Marry Him_The Case for Settling for Mr Good Enough

by Lori Gottlieb

  I told Evan that, as a sociological (not to mention masochistic) experiment, for one day the week before, I’d changed my age to 31, and I got responses from several potentially interesting men. But when I listed my true age, 41, the most promising guy who wrote me was a 53-year-old former gym teacher whose idea of a vacation was gambling in Las Vegas, but who had a sense of humor and loved kids. Nothing was different in my profile except for my age: the photos, the essays, even the fact that I had a child were the same! I wanted to become a satisficer, but I was finding it a lot harder with the matches I was getting at 41.

  “Of course it’s harder,” Evan said. “But think about it this way: Your market value may be lower than it was ten years ago, but it’s also a lot higher now than it will be ten years from now. So I’d like you to try to reserve judgment upfront. Because I don’t want to be having this same conversation with you when you’re fifty-one and wondering why you turned down all the guys you could have had at forty-one.”

  Actually, I’d made that mistake already. A few days before, I e-mailed a cute, scuba-diving 40-year-old lawyer with a great profile. I was excited when he e-mailed back—until I opened the message. He reminded me that five years earlier, he found me online and sent me a note. We exchanged a bunch of e-mails, and then had a phone conversation—all of which he thought went well. But when he asked me out at the end of the call, I mumbled something awkward about how I didn’t think we were a match.

  As I read his e-mail, I vaguely remembered this, but I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t wanted to meet him. It was probably a ridiculous reason—like, I didn’t feel immediate “phone chemistry” and therefore assumed that a date would be a waste of time. Now he was the most interesting guy I’d seen online. But he wasn’t receptive to reestablishing contact. This time it was his turn to say,

  “No thanks.”

  So I knew Evan was right—later on, I’d regret not considering the guys available to me now. Still, I found it insulting to get e-mails from guys who were so old that I could be their daughter.

  “Why is it insulting?” Evan asked. “Let’s say that you’re Harvard. You get twenty-five thousand applications each year. Harvard doesn’t feel insulted when somebody with a low GPA or poor SAT scores applies. They simply send a note saying, ‘Thank you for your application. ’ They don’t get mad at the people who applied but aren’t qualified. But the more important difference between you and Harvard is that Harvard accepts nine percent of their applicants each year and you don’t even accept nine percent of your applicants. Right now you’re accepting two percent.”

  It was true. Of the fifty matches I viewed, I’d e-mailed only one—the guy I’d “hotlisted” at our last session even though I thought he might be “too romantic.” We e-mailed back and forth a few times, then he simply disappeared. So much for romance.

  “Let’s take a look at your matches,” Evan said. “I’m sure we can interest you in a few more.”

  THE GAG REFLEX

  Apparently, I had a pretty loose gag reflex. The first guy Evan clicked on, I ruled out because his favorite movie was You’ve Got Mail.

  “What kind of guy lists a Meg Ryan chick flick as his favorite film of all time?” I asked. “It’s not just one of many movies he likes. It’s his favorite.”

  “I’m going to give you a little electroshock every time you get judgmental,” Evan said. “Besides, I liked that movie.”

  “You did not!” I couldn’t believe it. An irreverent guys-guy like Evan?

  “I did!” Evan said. “Actually, it’s one of my favorite romantic comedies. Does that make me un-datable?”

  “No, but that’s because it’s an aberration. You don’t have sappy bad taste—I know what other movies you like. You’re not a You’ve Got Mail kind of guy more generally.”

  “Then how do you know this guy isn’t like me?”

  Well . . . I didn’t. I couldn’t argue with that. I added Mr. Chick Flick to my hotlist.

  “Oh, and one more thing,” Evan said. “I was kidding. To make a point.”

  I wanted to kill him. “So you don’t like You’ve Got Mail ?”

  “Never saw it.”

  “I hate you.”

  “Yeah, but it made you think, didn’t it?” Evan asked.

  “I still hate you.”

  Evan flashed a victorious smile. “Just doing my job, darlin’. You can’t rule out a guy based on different taste in movies. It doesn’t mean what you think it does. Maybe he wrote that because he thought it would impress women and make him come off as a sensitive guy. Or maybe he thinks Meg Ryan is hot. Who knows? You need to stop making the wrong assumptions.”

  IT’S A PROFILE, NOT A LIFE STORY

  Evan told me that my problem was this: I was making up entire life stories about these guys based on one or two pieces of information. If a guy went to a fancy school, I assumed he was sophisticated. Not necessarily true. If a guy liked cheesy movies, I assumed he had bad taste in everything, or that we had completely different vibes. Not necessarily true again. If a guy couldn’t spell, I assumed he wasn’t smart, despite the fact that my friend Joy was married to a highly intelligent bad speller. In fact, she’d met Dave on Match, but before Dave posted his profile, he asked a writer friend to proofread it so it appeared error-free. Once Joy got to know Dave, she learned that he couldn’t spell at all, but by then she also knew how smart he was.

  “I almost missed out on meeting my husband, because if I’d seen his profile with all the spelling mistakes, I never would have replied to his e-mail,” Joy told me. “Besides, there’s no correlation between great spellers and great boyfriends. All of the great spellers I used to date were slightly tortured guys, and none of them turned out to be great boyfriends.”

  That’s exactly why Evan was saying assumptions are so dangerous. “Being a bad speller doesn’t make someone a bad husband,” he said. “There are different kinds of intelligence.” I knew he was right. I mean, if there were online dating sites in Einstein’s time, what would his essays have looked like? I thought about my friends’ very smart and competent husbands—I had no idea if they could spell.

  Evan suggested that if I wanted to find more hip, literary guys with cleverly written and correctly spelled profiles, I could check out Nerve—but that it skews younger and it might not be as relationship-oriented. He said that Match was a good choice for me because it’s like the mall—everything’s at the mall. Nerve is like a trendy boutique. Match has it all—from McDonald’s to Bloomingdales.

  “What about this guy?” Evan said, clicking on another profile.

  “He’s not attractive,” I said.

  “Really? He’s got a nice smile.”

  I laughed. “That’s like saying, ‘He’s got a mouth.’ Do you know anyone who doesn’t have a nice smile? Everyone has a nice smile, unless they’re missing their front teeth.”

  “What’s not attractive about him?”

  On second glance, there was nothing unattractive about him. He was just kind of average-looking. Besides, he left the income question blank.

  “He has no money,” I said. “I can’t support another adult. I already support myself and my son. I need to be with someone who can support himself. It says he’s self-employed and he’s hiding his income.”

  “How do you know he has no money?” Evan asked. “You’re making another assumption that may have no basis in reality. I know many men who leave it blank because they don’t want women to e-mail them just because they make a lot of money.”

  “Then they probably won’t get a lot of e-mails from women,” I said. “Think about it: Men don’t want women to e-mail them for their money, and women don’t want men to e-mail them for their looks. But if women don’t post a picture, men won’t e-mail us! When we hide our pictures, men assume we’re not attractive. When they hide their income, we assume they have no money. We all make assumptions.”

 
; Evan let out a loud sigh. “Assume all you want,” he said, “but you might pass up a guy who’s financially stable but didn’t feel like telling everyone his income. Look at this guy. He has a graduate degree in business. I’m sure he’s not poor. Your MO is ‘Shoot first, ask questions later.’ But you might be shooting at the wrong target.”

  “HAPPY” DOESN’T MEAN “GAY”

  How, I asked, could I know what the right target was? Wasn’t I supposed to use these profiles as screening devices? I couldn’t e-mail all ten thousand men on the site. I had to make assumptions based on what they wrote.

  “Yes,” Evan said, “but often your assumptions are misconceptions. All guys who like bingo are grandpas. All guys who like books on tape don’t read actual books.

  I knew that Evan was giving me good advice, but by now I was in a bad mood. It seemed so clear that I’d looked for the wrong things in a man when I was younger, and now, instead of being happily married to a good guy, I was spending my Monday lunch hour going through online profiles with a dating coach. I was tired of looking for The Guy and trying to figure out what it “meant” that he liked bingo or “read” books on tape. Trying to figure out what anything “meant” made me dizzy and depressed.

  “See this guy?” I said to Evan, as I clicked on a profile. “This guy looks okay. But you know what? I remember him from ten years ago. What’s wrong with him? Why can’t he find a girlfriend? He’s been on this site for ten years.”

  “So have you—just not every second for ten years,” Evan replied. “You’ve had three long-term relationships in that time, and come back twice after the breakups. Maybe he has, too. Maybe he just broke up with someone he’s dated for two years. You have to stop making these . . .”

  “Assumptions!” I said. “I know.”

  It did seem that a lot of my assumptions were off and I was going to have to keep them in check if I wanted to meet anyone. So I went to my hotlist to show Evan the men I’d seen some potential in. The first was a marketing guy who seemed smart and interesting and had a clever sense of humor. He had thinning salt-and-pepper hair and he was on the “wide” side. He definitely looked older than his stated age of 46. But a message popped up that he was no longer on the site. I couldn’t believe it.

  “Even he’s gone!” I told Evan. “That’s amazing. He found someone!”

  “Proof that some women are less judgmental than you are,” Evan said, hoping to make me laugh. “Or maybe he’s just taking a break because he’ll be traveling for three weeks.”

  Evan clicked on another guy. “He seems interesting,” Evan said. He did, but his picture gave me pause.

  “He looks gay, doesn’t he?” I asked.

  “He looks happy!” Evan said.

  “Yeah, but doesn’t he look gay?”

  “With his daughter in his arms? Probably not.”

  He looked totally gay to me. I don’t care if he’d been married and had a kid. Maybe he got divorced because his wife left him after she discovered he was gay.

  “There you go making up these life stories based on nothing more than a profile,” Evan said. “Maybe he is gay—but nothing in his profile screams ‘gay’ to me. Is he the most macho-looking guy? No. But that doesn’t make him gay. I know this is hard and that as a forty-one-year-old woman on Match, you’re going to get a lot of commitment-phobes, players, financially unstable guys, unattractive guys, socially awkward guys, bitter divorced guys, much older guys, and guys who don’t want kids than you would have ten years ago. Look in your in-box. I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. But are all the good ones taken? Not quite. It’s just that you’re not going to find them by making assumptions.”

  FINDING OUT IF HE’SAN “EH”OR AN “UGH”

  Evan believes that people make assumptions precisely because dating is so exhausting. They want to know right away whether a guy is The One, even though the only information they have is a one-page profile.

  “You want to read the last page of the book before you read the first page,” he said, “but you can’t. I just want to know if he’s smart. I want to know if he’ll commit. Women want to know what’s going to happen. If I meet this guy, he’s going to be like this. So you make assumptions about the last page of the book, but you have to read the book to know how it really turns out.”

  Or as my friend Kathy put it, “You know nothing about potential until you sit down with them. And even then, you still don’t know that an initial ‘eh’ is a definite ‘ugh.’ ”

  Evan clicked around and landed on a 43-year-old single dad with two young kids. He was age-appropriate—and he was open to dating someone his own age (but also, I noticed, someone as young as thirty). He had some kind of accounting job. He was young-looking and reasonably cute. He referenced a quote I liked.

  “I know—he didn’t spell-check!” Evan said, as I was about to speak. “But let it go, okay?”

  “No problem,” I said. “I’m trying to be open.”

  “You’re trying, but twenty minutes ago you ruled out a guy because of his favorite movie.”

  I reread the single dad’s profile. It was pretty standard and normally wouldn’t have caught my eye. My instinct was to assume he was boring, but my instinct hadn’t found me a husband yet.

  “You have two choices,” Evan said. “You can let more people into the mix who could possibly make you happy. Or you can hold out for that two percent of men who you assume meet your requirements, and hope that coincidentally, someone in that two percent feels that you’re in his two percent. And even then, the people you assume to meet your requirements might in fact not be the right fit for you. Look at your ex-boyfriends. Something to think about for next week.”

  As soon as Evan left, I wrote to the single dad. After a couple of e-mails—the usual questions asked between strangers—we spoke on the phone. It wasn’t that my conversation with Mike had gone fabulously. In fact, if I’d turned down a date with the cute scuba-diving attorney just a few years earlier simply because he didn’t knock my socks off over the telephone, I had even more reason to turn down a date with Mike.

  On our call, I found out that he was a Deadhead—at 43—not my scene at all. When he learned where I’d gone to college, he replied, “Ooooh, you’re one of those smart people!”—implying, I guess, that he wasn’t. He constantly used puns—in an annoying way.

  But there were also good things. We had the same political sensibilities and the same dedication to being a parent—he to his two young boys. He worked as a business consultant but had worked as a producer years before, so he also had a creative side. He was easy to talk to. He was kind and understanding of my schedule and offered to travel quite a distance in rush hour traffic to meet me near my house. So when he asked if I wanted to meet in person, I didn’t hesitate. I said yes.

  We had a date for Friday night.

  12

  The Men Who Got Away

  Now that I was about to meet Mike, I started to think about men I wouldn’t date because of assumptions I’d made.

  Several guys came to mind, and the more I thought about men I never dated, the more I noticed that I’d also made assumptions about men I hoped to date. If I assumed some guys were wrong for me, I also assumed some were perfect, sight unseen.

  So to see how accurate my assumptions were, I decided to track down a few men from my past.

  Andy—The Guy I Assumed Wasn’t Cool Enough

  I met Andy when I was 32 years old and had just moved to a new city. One of my friends had me call him so that someone could show me around. The first time we had coffee together, we talked for three hours and could have talked for thirty. He was smart, interesting, and extremely funny. There was an immediate sense of comfort, but in an “old friend” kind of way rather than a romantic way. Andy wasn’t my type. He was somewhat stocky and had a goatee. He was slightly nerdy. He was really into computers.
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br />   Mistake #1: I assumed he wasn’t what I wanted in a husband. A week later, when he expressed romantic interest in me, I said that I didn’t “think about him that way.”

  Meanwhile, Andy and I became close friends. We totally “got” each other. We finished each other’s sentences and knew what the other person was thinking. We made each other laugh. We shared witty banter, wordplay, the minutiae of our days, and views on everything from politics to relationships, but to me, we were more like buddies than anything else. Not once did I think, “I want to date Andy.” I just felt incredibly lucky for our friendship.

  Soon I started dating a guy I considered “cool”—he was artistic, exciting, and alluringly unconventional. Around this time, Andy met a woman who was pretty, smart, and kind, and before long, he and Jodi began dating exclusively.

  About a year and a half later, my cool boyfriend and I broke up (turned out that what made him exciting also made him unreliable; what made him fascinating and unconventional also made the idea of getting married and having kids with him impractical), and Andy struggled for a while with whether Jodi was The One. Was she stimulating enough? Did they share enough similar interests? Should he look for someone more quirky, like he was? He was 34 now, and ready to be married, but he didn’t want to marry the wrong person. Occasionally he’d say, “Where can I find someone like you?” but we always laughed it off, like a big inside joke. By then I had a new boyfriend, and I thought I was falling in love.

  One night, Andy asked if I’d meet him for dinner, and I knew something was up. “I have some important news,” he said in an e-mail. I figured that he’d finally broken up with Jodi. Instead, when we sat down at the restaurant, here’s how he announced his engagement: “Jodi and I are getting married. We want the same things.” It seemed comical at the time; I’d never heard a more unromantic way of saying, “I’m getting married!” I remember saying “Congratulations” but secretly feeling bad for him and thinking that he’d settled. I remember feeling that I would never settle like that. I remember thinking that without an initial period of giddy excitement to sustain them through the ups and downs of a marriage, Andy and Jodi would surely get divorced.