feelings and share his feelings the way their girlfriends did. When I asked why, several people said they want a guy who is emotionally complex because, to them, that signifies a thoughtful and reflective person.

  That seemed legitimate. But don’t men want a thoughtful and reflective partner, too? Yes and no, Ariely said. He believes that men tend to view emotional complexity differently: emotionally complex women seem neurotic and high-maintenance to a lot of men. A woman’s idea of complexity might be a man’s idea of instability.

  Melissa, who is 33 and admits to being “emotionally complex,” thinks Ariely is right.

  “People say men settle for women who are just not challenging,” she said, “but that’s wrong because I think that’s what many men look for—the easy-going wife, the adoring wife, the low-maintenance and unchallenging wife. The wife who doesn’t overthink things. Which makes men seem less picky. But are men less picky, or do men and women just want different things?”

  ONE-STOP SHOPPING

  The guys I spoke to think they do. They feel that women often expect a lot—and men can’t live up to it all. Kyle, the journalist in New York, said that back when he was dating, women wanted to find both the tall, wealthy guy and the emotional equivalent of a gal pal.

  “Women want their men to be gay and straight at the same time,” he explained. “This creates a lot of frustration with men, and resentment. Straight men don’t want to talk about fashion or nitpick over people’s personality foibles the way gay men do.”

  That reminded me of a conversation I had with a close friend one night, when I said that I wanted what she had with her husband—they seemed like the ideal combination of lovers and best friends.

  “Actually,” she said, “my best friend is you.”

  She explained it like this: “If I told my husband even half of what I tell you, he’d die of boredom and tune me out, and then we’d get into a fight about how he’s not listening to me. Besides, instead of nagging him every day, I complain to you!”

  I was confused. “If I’m your best friend,” I asked, “does that mean your husband isn’t?”

  “Maybe,” she smiled. “But I still love him more than you.”

  It’s a distinction she said she couldn’t make even a few years back. Then one day, frustrated that her husband wasn’t as interested in emotional topics as she was, she had a realization. “I thought, even our best friends don’t meet all our needs. That’s why we have many close friends, not just one. So why does a husband have to be an uber-friend who meets every need and shares every interest? Who can handle that kind of pressure?”

  It’s a lesson
she thinks more single women should learn.

  I remembered, too, what my friend Andy, one of the “men who got away,” had said about his wife.

  “I think one-stop shopping is overrated,” he told me. “I get passion at my office with my work, or with my friends that I sometimes call or chat with—it’s not the same, and, boy, it would be exciting to have it with my spouse. But I spend more time with people at my office than I do with my spouse.”

  I asked if he considered that settling. “Not at all,” he said. “She has a lot of the qualities I wanted in a spouse. And I was tired of looking for all the things she’s not.”

  Most men I spoke to seemed realistic about the limitations of one human being providing total fulfillment for another. As Kurt, the engaged guy I spoke to back at the bar in Los Angeles put it, “Men don’t care if you watch football games together, but women won’t marry you if you don’t want to hear the minute details of their book club meeting.”

  I was starting to think about the issue this way: Men and women both have to compromise to be with a mate, but they compromise differently. For married men, the biggest compromise is sexual monogamy. For married women, the biggest compromise is not having emotional monogamy. In other words, the compromise is not having one all-encompassing emotional connection, and having to get some of that connection outside of the marriage. It’s having to accept that one human being can’t provide a level of emotional intensity that most men don’t want in the first place.

  I CAN BE LESS PICKY—IN THEORY

  Annie is 34 and out there dating again. For three years, she was married to a handsome, smart, funny, and exciting guy who was a great boyfriend, but turned out to be a terrible spouse. In retrospect, she feels she overlooked the warning signs. She’d always been picky, but after her divorce, she was trying to date differently.

  “What’s changed the most is that I still want to have positive feelings about the guy and find him interesting, but it doesn’t have to be like ‘I’ve never felt that way’ or ‘my toes are tingling.’ I had that with the guy I married, and I know it can be misleading.”

  Now, she says, she realizes that other qualities are more important.

  “I’m trying to be more appreciative of kindness and good company,” she told me. “Things that are very basic, but that I didn’t used to focus on as much as I should have. I just want someone relatively smart, very kind, financially secure, and who wants a family now. I’ll redo the math on the physical stuff. I believe that, but sometimes I go back to my old ways.”

  Recently, she said, a married friend wanted to set her up with a lawyer at her husband’s law firm. She looked at his Facebook page and thought he was cute but didn’t like what he wrote.

  “He had this typical corporate lawyer bio,” Annie said. “I thought, Ugh—how boring. My friend didn’t say he was a dullard, but she didn’t say he was interesting either. She said, ‘What’s the downside of meeting him? He’s a great guy.’ But I thought, ‘Do I want to make small talk about spicy tuna rolls with this guy?’ Everyone says that I need to change my attitude and just go and see if we have fun.”

  I asked Annie how she would feel a few years from now if she’s still single, knowing she wouldn’t even go on a first date with a guy because she didn’t like his corporate bio.

  She thought about it for a minute. “When I’m 35, will I go out with this guy if he’s still available? I’m not sure. I’m not there yet. But if in two years I wouldn’t—then I would think it’s my problem versus this is me trying to honor myself. Then it’s just me being self-sabotaging.” Annie says it’s not just the biological clock that would motivate her to change. It’s that most of her friends are in happy marriages and she wants what they have, too.

  “I want to go through life with someone,” she said. “And I know that means I have to let go of some fantasies I have, and that everyone compromises. In theory, I’m absolutely on board with being less picky. But in practice, I’m having a hard time with it.”

  Like Annie, 39-year-old Jocelyn is on board in theory only.

  “I’m not a monk who can sit alone in my cell just waiting for the whole perfect scenario,” she told me. “I know that life is imperfect. But I just know that I require a certain emotional depth and insight in a guy, and if I can’t be with someone who truly appreciates my nuances, I’m not going to be interested in the long-term.”

  Evan Marc Katz, the dating coach, says that most women he works with start out like Annie and Jocelyn: I can’t help who I’m attracted to. I want to compromise, but I just can’t. To these women, Evan says, “Fine, don’t compromise. Just don’t be too surprised if everyone else ‘compromises’ their way into a fulfilling relationship while you keep chasing a dream that never has a happy ending.”

  WOMEN WANT MORE

  Edna Pollin, a divorce attorney in Denver, told me that from what she sees, “Women are dissatisfied because they always want more.” They want, for instance, more romance, more help around the house, more passion. Some want what she called “better income producers.” Sure, she said, there are men in midlife crisis who initiate divorce, but more often it’s the women who want out, leaving the men confused.

  “The men feel like, ‘Nobody told me we were having problems. I thought everything was fine,’ ” she explained.

  Maybe that’s one reason that, according to a report on divorce put out by the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University, two-thirds of divorces are initiated by women. Pollin said that women often expect their spouses to be “everything” and then feel like something’s missing—their soul mate, for instance.

  Keith, 36, told me that when his wife asked for a divorce a year ago, she told him, “I love you, but I am not in love with you.”

  Turned out she was “in love” with someone else.

  “I have an MBA, a good job in computer security, a pilot’s license, own my own house, am in decent shape, and volunteer teaching GED classes. I go to church. I’m not the exciting roller-coaster ride. I get paid to be cautious and manage risk. I’m not an exciting Romeo. That’s what my ex left me for.”

  I asked Paul Amato, a sociologist at Penn State who studies divorced couples, why women do things like this.

  He told me that it has to do with a gender difference in expectations. Often women he studied said they believed that marriage was going to be different—more exciting, or easier. So they think the problem is the husband: They think he’s become boring, but really it’s marriage that’s “boring” compared to the romance of the dating years.

  I asked some men about their expectations for marriage. Alex, who is 39 and has been married for four years, told me he’s fine not getting everything on his wife wish list, because he’s deeply in love with his spouse.

  “I wish my wife weren’t so uptight about day-to-day life,” he said. “I wish she were more tolerant of my slower pace in getting things done. And I wish she were younger and sexier, but isn’t that always the case in a long-term relationship?”

  Graham, who is 34 and in a serious relationship, told me that there are always things he wishes were different in his relationships, but most of them aren’t big enough to be deal-breakers. When he’s ruled out women in the past, it always came down to different values—career goals, money, safety, religion, parenting for future kids.

  He never broke up with his past girlfriends over things like this: “I wished I were with someone who liked more of the same things, like playing sports or the same music or theater. I wished she liked to hike. I wished I were with someone who was able to continue to contribute financially even after kids are born. I wished I were with someone who was small enough so I could pick her up during sex. I wished I were with someone who wanted to have sex with the frequency that I do. I wished I were with someone who preferred coming to my apartment in Brooklyn so I didn’t have to stay at her place in Manhattan all the time.”

  As
I listened to his list, I thought about all the women I knew who had broken up with guys, or would without hesitation, if the tables were turned: He didn’t share an interest of hers, he didn’t make enough money, he wanted sex more than she did, he wouldn’t make the trek to her apartment. Yet this guy accepted these things.

  Graham’s current girlfriend is by no means perfect, but to break up, he feels, would be too picky. His girlfriend isn’t athletic and doesn’t like sports; she’s much taller than he’d like; there are some potential sexual issues to work out; she can be dramatic in situations that Graham feels don’t merit drama.

  “I’m sticking with it,” he said, “because the things I do find important seem to be there. She’s bright, there’s mutual attraction, we laugh and sing together, we have similar values, there’s a feeling of mutual respect and admiration.”

  Jack, a 30-year-old Web designer who’s about to get married, told me he felt bad ten years ago, when he was rejected after confessing his romantic interest to his best friend from college. But as he listened to her dating stories over the years, he realized it wasn’t personal. He’s seen her reject men based on one piece of information (“He went a month without medical insurance—how irresponsible is that?”), one sentence (He said, “All the girls I’ve gone out with”), or one pet name she didn’t like (“He called me ‘dude’ as a term of endearment”).

  “I enjoy her friendship, but who’d want to go out with someone as judgmental as that?” he asked. “She always puts her finger on the one thing that’s wrong with a guy.”

  I’d been guilty of that in the past, but now I had the opposite problem: What happens when you can’t quite put your finger on what’s wrong? I was thinking about this after my second date with Mike. I needed to talk to Evan. I needed to get clearer on what really matters.