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Mr Good Enough: The case for choosing a Real Man over holding out for Mr Perfect
Lori Gottlieb


Lori Gottlieb suggests the unthinkable: what if she, and single women everywhere, need to stop chasing the elusive Mr Perfect and instead opt for Mr Good Enough?Embarking on her own journey to find the ideal partner, Lori explores a prevalent issue facing women today - how do you reconcile a strong desire for a husband and family without wanting to settle for anything less than the perfect package…?After interviewing a range of people from behavioural therapists to marriage counsellors, neuropsychologists to divorce lawyers, as well as single and married men and women from their twenties right up to their sixties, Lori is well placed to offer an answerMr Good Enough is this year's intelligent, eye-opening insight into modern relationships - a fast, funny read which 'might just be a formula for marital bliss' The TimesNote that it has not been possible to include the same picture content that appeared in the original print version.







Mr

Good Enough

LORI GOTTLIEB



The Case for

Choosing a Real Man Over Holding Out for Mr Perfect







For my husband, whoever you are.




Contents


Cover (#uf916c282-2c8a-5642-af90-e196f7e4e564)

Title Page (#u49cf1762-fba0-59a5-b62e-94592b955adf)

Prologue: The Husband Store (#ulink_9864639b-7966-52a1-96ba-50ad92fd2f71)

PART ONE: How Did We Get Here?

1: The Dating Trenches (#ulink_4728dd1a-c336-574d-ab73-7c7b49f0a2ec)

2: The Romantic Comedy That Predicted My Future (#ulink_4909abd1-ce80-5385-b713-1e3f920504c5)

3: How Feminism Fucked Up My Love Life (#ulink_8bf94fbe-597b-54cc-bbb4-a271b6434d3e)

4: Speed Dating Disaster (#ulink_128bd92c-d937-5789-b6bb-f58cc38676c9)

PART TWO: From Fantasy to Reality (#ulink_86f27b02-6626-5213-b7d2-26f56e7dea05)

5: Older, and Wanting to Be Wiser (#ulink_8d6194fc-0cb9-59b3-82ce-350356f4ac7f)

6: $3,500 for Love (#ulink_438717e3-535a-5bf3-9299-2361c0d481d0)

7: The What Versus the Why (#ulink_6f5520a3-0f06-574e-9930-509139f1d673)

8: Mondays with Evan: Session One: The Percentages (#ulink_e131ba94-8d56-5c62-9596-e149aa48c14d)

9: It’s Not Him, It’s You (#ulink_ea476a44-f2fb-5771-99cb-e6a056ee5588)

PART THREE: Making Smarter Choices (#ulink_0457c390-5c2b-5db8-a993-acf13062ffd9)

10: Don’t Be Picky, Be Happy (#ulink_f3dedfdd-9d4e-5f28-abce-5009bdb824e8)

11: Mondays with Evan: Session Two: The Wrong Assumptions (#ulink_9648ed2b-192e-5f5e-bca1-a2e9ed7942b4)

12: The Men Who Got Away (#ulink_9b9b53bf-f719-574a-80f8-e65ec283b0b5)

13: Pulling Another Sheldon (#ulink_55909f3e-c359-5f1d-a55e-e653d067d563)

14: Mondays with Evan: Session Three: The Lowdown (#ulink_a09496be-196a-5529-9580-03ac4376f47b)

15: What First Dates Really Tell Us (#ulink_3de71608-1e02-52e5-b4d0-01b6d27f72a3)

16: Are Wo men Pickier Than Men? (#ulink_056c2c6e-87d9-5e4c-baba-0803c537afb3)

PART FOUR: What Really Matters (#ulink_5ebd7e12-eeb8-5397-a246-a7be389a3813)

17: Mondays with Evan Session Four: Wants Versus Needs (#ulink_61e270f6-69e9-513c-be64-98be3585d3f6)

18: The Business of Love (#ulink_80e4492e-a3ca-597b-a307-96b98f1f10de)

19: Love at Twenty-seventh Sight (#ulink_c56b2647-1c78-55d6-96bd-977737c69931)

20: Mondays with Evan: Session Five: The Chemistry-to-Compatibility Ratio (#ulink_0d18220a-d1be-524e-af6a-d81655c45aee)

21: Dump the List, Not the Guy (#ulink_989cec1d-f20c-53ab-80a5-a71211bcffaa)

PART FIVE: Putting It All Together (#ulink_318b07f1-845d-54e2-a764-e11aa6820bc8)

22: The Good Enough Marriage (#ulink_004fc4b3-99f5-5e8e-a018-668d44638280)

23: A Visit with the Rabb (#ulink_0bc1c970-b7b2-5f67-88ee-0acc07e4060e)

24: Claire’s Story—Getting Over Myself (#ulink_fd282626-8f0e-50e1-a34a-6e8ae2499608)

25: Alexandra’s Story—Mr. Right in Front of Me (#ulink_d87e5894-589b-594c-9ffe-aeaef09d10f2)

26: Hilary’s Story—Finding What I Needed (#ulink_25c6a571-6555-5b47-b45b-870c8c20695f)

27: My Story—A Dating Public Service Announcement (#ulink_075c7df5-028a-50f4-8597-e86a83ae1504)

Epilogue: Where They Are Now (#ulink_2161aa6e-3c6c-540b-858a-7c140c0fc73c)

Acknowledgments (#ulink_f64be693-e914-553a-8542-eb31f6ad463c)

ALSO BY LORI GOTTLIEB (#ulink_bc746d71-beb7-5ae1-93f6-d31df06325ae)

Copyright (#ulink_69533686-eb36-53ae-ab90-34e2fb10f189)

About the Publisher (#ulink_f55d888f-afa3-59a4-bbfd-9468426c6b75)


The events and facts presented in this book are true and based upon my reallife experiences and research. Names and personal details of some of my friends and others who appear in the book have been changed or, in a few instances, composites created either at the individual’s request or out of my concern for their privacy.


You know you’re in love when you can’t fall asleep

because reality is finally better than your dreams.

—Widely attributed to Dr. Seuss




Prologue The Husband Store (#ulink_aef85c8c-91cc-5d4c-88bf-052fe448e410)


A NEW STORE HAS OPENED. A HUSBAND STORE! THERE‘S A SIGN AT THE ENTRANCE:

YOU MAY VISIT THE HUSBAND STORE ONLY ONCE. THERE ARE SIX FLOORS, AND THE VALUE OF THE PRODUCTS INCREASE ON EACH SUCCESSIVE FLOOR. THE SHOPPER CAN CHOOSE ANY ITEM FROM A PARTICULAR FLOOR, OR GO UP TO SHOP ON THE NEXT FLOOR, BUT SHE CANNOT GO BACK DOWN EXCEPT TO EXIT THE BUILDING.

So, a woman goes into the store. On the first floor the sign on the door reads:

FLOOR I— MEN WHO HAVE GOOD JOBS.

“That’s nice,” she thinks, “but I want more.” So she continues upward, where the sign reads:

FLOOR 2—MEN WHO HAVE GOOD JOBS AND LOVE KIDS.

She’s intrigued, but continues to the third floor, where the sign reads:

FLOOR 3—MEN WHO HAVE GOOD JOBS, LOVE KIDS, AND ARE EXTREMELY HANDSOME.

“Wow,” she thinks, but feels compelled to keep going.

FLOOR 4—MEN WHO HAVE GOOD JOBS, LOVE KIDS, ARE EXTREMELY HANDSOME, AND HELP EQUALLY WITH THE HOUSEWORK.

“It can’t get better than this!” she exclaims. But then a voice inside her asks, “Or can it?” She goes up and reads the sign.

Floor 5—MEN WHO HAVE GOOD JOBS, LOVE KIDS, ARE EXTREMELY HANDSOME, HELP EQUALLY WITH THE HOUSEWORK, AND HAVE A GREAT SENSE OF HUMOR.

Having found what she’s looking for, she’s tempted to stay, but something propels her to the sixth floor, where the sign reads:

FLOOR 6—YOU ARE VISITOR 42,215,602 TO THIS FLOOR. THERE ARE NO MEN ON THIS FLOOR. THIS FLOOR ONLY EXISTS TO PROVE THAT WOMEN ARE IMPOSSIBLE TO PLEASE. THANK YOU FOR SHOPPING AT THE HUSBAND STORE.

PLEASE NOTE:

To avoid gender bias charges, the store’s owner opened a Wife Store right across the street.

The first floor has wives who Love Sex.

The second floor has wives who Love Sex and Are Kind.

The third floor has wives who Love Sex, Are Kind, and Like Sports.

The fourth, fifth, and sixth floors have never been visited.

—My version of an old joke about choosing a husband

Okay, here they are. The qualities, off the top my head and in no particular order, that would be on my shopping list if I visited a Husband Store.

• Intelligent

• Kind

• Extremely funny

• Curious

• Loves kids

• Financially stable

• Emotionally stable

• Sexy

• Romantic

• Passionate

• Compassionate

• Irreverent

• Intuitive

• Generous

• Same religion but not too religious

• Optimistic but not naive

• Ambitious but not a workaholic

• Talented but humble

• Warm but not clingy

• Grounded but not boring

• Soulful but not new-agey

• Vulnerable but not weak

• Quirky but not weird

• Free-spirited but responsible

• Charismatic but genuine

• Strong but sensitive

• Athletic but not a sports nut

• Open-minded but has conviction

• Decisive but not bossy

• Mature but not old

• Creative but not an artist

• Supportive of my dreams and goals

• Has a sense of wonderment about the world

• Is close to my age (shares my cultural references)

• Good listener and communicator

• Flexible and can compromise

• Sophisticated—well-educated, well-traveled, has been around

• Over 5’10” but under 6’0”

• Has a full head of hair (wavy and dark would be nice—no blonds)

• Has shared political views

• Has shared values

• Is not into sci-fi or comic books

• Has good taste/sense of aesthetics

• Health-conscious and physically fit

• Cares about the community at large

• Cares about animals

• Competent

• Handy around the house

• Cooks

• Likes the outdoors (hiking, biking, Rollerblading)

• Likes my friends (and I like his)

• Not moody

• Trustworthy

• Is a team player

• Is literary and enjoys wordplay

• Is math- or science-oriented

• Likes discussing (but not arguing about) politics and world events

• Stylish

• Stimulating

• Not a slob—respectful of our living space

• Is madly in love with me

Actually, this isn’t my current list. This is what I started off with when I sat down to write this book. I’d never made a “list” before, but a married friend put me up to it. I told her I didn’t have a list, and she insisted I did, even if it only existed in my head.

“I can’t quantify what I’m looking for,” I said. “I always just fell in love.”

But she was right: It took me all of three minutes to give a detailed description of my ideal guy. Even if I’d never written a list, I clearly kept a mental file. Then she took it a step further: Hone down the list to make it more realistic.

I gave it a try. I crossed off some easy items—he doesn’t have to know how to cook (besides, he could always learn); if he’s 5’7” instead of 5’10", I could live with that. But even as I eliminated some qualities, I found it hard to get rid of most entirely. Maybe I could compromise on “funny,” but where do you draw the line between a guy whose banter makes your heart race and one whose sense of humor merely makes you smile? On a sliding scale, how much passion would he need to be considered “passionate”?

There were so many variables. In the past, I dated a freelance artist, only to say that next time I wanted someone financially stable. Then I dated a doctor, but we didn’t connect creatively. Finding a financially stable artist or a doctor who wrote novels in his spare time wasn’t impossible—but pretty rare. And combine that with all the other characteristics I wanted, not to mention “chemistry,” and suddenly the mystery of why I was still single was solved.

Maybe the man I was looking for on paper simply didn’t exist. And maybe, as my friend suggested, some of these qualities weren’t that important when it came to a happy marriage anyway.

Yikes. What if she was right? Had I overlooked men who might have turned out to be great husbands because I was drawn to an instant spark and a checklist instead of a solid life partner?

Of course, I wasn’t completely clueless. By the time I hit 30, I knew that nobody was perfect (including me) and that whoever I married would be a flawed human being like the rest of us. I wasn’t expecting perfection so much as intense connection. I also knew that none of that heady first-blush excitement guaranteed everlasting love, but I felt that without this initial launching pad, romance would never get off the ground. As far as I was concerned, there was no point in going on a second date if there wasn’t a strong attraction on the first.

So, at least in the beginning of a relationship, I expected to be dazzled (even if that meant being so distracted by my object of affection that I nearly lost my job and risked my very livelihood). I expected to “just know” that he was The One (even if it often happened that a year later, I’d “just know” that I wanted to break up). I expected to feel some sort of divine connection (even if that meant being in a constant state of nausea and having an obsessive need to check my voice mail every thirty minutes). This was what “falling in love” felt like, right?

Meanwhile, my unconscious husband-shopping list grew even longer. Like a lot of women, the older I got, the more things I wanted in a guy, because while life experience taught me what I didn’t want in a relationship, it also gave me a better sense of what I did want. So the thinking would go: The last guy wasn’t X, so next time I want X … plus all the things I had on my list before. Basically, my Husband Store went from a six-story building to the world’s tallest skyscraper. And I didn’t think I was alone.

Could this be one reason that in 1975, almost 90 percent of women in the United States were married by age 30 but in 2004, only a little more than half were? Or why the percentages of never-married women in every age group studied by the U.S. Census Bureau (from 25 to 44) more than doubled between 1970 and 2006?

I wanted to find out.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF LOVE STORY

This book is a love story. It’s not mine, exactly, but it could be yours.

It all started with a dinner I had with my editor at the Atlantic. I was 39 years old, a journalist and single mother with a toddler, and I was grumbling about a date I’d had the night before with a lisping 45-year-old lawyer who chewed with his mouth open and talked nonstop for three hours about his ex-wife but failed to ask a single question about me. I didn’t know if I had it in me to go on another date. Ever. I was so tired of having to talk to strangers over plates of pasta when all I wanted was to hang out in sweatpants with my husband on a Saturday night, like my married friends did.

How had this become my life?

Just two years earlier, I’d written “The XY Files” for the Atlantic, where I told the story of my decision, at age 37, to have a baby on my own. Obviously, this wasn’t my childhood dream, but neither was marrying someone who wasn’t The One—and so far I didn’t think I’d found him. I wanted to have a baby while I still could, so instead of signing up with another online dating site, I registered with an online sperm donor site. Soon I found myself pregnant and still hopeful that I’d meet Mr. Right. My plan was to have a baby first, find “true love” later. At the time, I felt empowered and even wrote in the pages of the magazine that what I was doing seemed somewhat romantic.

Well … hahahahahahaha!

Now, at dinner with my editor, I couldn’t stop laughing. Of course, I was ecstatically in love with my child, but let’s face it: Things weren’t so romantic over in the Gottlieb household. Like my married friends with small children, I was sleep-deprived, cranky, and overwhelmed, but unlike them, I was doing it all alone. Sure, sometimes they complained about their husbands and, at first, I felt proud of my decision not to end up like them—in what seemed like less-than-ideal marriages, with less-than-ideal spouses. But it didn’t take long before I realized that none of them would trade places with me for a second. In fact, despite their complaints, they actually were really happy—and in many cases, happier than they’d ever been. All those things that seemed so important when they were dating now had little relevance to their lives. Instead, the idea of choosing to run a household together—as unglamorous and challenging and mundane as that was—seemed to be the ultimate act of “true love.” Why hadn’t I looked at marriage that way five years ago?

“If I knew then what I know now,” I told my editor, “I would have approached dating differently.” But how could I have known?

As a single 42-year-old friend put it, for many women it’s a Catch-22. “If I’d settled at thirty-nine,” she said, “I always would have had the fantasy that something better exists out there. Now I know better. Either way, I was screwed.”

I remember being surprised that my friend, a smart and attractive producer, was basically saying she should have settled. But she explained that I had it all wrong. She didn’t mean resigning herself to a life of quiet misery with a man she cared little about. She meant opening herself up to a fulfilling life with a great guy who might not have possessed every quality on her checklist. In her thirties, she told me, she used to consider “settling” to mean anything less than her ideal guy, but now, in her forties, she’d come to realize that she’d been confusing “settling” with “compromising.”

I’d come to the same conclusion, and I started asking myself some important questions. What’s the difference between settling and compromising? When it comes to marriage, what can we live with, and what can we live without? How long does it make sense to hold out for someone better—who we may never find, and who may not exist or be available to us even if he did—when we could be happy with the person right in front of us?

I brought up these questions with my editor that night, and neither of us had the answers. For the next two hours, he talked about his marriage and I talked about the dating world, and when the check came, he thought I should explore these issues in an article.

Over the following weeks, as I spoke with friends and acquaintances about their relationships, something surprised me. Whether or not these people went into marriage head-over-heels in love, there seemed to be little difference in how happy they were now. Both kinds of marriages seemed to be working or not working equally well or poorly. Meanwhile, the women I spoke to who were single—and unhappy about their single state—were still nixing guys who were “obsessed with sports” or “too short,” because they figured that if they married the short guy who didn’t read novels, they’d be unsatisfied in that marriage. Yet the women who had done just that weren’t.

When “Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough” appeared in the Valentine’s Day issue of the Atlantic, I pored over e-mails from complete strangers—men and women, married and single, ranging in age from 18 to 78. The notes were incredibly personal, and most people admitted that they’d struggled with these same questions in their own lives. Some had resolved them happily and felt grateful to be with a more realistic Mr. Right. Others regretted letting a great guy go for what now seemed like trivial reasons. Still others said that marrying for “fireworks” left them feeling like they were settling once the pilot light went out because once they could see each other clearly, they realized they weren’t that compatible after all. Some—including priests, rabbis, matchmakers, and marriage therapists—felt that adjusting our expectations in a healthy way would help members of their congregations, clients, friends, or family members find real romantic fulfillment.

But where did that leave me? Out in the dating world, I was doing exactly what I’d suggested in the Atlantic article. I was trying to be more open-minded and realistic, and focus on what was going to be important in a long-term marriage instead of a short-term romance, but somehow that didn’t seem to be working. I was still drawn to guys who were my “type,” and when I dated guys who weren’t, I just wasn’t feeling “it.” I wasn’t looking for instant butterflies anymore, but there had to be some “it” there, right? And if so, how much “it” was enough?

WHAT IF I WANT A DIFFERENT 8?

Then I got an e-mail from a single woman who wrote that she wasn’t looking for the perfect 10 in a mate—an 8 would be great. She was even dating an 8. But there was just one problem, she said: “What if I want a different 8?”

That, I realized, was exactly my problem—and so many other women’s, too. She agreed that we should be looking for Mr. Good Enough (who exists) instead of Prince Charming (who doesn’t), but she didn’t know how to make it work in practice. Neither did I. In fact, when readers wrote in saying that they’d decided to get engaged because of my article, I worried that five years later, I’d get a slew of e-mails saying that they were getting divorced because of my article, since nobody knew what being more realistic actually meant. How much compromise is too much compromise? How do you know if you’re being too picky or if you’re really not right for each other? If being with Mr. Good Enough means sharing both passion and connection, but also having more reasonable expectations, how do you balance those things?

In order to find out, I decided that I’d have to become a dating guinea pig. I’d go out there and get some answers—then apply them to my life in the real world.

I started by talking to cutting-edge marriage researchers, behavioral economists, sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, neurobiologists, couples therapists, spiritual leaders, matchmakers, divorce lawyers, dating coaches, and even mothers. I also listened to stories from single and married people who had helpful experiences to share. I didn’t expect anyone to have the answer, of course, but I was hoping that with some guidance and insight, I’d come closer to finding the right guy. Maybe I’d help others do that, too.

What follows isn’t an advice book or dating manual. There are no worksheets to fill out or “rules” to follow. Instead, it’s an honest look at why our dating lives might not be going as planned, and what our own roles in that might be. Then it’s up to the reader to decide what kinds of choices she wants to make in the future.

I’ll warn you that you might not like what some of these experts have to say. At first, I didn’t either, and I spent a lot of time kicking and screaming in denial of the facts. But eventually I realized that knowledge was power, and this journey changed me and my dating life profoundly. It could change yours, too.

Because in the end, I discovered that finding a guy to get real with is the true love story.



PART ONE How Did We Get Here? (#ulink_f0a47f27-f5b9-5cd8-a2d3-20b1d098ba2b)




1 The Dating Trenches (#ulink_2e47bbef-7f69-5da6-897b-5e07815b5b38)


One night, my friend Julia called to say that she had just broken up with her boyfriend, Greg.

“I just wasn’t inspired by him,” she said.

When Julia met Greg two years earlier, they were both 28 and he was her coworker at a nonprofit. She thought he was cute, sweet, and very smart. He was kind of unstylish—he wore nerdy highwaisted corduroys all the time—but she liked how “real” he was, how “unpretentious” and “nonmaterialistic.” She also felt at ease with him in a way she hadn’t with previous boyfriends. Julia had never dated anyone as supportive as Greg. Whatever her goals were, he helped her out. Whenever someone wronged her, he had her back. Whenever she felt insecure, he made her feel beautiful. You’d think this would have made her love him all the more, and it did—at first. But now, as Greg started talking about marriage, it began to have the opposite effect.

“Greg made me feel like I was the most wonderful woman in the world,” she said. “So then I started thinking, ‘If I’m so wonderful, maybe I should be with someone better.’”

By “better” she meant, in part, “someone more charismatic.” Greg could be shy and somewhat insecure in social situations, while Julia was confident and outgoing. Julia was quick with the one-liners, while Greg had a more subtle sense of humor. Greg came from a more modest background than Julia did, so he didn’t always share the more sophisticated references that came up with Julia’s friends in conversation.

Meanwhile, thanks to Greg’s encouragement, Julia had risen up the ladder at work—and eventually earned more money than he did. Not a lot more, but it made Julia uncomfortable.

“I want to work,” Julia said. “But I don’t know. It’s not how I imagined my marriage would be.”

When I asked how she imagined it, she let out an embarrassed sigh.

“Honestly?” she said. “I guess I want my husband to be more of a go-getter.”

I pointed out that Greg was sweeter than anyone she’d dated, especially her last boyfriend, the ambitious lawyer who often “forgot” to call her when he said he would. Greg was loving and reliable. He was passionate about his work. They had great sex. They shared similar interests, especially because they worked in the same field. They had a lot of fun together.

“But he wasn’t inspiring enough,” Julia repeated. “He’s just this, you know, really nice, regular kind of guy. I started feeling like, ‘This is it? This is the guy I’ve waited all my life for?’ I’m worried that long-term, I’m going to outgrow him. I’m going to want more.”

“More what?” I asked.

The phone line went silent for what seemed like a long time.

“More like I imagined,” Julia said. “He just wasn’t husband material.”

And with that, another great guy bit the dust. Or did he? What were people looking for in a husband nowadays anyway?

ANYTHING BUT BORING

Not long after my conversation with Julia, I got together with five twenty-something single women at a bar in Los Angeles and asked why it’s so hard to find “husband material.” Their consensus: We’d like a guy, but we don’t need a guy. So why should we lower our standards?

“I’d rather be alone than settle,” said Olivia, a 27-year-old Web designer. “I’ve had annoying roommates in my early twenties, but I can’t imagine having to eat all my dinners and sleep in the same bed with a male roommate who happens to be the husband I settled for.”

The others nodded.

“I don’t know about you,” Olivia continued, half-joking, “but I would need to love someone very deeply in order to brush my teeth two feet away from where he’s taking a dump every morning.”

I suggested that, all kidding aside, bathroom doors can be closed, but opportunities to meet good men aren’t always open, and I asked the group how they defined settling. Did it mean picking a guy who’s truly annoying, or compromising on some desired qualities but getting other, more important ones? And what would those important ones be?

“Even if he’s nice and smart and attractive, I can’t be with someone boring,” said Nora, a radio producer.

“Exactly,” said Claire, a graduate student. “There are guys who are smart but then you’re shocked to learn that for all that intelligence, they’re just not that interesting. They have to be smart in an interesting way. They have to be curious.”

“Curious, but not earnest,” said Nina, a marketing executive. “They have to be a little edgy.”

“But not too edgy,” said Nora. “They have to be normal. But just not boring.”

I asked the women for examples of what they meant by boring.

“They have to have a sense of humor,” said Nina. “They can’t just be sitting there laughing at something funny I might say. Boring guys aren’t funny, but they think you’re funny.”

“Or the opposite,” said Claire. “They think that if a woman laughs at their jokes, she has a sense of humor. Only a boring person believes that.”

“Or a narcissist!” said Lauren, a fund-raiser for political causes.

“Well, narcissists are boring!” said Olivia, and the group broke into laughter.

I told these women—all reasonably attractive but not drop-dead gorgeous; all interesting but not off-the-charts fascinating—that at a certain point, they might get lonely going on all these dates looking for The Perfect One instead of building a nice life with Some One.

“I’m already lonely, but loneliness is better than boredom,” said Lauren. She’s finds her stable fund-raising job boring at times but it’s often fulfilling, too, so she won’t leave it for her true passion, painting, because it seems too risky.

“So you’ll compromise in your choice of a job but not your choice of a partner?” I asked. “You’re willing to spend eight hours a day in a good enough career instead of leaving it for your true love, being an artist?”

Lauren thought about this for a minute.

“Well, that’s different,” she said. “I’m practical about my career. But to be practical about love? You can’t be practical about a feeling. That seems so … unromantic.”

Just then, a cute-ish guy who seemed to be about thirty walked by and checked out the women. They ignored him. I asked why.

“Too short,” said Olivia, who is 5’2”.

“And what’s up with those glasses?” added Claire, who wears chunky glasses herself.

I wondered if they’d be open to dating a short guy with last year’s style of glasses if he had many of the other qualities they wanted: smart, funny, slightly edgy, kind, successful—and, of course, not boring. How much do first appearances matter?

“I’ve tried that,” Nora said, “but I can’t make myself become attracted to someone. You have to feel it from the beginning. If you aren’t physically attracted when you meet them, you’re always forcing it and it never works.”

At first I was surprised by how readily the twenty-somethings dismissed this cute guy without even considering starting up a conversation to learn more about him. I mean, this wasn’t college, where the playing field was pretty evenly matched in terms of available romantic prospects. This was the adult world, where people were pairing off and getting married, where the pool of single men was getting smaller, where there wasn’t a built-in mechanism for meeting like-minded people the way there’d been in the past.

But then I remembered myself in my twenties, when the possibilities still seemed tantalizingly endless—even if they weren’t.

DESPERATE BUT PICKY

Ah, the difference a decade makes. A few nights later, five single women in their late thirties to early forties met me at the same bar, where I asked the same question: Why is it so hard to find a good guy? I filled them in on the conversation I had with the younger women about boredom and loneliness.

“Check back with them in ten years,” Stephanie, an attractive 39-year-old pediatrician, said. “If they’re holding out for Prince Charming, they’ll be bored and lonely. The job won’t seem as exciting anymore, drinks with the girls will get old, and on holidays, they’ll be hanging out with their married friends and their kids, or their nieces and nephews, which will only make them depressed that they don’t have a family themselves.”

I admitted that I related to those younger women, who wanted to be in a relationship but had a very specific idea of what that guy would have to be like. And as I got older, I explained, my dating life slowly became this lethal paradox: desperate but picky. They knew exactly what I meant.

“That’s so true!” said Liz, a 37-year-old screenwriter. “I want to shake younger women and say, you know, the guy who laughs too loud in public may not love the way you chew raw carrots at dinner parties, but it’s not a deal-breaker for him.”

These women could easily list their former deal-breakers—the reasons they didn’t pursue relationships when they were younger. Here’s what they said:



• “He was very loving but he wasn’t romantic enough. On Valentine’s Day he made a mix tape of my favorite music and gave me an hour-long massage, but all day at work, whenever I saw the flower guy going up the hall delivering flowers to my colleagues, I kept thinking, where are my flowers? I wanted a guy who sent flowers.”

“He brought me flowers, but cheesy ones that just spoke to bad taste—and the sense that I wasn’t worth something more thoughtful.”

“He wasn’t exciting enough. I felt like we were already married, which was nice in a way, but this was supposed to be the courting period.”

“He had long nose hairs and they grossed me out, but I didn’t have the courage to ask him to trim them, so I stopped seeing him.”

“He cried. The first time, I wasn’t thrilled, but okay. The second time, I bailed. I felt he was too weak for me.”

“He was too predictable. Then I started dating guys who always kept me on edge and I never knew what to expect. It was terrible. Now I’d give anything for predictable.”

“I was embarrassed by his voice. Sometimes when he’d answer the phone at my place, people would think he was me, because I have kind of a low voice. But otherwise, he was very masculine. And a great guy.”

“He was too optimistic. He was so cheery all the time, even early in the morning when the alarm went off, and I found that grating. He always found a silver lining—‘The stove broke, let’s go out to dinner!’—but I’d be upset that I had to buy a new stove. I didn’t want to ‘look on the bright side’ all the time. Then I dated a guy who was more cynical and after a while, it depressed me. So I tried to get the optimistic guy back, but he told me I was too pessimistic!”

“He was completely bald except for one of those rings of hair around his head and a little tuft poking up in the front. It was such a turnoff, but I tried to get over it because I really, really liked him. My friends said, ‘He has a nice face, he has a nice body, and besides, most guys lose their hair eventually.’ But he was only thirty-five. I’d always been attracted to guys who had the kind of hair you could run your fingers through. Now I’m lucky if the guys I meet have any hair at all.”

“He thought it was funny to make up strange words, like ‘fabulosa.’ He did this a lot—and in public, too. Once he said to someone at a party, ‘Being a doctor isn’t just one fabulosa after another’ and I was so embarrassed. I broke up with him the next day.”

“He loved me too much. I felt like he was too much of a puppy dog, always looking at me with those adoring eyes. I wanted more of a manly man.”

“He wasn’t refined enough. He couldn’t order off a wine list. He’d never seen Casablanca. I wondered, how can you be thirty-two years old and not have seen that?”

“I just wasn’t feeling it—and now I think, what was I supposed to be feeling? Because, actually, I liked being with him more than any of the guys I felt strong chemistry with before or since.”


Listening to these women, I thought about the reasons I’d passed up guys when I was younger, often sight unseen. One of the most memorable is Tom, a client of my lesbian hairdresser. She’d told me he was a handsome, charming, brilliant chemist and wanted to set us up on a blind date.

“He’s the only guy who does it for me,” she said, which sounded like quite an endorsement. Add the fact that I have a science background, and this guy seemed incredibly hot. But I said no, back when I was 29, because when my hairdresser said that Tom had red hair, I didn’t think I’d be attracted to him. I just knew that red hair wasn’t going to work for me. (Apparently, my bar for men was higher than that of a lesbian.)

There was also the cute, smart, funny lawyer I went on several dates with until I lost interest because he overused the word “awesome.” I remember telling a friend, “Everything is ‘awesome’ with him. It’s not ‘great’ or ‘wonderful’ or ‘interesting’ or even ‘cool.’ It’s always ‘awesome.’” I tried to get past it, but it irritated me every time he said it. (Somehow, the fact that I said “like” and “you know” all the time didn’t seem to irritate him.)

In my early thirties there was the adorable software developer I met at a party who gave me his work number and told me to call there anytime because, he said, “That’s where I always am.” I didn’t want to be with a workaholic, so I never called. It didn’t occur to me that maybe he was at work all the time because he was starting his own firm, or that if he had a girlfriend, he might have more of a reason to leave at night. Nor did I bother to find out, because I always assumed there would be another setup, another guy at a party, or another online prospect. And even when the available guys and the opportunities to meet them seemed scarcer as I edged into my mid-thirties, I only got into serious relationships with men who met my rather strict and, in hindsight, superficial criteria. I had the attitude of, “I didn’t wait this long searching for The One, only to end up settling.” But would I really have been settling with the red-headed chemist, the lawyer who liked the word “awesome,” or the software guy who happened to work until midnight as he launched his business?

I’ll never know.

Like me, the women I met with at the bar were embarrassed by the way they’d dismissed men in the past, evaluating every guy as either too-something or not-something-enough. These guys didn’t fit our image of the person we thought we’d end up with, leaving us to end up with nobody.

I asked the group if these types of things would still be deal-breakers for them now.

“If I met a guy now who hadn’t seen Casablanca,” said Kathy, a 38-year-old consultant, “I wouldn’t rule him out, but I would still be aware of it in the back of my mind. I can’t say I’d dismiss it completely because it speaks to a larger issue of cultural void. Overall, though, my deal-breakers have changed.”

What would be their deal-breakers now? Someone with an addiction, someone who had a bad temper, someone who’s unkind, someone who doesn’t have a job, someone who’s not warm or doesn’t have a generous spirit, someone who’s inflexible, someone who’s irresponsible, someone who’s dishonest, someone who wouldn’t be a great father, someone who’s old enough to be their own father. The rest, these women feel, is negotiable, but it’s a realization that might have come too late: In their experience, the men who will date them now often come with these more serious deal-breakers, whereas the guys who would date them ten years ago didn’t.

“In a way, I’m still looking for the same kind of guys I was when I was twenty-five, except that I also want them to be family-oriented and be good providers, which I wasn’t thinking about back then,” said Beth, a 37-year-old pharmaceutical rep. “Those are the guys I used to break up with.”

Amy, a 43-year-old interior designer, agreed. She said that she always had boyfriends until she was 39, when, she explained, “I suddenly stopped getting asked out by anyone younger than fifty.”

So, I asked, why can’t they go back to those guys they’d passed up, who now sound pretty appealing?

In unison, they said, “They’re all married!”

WHO CARES IF HE’S SEEN CASABLANCA?

I had to wonder: Who were the women that married those guys? A week later, I met with some of them. On the surface, they seemed a lot like the women who’d dumped their husbands. They were around the same age, and similar in terms of looks and education. In fact, I could imagine these married women having become their single counterparts if it hadn’t been for one distinguishing quality: the ability to redefine romance. Nancy, who is married to the “predictable” guy, explained it like this:

“I think the difference between women who get married and women who don’t is that women who don’t get married never give up the idea that they’re going to marry Brad Pitt, and it never occurs to them that they might not get married at all. They may say, ‘I’m never going to meet anyone,’ but that’s just like saying, ‘Oh, I’m fat’ when you don’t believe you are. It’s something women just say, in a self-deprecating way. When you’re young you’re always meeting guys, so deep down you believe that The One will suddenly show up. It doesn’t occur to you that maybe it’s okay if The One doesn’t look like Brad Pitt and earn a gazillion dollars and make your knees go weak every time you’re together. Well, it occurred to me, but not until I was thirty-five.”

That’s when she met Mr. Predictable.

“So many women say they’d rather be alone than settle, but then they’re alone and miserable—and still holding out for the same unrealistic standards,” Nancy said. “They assume their soul mate will appear and it will have been worth the wait. Then they’re blindsided and shocked when that doesn’t happen. And it’s too late.”

Too late, she meant, for the life she has with the predictable guy.

“It is predictable,” Nancy admitted. “But it’s a lot better than always wondering what was going on with the more exciting guys. That wasn’t love. What I have now is love. I have an amazing husband and two wonderful kids. I couldn’t ask for a better family. And my husband is exciting, just in less obvious ways.”

Sara, who’s 42 and married to the ring-of-hair guy (who, at 43, is now completely bald, except he still has that tuft sticking out in front), told me that she feels lucky to have been at a place in her life at age 34 when she finally stopped getting hung up on things like how much hair a guy had.

“A year or two earlier, I wouldn’t even have considered meeting a bald guy,” she told me.

She’s glad she changed her mind, she said, because if she hadn’t, she would have missed out on falling in love with her husband—and probably ended up with no husband at all.

“I don’t know one available guy out there who’s as desirable as my husband and would also date me at this age,” she said. “If I were single today, my own husband probably wouldn’t date me either. I wouldn’t be on his radar. Why would a forty-three-year-old guy who’s kind and successful and funny date a forty-two-year-old woman when he could easily attract an equally interesting thirty-five-year-old who’s prettier and young enough to have kids with instead?”

I told Sara that a lot of women would be offended by that kind of thinking, but she just shrugged her shoulders.

“Let me put it this way,” she said. “It’s a good thing I met my husband when I did. Because if I’d passed him by, he’d be married, and I’d still be sitting around wondering where the few good men were.”

A FEW GOOD MEN

That’s exactly what I was wondering: Where were a few good men? When I sent out a mass e-mail looking for single men, ages 25 to 40, to interview for this book, a typical reply went like this: “I don’t know any single men, but do you need any single women? I know a lot of those.”

Two weeks later, I got a quorum—but only after I expanded my definition of “single” to include men who weren’t married but were in committed relationships. These guys, for their part, seemed as baffled as the women when I went back to the same bar and asked the familiar question: Why are women saying they can’t find a good guy?

David, a funny 29-year-old professor, thinks the problem is that good guys are out there, but women don’t recognize them as the good guys.

“A woman broke up with me because she didn’t like the clothes I wore,” he explained, “but she’s madly in love with a guy who dresses well but doesn’t call her.”

His 32-year-old colleague Dan laughed—he’d been there before. “Women never want what’s available,” he said. “If they can’t find the perfect guy at thirty, they move on to find something better. But they don’t learn from this. Even if they’re still alone five years later, they get pickier. Then they’re almost forty and they haven’t found the perfect guy, so they start to regret having broken up with us, but now we’re not interested in them anymore.”

Kurt, who’s 38 and engaged, said that’s exactly what happened with his exes. “And those perfect guys, if they do exist, want to date maybe the top one percent of thirty-year-old women. But every thirty-year-old woman I know thinks she’s in that top one percent. All women want a ten, but are they all tens?”

His question reminded me of something my married friend Julie once said: “The culture tells us to approach dating like shopping—but in shopping, no one points out the shopper’s own flaws.”

Steve, who’s 35 and dating a lawyer, feels the same way. “I think the reason some women have an inflated view of themselves is that in high school, they really did have the power, so they grow up thinking it will always be that way. And even in their twenties, they still do, to some extent, because they’re so in demand. A guy will spend all of his money courting her, investing in the relationship, and then one day she’ll suddenly say, ‘You know, you’re a great guy, but I’m just not feeling like this is what I want.’

“In their thirties,” he continued, “it’s the opposite. The girl gives the guy free sex, thinking she’s investing in the relationship that will lead to marriage, but then the guy, who is now the one in demand, suddenly says, ‘You know, I think you’re great, but you’re not who I want to marry.’ And the women are shocked, because guys used to worship them, but the balance of power has changed. And I can’t say I don’t feel slightly vindicated that those same women who rejected me five years ago now complain that they can’t find anyone.”

THE MARRIED MEN

Eric, a 38-year-old married writer friend of mine, is still friendly with the three girlfriends who broke up with him before he met his wife. He said he’s going to write a book one day about the way women analyze men.

“I’ve got two working titles,” he explained. “The first isMy Wife Isn’t Perfect (But I Don’t Consider That Settling)and the second isI Have No Idea Why She Broke Up with Me (But I’m Married and She’s Still Single).”

Women, he said, might call ten of their friends and discuss, point by point, how a guy measures up on a whole host of attributes. Then, in the areas he falls short (he’s too messy, he’s not sensitive enough, he’s not making enough money), they think about whether they can “fix him” or “train him” to make him into what they want. Men, he believes, know that what you see is what you get—and accept it.

“When we decide to marry someone, we don’t think we’re going to fix our wives and we don’t try to change them,” he said. “We don’t get out the spreadsheet and break it down on a microscopic level the way women do. We either want to be with her, or we don’t.”

Another married friend, Henry, who’s 36, said that while some men are afraid of commitment, most aren’t. They want to get married as much as women do. Often, he said, it’s just a case of the guy not being into that woman, but also not wanting to give up the perks of the relationship.

“He knows he’s not going to marry her,” Henry said, “so he says, ‘I’m not looking for anything serious right now’ or ‘I’m not sure I want to have kids’ or ‘I’m focused on my career right now,’ which he thinks is telling her that if she wants this relationship to lead to marriage, she should look elsewhere. But women think the guy is confused and she can change him, when really the guy has made up his mind.

“Meanwhile,” Henry continued, “women can’t make up their minds. Every perceived flaw is dissected for months or years until a verdict comes down on whether they’ll marry him. Men know early on when they’ve met the person they want to marry. It’s a very visceral feeling. That’s why women are always flabbergasted when their ‘commitment-phobe’ boyfriend goes off and gets married a year later.”

For all their talk about romantic love, Henry said, women tend to analyze the situation too much. “They’re hypocritical,” he explained. “They say they want true love but you’d better be this tall and make this much money—and not have bad moods or be a real person, either.”

He’s probably right. Two months after my friend Julia broke up with her “uninspiring” boyfriend Greg, she started dating Adam, a sexy, ambitious surgeon. Adam was all the things that Greg, her nonprofit boyfriend, wasn’t. But the low-key, supportive nonprofit guy was all the things her new beau wasn’t. She was starting to miss Greg.

“I just don’t know which things I can live with,” she sighed, as she was about to fly to Hawaii for a romantic weekend with the surgeon.

But does it have to be this way? Isn’t there a middle ground between cold, hard analysis and intense passion?

WHAT SIXTY-SOMETHINGS SAY

When I asked half a dozen of my mother’s friends who had married in their twenties about this middle ground, they said the problem they’ve seen in their kids’ generation is that the middle ground doesn’t exist.

“I hear constantly from my daughter’s friends that they want men to have the same emotions they do, but men and women express emotion differently,” said Susan, who has two daughters in their thirties. “Young women expect men to be soft and caring and rich and gorgeous—they want everything.”

Connie shook her head. “You can wait for Prince Charming,” she said, “but even Prince Charming will have holes in his socks. You can marry the most perfect person in the world and you’ll still have problems to work through. But once young women see those holes, they’re no longer interested.”

“Our expectations were different,” said Melinda. “We expected to have disagreements. You didn’t go in thinking, ‘I’ll get married and if it doesn’t work out, we’ll get divorced.’ There’s a sense of being a team. You were committed to working it out. Today’s girls always think they’ll find something better.”

Of the group, none of the moms believed in the concept of your soul mate being the only person on the planet you were meant to be with. To them, a soul mate meant someone you have a deep connection with, someone who accepts you for who you are and vice versa, someone who is there for you at the end of the day.

“I think going through difficult times together makes you feel like soul mates,” said Kathryn. “Working through an illness, a financial issue, a parent’s death.”

“People don’t expect to work in relationships today,” June added. “There have been phases of our marriage when both of us needed things at the same time, and that could be very challenging. But I think a lot of women nowadays expect that they’ll always get every single one of their needs met and if they don’t, something’s wrong. Nothing’s wrong—that’s just the nature of two people being in a relationship.”

I asked them what women should give up if they want to find a good mate.

“I don’t know that you’d have to give up anything—don’t start off with the negative!” Diane said. “Women today start off with that mind-set—they have a long list of what they want and think they have to cross things off of it. Why not just look for someone you enjoy being with and see where it goes? Start off from a place of optimism instead of what the guy might be lacking.”

Kathryn agreed. “I have a very dear friend who has single girls,” she said. “I wanted one of them to meet a young attorney who’s smart and funny and donates time to kids. She Googled him, found a photo, and said he wasn’t good-looking enough. She wouldn’t even meet him. Girls today are stopping relationships from happening before they even have an opportunity to develop. There’s a romanticized expectation of being swept off your feet from the get-go and sustaining that level of excitement, but the way love happens is over time.”

That’s how it happened for Connie. “I didn’t even like my husband when I met him,” she said. “I was working in fashion and he was schlubby. He was sort of an oddball. He asked me out and I didn’t want to go out with him. But he was persistent and as I got to know him, he not only turned out to be a wonderful guy, but he turned out to be the love of my life.”

The more I spoke to people about relationships—younger single women, older single women, married women, single men, married men, and women from my mother’s generation—the more I found myself asking the same questions: How did the search for love get so confusing, and was this modern way of dating making women happy?




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