Marry Him_The Case for Settling for Mr Good Enough

by Lori Gottlieb

  —Prudie, historically

  Hi Prudence,

  After my eight-year marriage ended, I spent some time alone, followed by a series of dates with men who looked great on paper (well-educated, same tastes in books, music, art, etc.) but who were boorish, socially awkward, or downright boring in person. Now comes Mr. (Quite Possibly) Right, whom I’ve been seeing for nearly a year—a guy who is kind, appreciative, a great listener, and a fabulous lover. My only persistent qualm is that, with him, I miss the caliber of intellectual engagement I enjoyed so much with my ex. Mr. (QP) R is open to attending the museums and performances that interest me, but it’s clear that I can’t expect any new insights on these experiences from him, and that I’ll always need to be the one seeking them out. I love my new beau and don’t want to undervalue his many excellent qualities, but as we reach the one-year mark, I do worry I’ll grow restless in a relationship that doesn’t stimulate me intellectually. Am I focusing too much on a minor deficit, or does this sound like trouble waiting to happen?

  —One Nagging Doubt

  Dear Nagging Doubt,

  I’d have a different answer if you wrote that you had met a man who’s kind, appreciative, a great listener, and a brilliant cultural critic—but a total dud in bed. Obviously you and your former husband could talk about the latest Tom Stoppard until the wee hours, but that didn’t keep the whole relationship from turning sour. You don’t say your new guy is unintelligent, just that he’s not interested in the same artistic pursuits you are. So what? If you want some lively discussion about a play or museum exhibit, invite another couple along to talk about it afterward over dinner. Or go to a show with a friend who shares your zeal. Probably your beau could write to me that you and he click in so many ways, but all his previous loves have been fabulous skiers and accomplished birdwatchers, and he wonders if over the long-term he will be dissatisfied settling down with someone who never will match their skills at these pursuits. Wouldn’t you want to say, “Don’t throw away what we have because of skiing!”? But if you want to begin your search again to find that so-far-undiscovered person who suits you in every way, it sounds as if a less picky woman will quickly find that Mr. (QP) R is perfect.

  —Prudie

  According to a social scientist named Barry Schwartz, there are two kinds of people in the world: maximizers and satisficers, and these two advice-seeking women seem like classic maximizers. In fact, they sound like a lot of single women, including me.

  This isn’t a good thing, especially when it comes to dating.

  In his eye-opening book The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, Schwartz explains the difference between maximizers and satisficers like this: Say you want to buy a new sweater. You decide that it needs to be well-fitting, stylish, not itchy, a pretty color, and in your price range. Say it even has to go with a specific outfit. A satisficer walks into a store or two, finds a sweater that meets all of these criteria, and buys it.

  She’s done.

  A maximizer, on the other hand, walks into a store, picks out a sweater that meets all of these criteria, and thinks, This sweater is nice, but maybe I should look at that cute store down the street. Maybe I can find something I like better. Maybe I can find something on sale. So the maximizer hides the pretty sweater on the bottom of the pile (so that nobody else buys it) and goes to check out another store (or five).

  Now, you might think that the maximizer will end up with a better sweater—after all, she’s looked at more possibilities—but that’s not necessarily the case. A satisficer isn’t looking for the absolute best, but she does have high standards. The difference is, she stops when she’s found something that meets those high standards.

  She wants something stylish, and she’s found it, so she doesn’t wonder if she can find something more stylish at another store. She wants something in her price range, and she’s found it, so she doesn’t wonder if she can find a better value at another store. She wants a flattering fit, and she’s found it, so she doesn’t wonder if she can find an even more flattering fit at another boutique.

  A maximizer, on the other hand, will spend another three hours or three days looking for the perfect sweater, even though she may not find anything better, leaving her to buy the sweater she’d hid under the pile on the display table. (If it’s still there, which by now, it probably isn’t. A satisficer has already bought it!)

  But let’s say that the maximizer does find a slightly cuter sweater, or a slightly less expensive one. Will she be happier with her purchase than the satisficer is with hers?

  Probably not, Schwartz says. That’s because while a satisficer is content with something great, a maximizer is content only with the absolute best. And since you can never be sure that you got the absolute best—you can’t see every sweater in the entire city; new styles will appear in store windows the very next week and you may like one of those better—the whole process is fraught with anxiety.

  Meanwhile, think of all the time and energy wasted on making this decision, all for 5 percent cuter, or ten dollars cheaper that, in the long run, won’t really matter. Instead of having agonized for all that time, you’d be warm and stylish, and probably even get a few compliments.

  But now, because you’ve put so much effort into finding the perfect sweater, the stakes are even higher for you to have picked just the right one. It’s like women who say, “I’ve waited this long for Mr. Right, I’m not going to settle now.” The longer you wait and the more you search, the “better” the sweater—or the guy—is going to have to be. You don’t want to have gone through all that struggle and turmoil only to end up with a “good enough” sweater or a “good enough” guy just like the one you could have had and enjoyed years earlier. Which is all the more reason to buy the cute enough sweater and choose the good enough guy the first time around.

  BUT IS A GUY LIKE A SWEATER?

  Okay, a sweater isn’t a relationship, obviously, but whether it’s about a sweater or a romantic partner, satisficers tend to be happier in life than maximizers. Satisficers know when they’ve found what they want, even if it’s not perfect. Maximizers either keep looking for someone better and never choose anyone, or they choose someone but will always wonder whether they’ve settled. They don’t understand that not getting 100 percent of what we want isn’t just “acceptable”—it’s normal.

  When I called Barry Schwartz at Swarthmore College, where he’s a professor, he explained the maximizer’s predicament like this: “You’re continually looking over your shoulder to see if there’s something better. And the more you look over your shoulder, the less good you’ll end up feeling about your partner or a potential partner—even though he’s probably just as good, on balance, as the people you’re looking at.”

  This is why, like those women who wrote to Slate’s advice columnist, a maximizer can date someone for years and still not know if she wants to marry him. She says she has to “be sure.” But Schwartz says it’s not that she’s “not sure” how she feels about this particular person. It’s that she’s not sure if someone better might come around the bend. After all, will another year—after two years of dating—really provide some crucial new piece of knowledge about her boyfriend, some undiscovered quality he’d been hiding all along? Or will she spend that year in the same state of ambivalence that she spent the year before?

  Instead of wondering, Am I happy?, maximizers wonder, Is this the best I can do? They experience what Schwartz calls regret in anticipation of making a decision. As he puts it in his book: “You imagine how you’ll feel if you discover that there was a better option available. And that leap of imagination may be all it takes to plunge you into a mire of uncertainty.”

  THE HUSBAND RETURN POLICY

  Some people deal with their fear of buyer’s remorse by hedging their bets: They live together so that they can decide later whether to fully commit. They bu
y the proverbial good enough sweater as long as it has a return policy. They may say that living together provides more information about how compatible they are in the long-term. They may even say that they care so much about having a successful marriage that they want to do everything they can to make sure it’s the right one. But does living together provide such clarity?

  The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention puts the divorce rate of people who live together before marriage at 12 percent higher than those who didn’t cohabitate before marriage. And according to a study published in November 2008 by the sociologist Daniel Lichter of Cornell University, divorce rates for women who had lived with more than one man were twice as high as those who hadn’t.

  What’s going on here?

  Schwartz has some theories. He feels that people who live together as a “test run” might tend to be maximizers, people who want to be sure they’re getting “the best” but then are never truly satisfied. Moreover, the very act of having that return policy mentality—“If it doesn’t work out, we’ll move out”—might make people less satisfied if they do go on to get married. He told me about a study cited in his book that found that people are more satisfied with nonreturnable items than they are with returnable ones.

  “Almost everybody would rather buy in a store that permits returns than in one that does not,” he writes in The Paradox of Choice. “What we don’t realize is that the very option of being allowed to change our minds seems to increase the chances that we will change our minds. When we can change our minds about decisions, we are less satisfied with them.”

  But, according to Schwartz, “When a decision is final”—like, say, marriage instead of cohabitation—“we engage in a variety of psychological processes that enhance our feelings about the choice we made relative to the alternatives.”

  In other words, the longer you spend being indecisive—thinking that any given guy can be returned for another—the more likely it is that you’ll focus on his faults, and nobody will measure up. One guy might seem great, but compare him to another guy who’s smarter but more passive, and both choices start to look slightly less appealing. The first guy seems less smart, the second guy seems less proactive. It’s easy to choose between “pretty good” and “completely wrong”; it’s crazy-making to constantly choose between two pretty goods. Compared side by side, two pretty goods might start to look like two mediocres.

  As Schwartz put it, “Our powers of interpretation can turn great things into mediocre things.”

  EVERY “8” BECOMES A “ 6 ” OVERTIME

  So let’s take another look at the woman I mentioned at the beginning of the book, the one who wrote to me and said she wasn’t looking for a perfect 10—an 8 would be great. She was, in fact, already dating an 8. Remember her dilemma: But what if I want a different 8? She knows she needs to compromise, but in the back of her mind, she’s wondering if she can compromise for something better. Maybe she can. There’s certainly a difference between “being realistic” and being with the wrong person. But it’s also possible that she was suffering from the problem of too many choices starting to make all the “pretty good” choices seem less appealing.

  Or, Schwartz told me, there’s still another possibility: Maybe she was tripped up by a psychological process called “adaptation.”

  “We get used to things,” Schwartz said, “and then we take them for granted.” It’s kind of like how you can walk into an air-conditioned room on a really hot day and think that air-conditioning is the best thing in the entire world, only to forget it’s there an hour later. You get used to it, and it’s not so wonderful anymore—it’s expected. It used to be a 10, but now it’s just a 5.

  Similarly, for the woman who wanted a different 8, her 8 may now have become a 6.

  “Any new person will look better temporarily,” Schwartz said. “The thing she has to remember is that every eight becomes a six over time. You can trade your six for a new eight, but eventually that eight will become a six, and you’ll be trading him in for another eight, too.” If, however, you fully expect the novelty of the 8 to morph into the comfort of the 6, you won’t be disappointed. And by recognizing that you’ll adapt to any person you choose, picking “the best” instead of “pretty good” won’t seem as important either.

  Schwartz’s point is that satisficers don’t end up with a sweater that’s less good than they should have; nor do they pick a guy who’s less good than they should have. They’re happy because they know that good enough is good enough. They realize that nothing is perfect in life—not jobs, not friends, not sweaters, and not spouses—so taking the best available option and appreciating it makes sense.

  TOXIC MAXIMIZERS

  To be fair, single men can be maximizers, too. Who doesn’t know the guy who dates a string of seemingly wonderful women but can’t commit to any of them? Still, Schwartz said the problem isn’t these men, per se. It’s that many women waste their time going after these men while overlooking satisficer men who can make them happy. Often maximizer women are dating maximizer men, only to find them wanting or to have them find us wanting. Two picky people don’t make for a great couple.

  That’s part of the reason it’s often an illusion that if we just wait long enough, we’ll meet Mr. Right. The logic would be that the people left later on are “better” because they were so discriminating (after all, nobody was good enough so far). But just the opposite is probably true. The people who got married younger, who knew how to compromise and negotiate and sustain a marriage, are likely less demanding than those who felt they couldn’t find anyone good enough. They tend to be better partners and parents. They’re probably much more enjoyable to live with over the course of fifty years. All the more reason not only to seek out a satisficer, but to be one yourself.

  “People often think they have to choose between two qualities, like looks and intelligence,” Schwartz told me. “But you’ll probably be happy with someone who has an acceptable degree of both.” In other words, nobody’s asking you to choose between the guy who’s a 3 on looks and an 8 on intelligence and another guy who’s an 8 on looks and 3 on intelligence. Most of the time, we’re faced with a guy who might be a 6 on looks and a 7 on intelligence but an 8 on lifestyle and personality—nothing extreme on either end, but overall a pretty appealing person.

  Maximizers consider this settling. They want an 8 on everything. Satisficers consider this a good deal. Ironically, it’s the maximizers who, years later, look at the satisficers—with their husbands and families and contentment in life—and say, “I wish I had what she has.” Well, it was there for the taking. The maximizers simply passed it up.

  After all, satisficing isn’t about settling for someone who doesn’t have the qualities you’re seeking. It’s about finding someone who is enough, as opposed to someone who is everything.

  MARRIAGE: THE GAME SHOW

  When I asked Steven Martin, a demographer at the University of Maryland, why the number of single women is rising in every age category, he said he didn’t have the data on why, but he had a personal theory. He believes that many women look at marriage this way:

  Let’s say you assume you’ll have twenty relationships in your life. With every one, you’re trying to decide if, say, Guy #3 is better than the possibility of the next seventeen. Some women might go for #3, but always wonder if numbers 4 through 20 would have made a better match. Others might pass on Guy #3 and end up with Guy #20, but spend an awful lot of time wondering if passing up Guy #3 was a big mistake. Others will simply stop getting asked out and end up alone. That’s the thing about choice: If you don’t choose anything, eventually you’re left with nothing.

  “I think there’s a lot of wistfulness and regret out there,” he said.

  There sure was for me. All that second-guessing hadn’t helped me to make better dating choices in the past, and it wasn’t going to help me make better ones in the future. There will alw
ays be another nice, warm sweater in another store. And if there’s one thing I knew for sure, it’s that I didn’t want to freeze to death while searching endlessly for the perfect one.

  11

  Mondays with Evan

  Session Two—The Wrong Assumptions

  “You need to do something about your gag reflex,” Evan said when he came back the following Monday for our dating coaching session. He wanted to know why I hadn’t been able to pick just one out of every twenty men the computer had matched me with. Why, we both wondered, was I having so much trouble letting go of my maximizer tendencies?

  Partly, there was the reality of what I was facing: My matches weren’t what they used to be. Against Evan’s advice, I’d e-mailed the cute 40-year-old from our last session, the one whose desired age range went up to 35. As Evan predicted, he never responded.