Marry Him_The Case for Settling for Mr Good Enough

by Lori Gottlieb

  We’ve all been there, haven’t we?

  Jane’s dilemma—the choice between fireworks and friendship— may seem age-old, but it’s not. The internal struggle might be, but the freedom for women to choose not just one or the other, but neither, is relatively new. Instead of picking Aaron or Tom, Jane decides to wait for Mr. Right, who, incidentally, never shows up. At the end of the movie, when we see these characters seven years later, Jane vaguely mentions that she’s dating a guy, but so what? What are the odds that this relationship will work out, given that she’s probably been in several relationships in the past seven years that seemed promising but didn’t pan out? Besides, who’s to say that this guy is better-suited for her than Aaron, her emotional and intellectual soul mate? Meanwhile, we learn that Aaron is married with a son, and Tom is engaged.

  It’s a sad ending, but when I was 20, I didn’t question whether Jane had made the right decision. That Jane ended up unmarried and childless, well, I chalked that up to—get this—the filmmaker’s misogyny! I’m not kidding. I’m completely embarrassed by this now, but I actually had conversations with female friends about how Hollywood wasn’t ready to show a strong woman standing her ground without somehow punishing her for it. It never occurred to us that this was simply a likely outcome to Jane’s choice. In fact, many of us went through our twenties and thirties making that very same choice—Prince Charming or nobody!—and ending up single.

  What my friends and I called “misogyny” turned out to be “reality.”

  It wasn’t until I watched the DVD in my late thirties that I realized I’d become Jane, passing up the Aarons of the world only to appreciate too late that what I want most in a partner is an Aaron. But like Aaron in the film, those guys my friends and I passed up earlier had gotten married.

  At 20, I remember thinking that the saddest moment in the film was when Aaron confesses to Jane, “And I’m in love with you. How do you like that? I buried the lead.” My heart broke for Aaron.

  Two decades later, the saddest moment for me was when a heartbroken Aaron predicts the consequences of Jane’s rejecting him for the charming but shallow Tom: “Six years from now, I’ll be back here with my wife and two kids. And I’ll see you, and one of my kids will say, ‘Daddy, who is that?’ And I’ll say, ‘It’s not nice to point at single fat women.’ ” Now my heart broke for Jane. I knew how truthful Aaron’s cutting remark could be.

  A BETTER-LOOKING BILLY CRYSTAL

  A couple of years after Broadcast News came out, When Harry Met Sally hit theaters. This time, best friends do fall in love. There was something incredibly romantic about the idea of, Hey, wait a minute, take a second look at the guy who’s your buddy. But still, back in my twenties, I wasn’t interested in the Billy Crystals of my world. Again, stupidly, my friends and I considered this message insulting. Why should someone like Meg Ryan lower her standards? In real life, we asked, would someone as beautiful as Sally go for someone like Harry? Probably not. He’d have a crush on her, and she’d say she just wants to be friends.

  But in our “real-life” scenario, we didn’t think through what might happen next: She’d reject him and date more attractive men, while he’d go off and marry someone else. Maybe she’d find someone, but maybe she wouldn’t. Or maybe she would, but not someone she connects with as strongly as Harry, or not in time to have the children she wants.

  I had no sense of this when I was 22 years old and watched Sally sob to Harry, after she learns that her ex-boyfriend is getting married, “I’m going to be forty!” Harry reminds her that she’s only 32 years old and that 40 is eight years away, but Sally cries: “But it’s there, it’s just sitting there like a big dead end. It’s not the same for men. Charlie Chaplin had babies when he was seventy-three.”

  At the time, the idea of being 40, much less 32, seemed eons away to me. I took it for granted that I’d be married by then. I never thought my life would be like Jane’s at the end of Broadcast News; I thought my life would be more like Sally’s, a wonderfully romantic story of best friends who fall in love, except it would happen at age 30, and I’d be married to a man I considered to be not just my best friend, but also incredibly sexy—a better-looking Billy Crystal, a smoother Albert Brooks. Quite an assumption, given that I look nothing like Meg Ryan and, on a good day, have maybe half the charm of Holly Hunter. But like many young women, I identified with Meg and Holly. Delusional as it sounds, when I was dating in my twenties, I thought my romantic prospects should be on par with theirs.

  And so did many of my friends. Sure, we would have denied it, but we would have been lying. We said we didn’t believe in the fairy tale, but when push came to shove, we wouldn’t settle for less than the fairy tale, either. We said we wanted true love, but we sought out romance and confused it with love. We knew that movies were fiction, but on some unconscious level, we watched them as if they were documentaries.

  As Allison, a single 38-year-old in Minneapolis wrote to me, “At twenty-seven, when I got into an argument with my boyfriend—who I loved—I was looking for the romantic comedy response. My mistake.” They broke up, and she regrets that decision. Now with no romantic prospects on deck, she was planning to get inseminated to become a mom on her own.

  BRIDEZILLA

  It’s not just movies, of course. There’s an entire industry devoted to fairy-tale weddings (which, incidentally, became a source of conflict in the hugely popular Sex and the City movie), and even the newspaper announcements themselves, with their over-the-top “we looked across the room and our eyes met instantly” stories, fuel the fantasy of what love is supposed to look like when we find it. But just as in the movies, these newspaper accounts—the so-called sports pages for women—never tell you what happens in the actual marriage.

  Elisa Albert, whose own wedding was featured in The New York Times, knows this all too well. As she put it: “My Times wedding announcement read, as so many do, like a smug sigh of relief.” What followed, though, was a train wreck of a relationship. She was separated within a year, and divorced shortly thereafter.

  In her essay in The Modern Jewish Girl’s Guide to Guilt, Albert describes her whirlwind romance leading up to the Times announcement, the fabulous and moving wedding ceremony, and the post-wedding reality that set in as she and her husband realized they were—and always had been—incompatible when it came to marriage. Just as it might be helpful if movies made sequels showing the couples’ marriages, Albert wishes that wedding columns would print “divorce announcements” as follow-ups to all the enviable romantic courtship stories. At least then, she believes, single people would have a better idea of what love is and isn’t.

  She has a point. I went through my twenties and thirties saying that I wanted true love, but how could I even know what that was? Married people rarely talk about the reality of their marriages with their single friends, and the only “love” stories most of us see onscreen are the kind where once a couple finally kisses after working out their conflict, it’s like a collective orgasm for the audience. After that, our interest in them deflates. The story’s over. We’re left to assume that these couples go on to happily ever after, but if the couple had so much trouble simply getting together, what makes us think they’ll have more success in holding a marriage together?

  You’re probably wondering why any of this matters in a book about finding the right guy. You’re probably wondering why I think anyone with half a brain is going to be influenced in their dating lives by movies or TV shows or romance novels or wedding announcements or the covers of People magazine. If you’d asked me years ago whether I thought this stuff influenced me, I would have rolled my eyes. I mean, we all know that even leading men don’t meet the leading man ideal in real life. (Remember Hugh Grant cheating on Elizabeth Hurley with a prostitute? How about Brad Pitt leaving Jennifer Aniston for his costar?) But then why do many of us overlook men who don’t fit a fantasy man ideal but who would make
wonderful life partners?

  I thought about what the late psychologists Willard and Marguerite Beecher wrote about what they called “the infantile attitude toward marriage” in their book Beyond Success and Failure: Ways to Self-Reliance and Maturity: “We can only guess at the extent of it when we realize the number of love stories that are ground out and consumed each month for books, periodicals, TV, radio, movies, and the like. People would not buy such stuff if they did not believe in its probability. We find no such sale for fairy stories, which are no more fantastic.”

  THE NON-PROBLEM PROBLEM

  These days, in the movies or in real life, there’s not a lot of external conflict to overcome in order for two people to get together. It’s less about class or religion or geography or valid value differences than it is about the inner conflict of not knowing whether this person is The One.

  In other words, nowadays you don’t fall in love with Romeo and say that the relationship is doomed because he’s a Montague. Instead, you start dating Romeo and overlook the fact that he’s a Montague, but the second he spends too much time playing video games, or he forgets the name of your best friend from high school, you wonder if you should try to find someone more mature or attentive. Instead of falling for a guy and discovering a seemingly insurmountable practical obstacle (like, there will be a civil war if you get together), we fall for a guy and then create our own seemingly insurmountable obstacles as to why we can’t be with him (isn’t funny enough, has a tendency to get stressed out during tax season). It used to be that lovers knew they wanted to be together but couldn’t. Now it’s that lovers can be together but aren’t sure they want to. And then we complain that we can’t find a suitable spouse.

  I was starting to realize that despite everything I believed on an intellectual level—despite the strong, sensible person I thought I was—deep down, I had a classic Cinderella complex. I expected that, as the famous song goes, someday my prince would come and “thrill me for ever more.” It never occurred to me to trade those impractical glass slippers for shoes I could actually wear.

  A SOLE SOUL MATE

  When I look back on the way I dated in my twenties and early thirties, it’s not surprising that I thought it was perfectly reasonable to stay single while holding out for my ideal man. After all, everyone else seemed to be doing that—in real life and every time I clicked the remote control. During my peak dating years, prime-time TV was packed with series featuring sexy, successful single women looking for love, surrounded by surrogate families of wise-cracking, lovelorn singles like themselves. Two notable exceptions were Everybody Loves Raymond, a show about a marriage that, ironically, seemed to be of little interest to young single women aspiring to marriage, and Mad About You, a hip, smart comedy about a young couple adjusting to married life, which did appeal to young single women until a baby was added to the show, at which point viewers stopped watching and the show went off the air. Was this perhaps too much reality for single women dreaming about happily ever after?

  On the single gal shows—Ally McBeal, Caroline in the City, Friends, Sex and the City, Grey’s Anatomy—viewers would tune in to watch a woman date a guy, only to talk endlessly with her girlfriends about why he’s not right for her, and why maybe she should look for someone better. There was always the assumption that she’d end up with her “true love” in the end—that there was a single soul mate and therefore a clear right choice when it came to a partner. These characters worried about making a mistake because there seemed to be only one chance at getting right, so they’d better be darn sure this guy was it. Nobody seemed to be saying there might be lots of “right” guys. In real life, of course, each partner has his pleasures and his drawbacks, but we rarely see real life played out onscreen.

  “REALITY” SHOWS

  The closest we get to “real life” are so-called reality shows like The Bachelor. It’s telling that the audience was horrified when Brad, one season’s bachelor, whittled his choices down to two women, picked DeAnna, then changed his mind before he was supposed to propose to her.

  The audience was incensed: What was wrong with DeAnna, they wanted to know. She was charming, family-oriented, smart, and attractive. Who did Brad think he was, letting her go?

  But Brad just wasn’t feeling it. If a woman turns down a perfectly acceptable partner because she just isn’t feeling it, we support her and tell her to go find “true love.” We say that she made an empowered decision. But if a man turns down a perfectly acceptable partner because he’s just not feeling it, he’s a villain. Brad was whipped on everything from talk shows to blogs because viewers wanted him to take this woman and grow into that big love if he didn’t feel it right from the start. They didn’t want him to hold out for something better.

  DeAnna, of course, got her own shot on The Bachelorette, but when she was down to her final two candidates, she choose the wacky snowboarder who wasn’t sure he was ready to get married and have babies over the single dad who doted on her and who already lived the domestic life she claimed to want so badly. Audiences supported her decision to pick romance over practicality. For a woman, viewers seemed to think, romance was more important. Never mind that DeAnna later broke off her engagement.

  The messages about love that we take away from the media are as contradictory as they are counterproductive. If the typical love story goes like this—Boy meets Girl. Boy and Girl hate each other. Boy and Girl exchange witty banter. Boy and Girl grudgingly realize they love each other. Boy and Girl live happily ever after (although we never see this part)—what message does that send? Should we look for the person who annoys us initially or who attracts us initially? And if love comes when we least expect it, does that mean if we actively seek love, it’s not true love? That we shouldn’t even try because true love will find us only when we aren’t looking? Should we go by the message “You can’t hurry love” or “Get out there and be proactive”?

  Of course, as confused as I was, I knew that I wasn’t still single just because I’d seen too many romantic comedies or watched too much reality TV. Earlier generations of women grew up on similar themes, but my generation and those after me have another set of conflicting messages to make sense of, too: What does it mean to be empowered and also want happily ever after? In other words, if feminism taught us that we don’t really need the White Knight, how do we reconcile that with the fact that many of us are women who want a husband and a family?

  If the fairy tale is to “have it all,” what does “having it all” even mean?

  3

  How Feminism Fucked Up My Love Life

  I know this is an unpopular thing to say, but feminism has completely fucked up my love life. To be fair, it’s not feminism, exactly—after all, “feminism” never published a dating manual—but what I considered to be “the feminist way of doing things” certainly didn’t help. It’s not that I would give back the gains of feminism for anything. Believe me, I wouldn’t. It’s just that I wish I hadn’t tried to apply what I believed to be “feminist ideals” to dating.

  Growing up, my friends and I thought feminism was fabulous. To us, feminism meant we had “freedom” and “choice” in all aspects of our lives. We could pursue professional careers, take time to “find ourselves” before getting married, decide not to get married at all, and have our sexual needs met whenever we felt like it. The fact that we didn’t need a man to have a fulfilling life felt empowering. After all, who wanted to do what our moms did—find a man, marry him, and have kids—all before most of us had gotten our first promotion?

  But then, in our late twenties and early thirties, as more of us moved from relationship to relationship, or went long periods with no meaningful relationship at all, we didn’t feel quite so empowered. The truth was, every one of my single friends wanted to be married, but none of us would admit how badly we craved it for fear of sounding weak or needy or, God forbid, antifeminist. We were the generation o
f women who were supposed to be independent and self-sufficient, but we didn’t have a clue how to navigate this modern terrain without sacrificing some core desires.

  We didn’t want yet another Sunday brunch with the girls. We wanted a lifetime with The Guy.

  Meanwhile, we were praised for our ambition out in the world, but at the same time told that our ambition would distract us from finding a husband. That never made sense to me. I don’t think that women are so caught up in their careers that they “forget” to focus on their personal lives. After all, 90 percent of conversations most women I know of dating age have, even those trying to make partner in a law firm or slogging through a medical residency, involve men: who the cute new doctor is at the hospital, whether to move in with a boyfriend, what it means that the guy stopped calling after five dates. In fact, working in environments where we’re likely to meet interesting men may actually be a dating advantage. Our long hours and high-minded aspirations weren’t the problem, but none of us could figure out what was.

  It wasn’t until I found myself still single in my late thirties that something hit me. Maybe the problem was this misconception: We thought that “having it all” equaled “happily ever after.”

  Except that a lot of us weren’t so happy.

  Instead, I started to see a pattern that went like this: We grew up believing that we could “have it all.” “Having it all” meant that we shouldn’t compromise in any area of life, including dating. Not compromising meant “having high standards.” The higher our standards, the more “empowered” we were.