Marry Him_The Case for Settling for Mr Good Enough

by Lori Gottlieb

  PART FOUR

  What Really Matters

  Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.

  —Goethe

  17

  Mondays with Evan

  Session Four—Wants Versus Needs

  At our fourth coaching session, I gave Evan the update on Mike.

  “I wish I could say that I liked him more on the second date,” I explained. “I wish I could say that his being an attractive, nice, wellintentioned guy who’s close to my age and a great dad and is looking to be married again was enough. But I can’t.”

  It had nothing to do with the alpha male thing. I’d pretty much let go of that. Instead, it was just that we weren’t connecting more generally. It went beyond these two dates: Even in e-mail exchanges and on several phone calls, I told Evan, the only thing that Mike and I really shared beyond the superficial was our love of parenthood. That’s no small thing, I know. But otherwise, our conversations felt forced and the more we talked, instead of developing an easier rapport, we simply ran out of things to say. There’s only so much small talk two people who clearly aren’t clicking can make.

  I told Evan about another guy I’d discovered online. Like Mike, Rick was a divorced dad and an involved parent. From his profile and half a dozen e-mails, he seemed interesting: He was a funny, self-deprecating, intellectual-seeming history professor. We wrote back and forth with a flirtatious ease. We understood each other’s references. We seemed to have similar views and lifestyles. There were some downsides—he was fifty and looked his age; his kids were teenagers and I had a two-year-old—but none of that mattered. I was trying not to sweat the details anymore, and I was excited about our connection. He asked to talk by phone and I gave him my number.

  He called me that day, but I wasn’t home, so he left a message. Then, before I had a chance to call back, he called three more times. I don’t mean that I looked at my Caller ID and discovered that he’d called and hung up. I mean that he actually spoke to my voicemail, three times in the span of five hours, and said, as if this were perfectly normal behavior, “Hi, it’s Rick from online! Just seeing if we could chat.” Then he’d leave his number. Every time.

  By the time I got his messages it was late at night. I was going to call him the next day after work, but during the day, Rick called three more times—three!—and two of those times, he left the same message. “Hi, it’s Rick from online! Guess I missed you. Hope to hear from you.” The day before, I thought he might have been nervous or overeager. I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Now I just thought he was creepy. Who calls someone you’ve never even met six times in twenty-four hours? I didn’t call him back.

  A few days later, I picked up the phone as I was walking out the door, and it was Rick. “Hey, it’s Rick,” he said casually, as if we were old friends and I’d instantly know who he was. “How are you?” I explained that I was about to leave but I’d call him back later. At that moment, I honestly thought I’d give him another chance. But when I got home a few hours later, I saw that he’d called and hung up on my machine again! I decided that was too weird.

  “He strikes me as a stalker, or at least as someone who has no clue about basic social interaction,” I told Evan.

  Evan agreed that his behavior was totally creepy. “One of the most common complaints I hear from women is that men don’t pay enough attention. But when they pay too much attention—they call too much, they call too soon, they express their excitement too soon—women get turned off. I usually encourage women to give the awkward guys a break. But being open to awkward isn’t the same as going out with freaks.”

  Finally, a situation where it wasn’t a case of me being too picky!

  EVAN READS ME THE RIOT ACT

  Okay, I didn’t want to date freaks, but I also wanted to date people I had more of a natural connection with than Mike.

  I didn’t think that was too much to ask, but when I told Evan that replying to an e-mail from a real estate broker who was wearing a pink polka-dot bow tie would be a waste of time, Evan sighed and shook his head, like a teacher frustrated with a lazy student. Then he looked me in the eye and, for the first time since we started our sessions, completely lost his patience.

  “You’re listening to me each week, but you’re not changing!” he said, raising his voice into a near-yell. “You won’t open up to anything other than what you’ve been open to for the past twenty years! You’re like the person who wants to lose weight but won’t change their eating or exercise habits. ‘But this is what I like to eat!’ they say. And their doctor would say, ‘Fine, you keep eating that—but you won’t lose weight!’ You have to do something differently if you want different results. The waste of time isn’t e-mailing guys like this. The waste of time is not e-mailing guys like this. Will he be The Guy? I don’t know. But it’s like a lottery, and one of these guys might well turn out to be someone you click with. And you’ll never find out because you’ve wasted all your time not giving anyone a chance!”

  Wow. We both sat there in silence for several minutes. I felt like such an idiot. I kept thinking I was changing, but in reality I was only changing in my head. I wasn’t changing that much in my actions. Here I was, 41 and single, after years of dismissing good guys for bad reasons—men like Andy and Jeff and Sheldon and Scott. And now, I wouldn’t even e-mail a guy who fit a lot of what I was looking for, who wrote me a very clever e-mail, and who might be interested in someone like me, despite my own baggage and flaws, just because of what he did for a living (selling real estate seemed as boring to me as accounting) and what he was wearing (that pink polka-dot bow tie!).

  I broke the silence by tapping on my keyboard. I wrote a note to Bow Tie Guy as Evan sat there looking over my shoulder.

  The lesson I should have learned from the Creepy Stalker incident, Evan said after I pushed “send,” is that the person who seems great based on his profile can turn out to be disappointing as often as the guy who isn’t your type turns out to be appealing.

  “None of these people are real until you’re in a committed relationship with them,” Evan said, “You’re always projecting something onto them. Stop drawing a picture of The Guy in your head because the real guy won’t look like that.”

  Which is why, whenever I objected to meeting a guy who seemed too serious, or too old, Evan would say, “It’s just a date!” Whenever I said that the fact that a guy lived an hour away wasn’t ideal, Evan would say, “Nothing’s ideal. People expect ideal and they miss out on opportunities to meet the right guy. Even what you think is ideal isn’t ultimately going to be ideal. There’s no such thing as ideal. So let go of ideal.”

  WHICH BRINGS US BACK TO MIKE

  I was willing to let go of ideal, but what exactly did that mean? Mike was a good guy and at the same life stage, raising small children like me. He was cute and reliable. Yet his whole vibe was drastically different from mine. We had a hard time finding things to talk about. I was intensely intellectually curious by nature and he was very laid back by nature. We weren’t connecting.

  “I don’t think it’s unreasonable to want intellectual stimulation and a devoted dad,” I told Evan. “I have friends who have husbands like that. It’s not impossible to find.”

  “It’s not,” Evan agreed. “And if those two things are absolute needs, then you should look for that. But then you can’t go around nixing guys who are devoted dads and intellectually stimulating because they wear pink bow ties. You can’t have everything.”

  I didn’t think I wanted “everything,” but when Evan asked me to write down my “needs”—as opposed to my “wants”—I came up with fourteen things. Evan told me that if I wanted to be realistic, I should narrow the list down to three.

  I was surprised. Only three?

  “The difference between ‘needs’ and ‘wants’
is crucial,” he explained. “If you have fourteen ‘needs,’ it means that if a guy has thirteen of the fourteen qualities, he’s gone! And even if he’s most of these things, you have to remember that a lot of good qualities flip over and become bad qualities. Someone highly intelligent and analytical can also be opinionated and a know-it-all. Someone easygoing may have no opinions or be lazy.”

  He told me about a client of his who’d had her heart broken by a charming but commitment-phobic man. When she was ready to date again, she went online and sifted through her responses. She was excited about one guy who reminded her of her ex. They went out on a date, he said he’d call, and he didn’t.

  But another guy did. “In her view, he wasn’t the most compelling candidate in the bunch,” Evan said, “but he just kept asking her out. Every time my client would go on a date with him, she would have fun. And then she’d complain to me that he wasn’t what she was looking for.”

  He was too short for her. He wasn’t rugged enough. But he met her needs: He was thoughtful and reliable, he had the same values as she did, and he shared a similar lifestyle. And when she distinguished between her wants and her needs, she fell in love. She thought she wanted the charming, manly-man guy—and maybe on some level she still wants that—but what she needed was someone fun and thoughtful and reliable who had similar goals and values.

  Evan said her story is like that of a guy who gets fired from his job and thinks his life is over, only to realize it’s a perfect opportunity for him to create the life he always dreamed of. He wouldn’t have chosen to get fired, of course. It wasn’t what he thought he wanted, but it made him happier than he ever imagined because it opened him up to a possibility he hadn’t considered before.

  That’s also why so many married people say, “I wouldn’t have chosen my spouse on an online dating Web site,” because their spouses weren’t what they thought they wanted. Until, of course, they met them.

  NARROWING DOWN THE NEEDS

  “What you want isn’t necessarily good for you,” Evan said. “And in going after the person you think you want, you ignore what you really need.”

  But figuring out what you need isn’t easy. If distinguishing wants from needs can seem baffling, he said, sometimes our desires even contradict themselves: I want someone with strong opinions . . . who never argues. I want someone who’s spontaneous and wild . . . who has a stable job.

  Evan told me about a male dating client who couldn’t figure out what he needed, either. This guy was around 40, smart, successful, and serious about getting married. He wanted someone smart and mature, but who was easygoing and slender. So he’d go out on dates, and then he’d complain that the younger women with the great bodies were often a little too immature and at a different stage of life, the brainy corporate lawyers were a little too demanding, and the women who were more mature generally didn’t have the younger body type he preferred.

  How do you get over it? You distinguish between your wants and needs. Evan gave some examples: You want someone creative. You need someone you can trust.

  You want someone who shares your love of jazz. You need someone who appreciates some of your interests.

  You want someone who is athletic and physically active. You need someone who accepts you at your worst.

  A few minutes later, I was able to narrow down my list to three essential needs: intellectually curious, kid-friendly, and financially stable. That’s it.

  Obviously, these weren’t the only qualities I would be looking for in a partner, but they would be the only basis on which I could rule someone out for a first date. In other words, I couldn’t say no to a first date with a guy who wore bow ties but met these three requirements.

  Now that I clarified my needs, Evan pointed out that it made sense why Mike and I had fizzled out. He was definitely kid-friendly, but he wasn’t intellectually curious and, as a freelance consultant supporting two kids and trying to make ends meet from job-to-job, he was iffy on financial stability. He had many wonderful qualities, but he met just one out of my three essential needs. For a woman with three different essential needs, he’d be a great catch.

  Making this distinction felt good. I knew this wasn’t a magic formula, but it seemed like a better screening tool than my usual, “I’m either excited about him or I’m not.” And it sure seemed better than comparing him to a mental list of fourteen “essential” items.

  I felt like finally, I was starting to turn a small corner.

  That night, the real estate guy in the bow tie e-mailed back and I got more information. He was a 46-year-old widowed dad with an 8-year-old son. “Real estate” meant that he designed houses and sold them, and he seemed passionate about his work. He was 5’6” and balding, but funny and thoughtful in his e-mail. He seemed sophisticated and smart, despite not having been highly educated. He suggested that we talk on the phone, but I took it a step further. If he was intellectually curious, a good dad, and financially stable, what more did I need to know to before agreeing to a first date? Why not just meet?

  This may not seem like a big deal, but it felt like real progress for me. I’d made so many mistakes on those first phone calls—jumping to all kinds of conclusions that weren’t helpful or accurate. Dan Ariely of MIT had warned me about how misleading those phone calls were—how they only set you up to have unrealistic expectations if the call went well, or led you to decline a date if it went less than well than you expected (like what happened with Scuba Matt).

  So in the spirit of changing my actions, I suggested that we get together instead. Not for coffee, where I could get in and out in twenty minutes, but for an afternoon hike, where I’d be with the guy for a couple of hours of conversation. I wasn’t going to interview him on the date, either. I was just going to try to have a good time.

  We set the date for the following Tuesday. Oh—and this is the unbelievable part—his name was Sheldon! I mean, not literally Sheldon, but he had the same name as the guy I’d called Sheldon. I was amazed, and even pleased. Because this time, instead of being judgmental, I thought the universe was giving me a second chance.

  I decided to call him “Sheldon2.”

  A HUSBAND WHO WANTS TO GET MARRIED

  When I told my friend Maggie about “Sheldon2” and how I’d narrowed down my needs to just three, she said she’d also gone through that process recently—with her fiancé.

  “My mom once told me that one characteristic to look for in a husband is simply someone who wants to be married,” she said. “Look for someone for whom the married lifestyle is appealing. I remember thinking that was fairly unromantic—after all, shouldn’t I be enough to make someone want to commit for life? Aren’t I just inherently that great? But I also suspected there was some truth in it.”

  Like me, Maggie spent most of her twenties looking for an intense connection. She found it in a long-term relationship with an older guy who was in many ways a great match—they were both talented, creative film producers—but the more years they stayed together, the more it became apparent that they wanted different things in life.

  “When it didn’t work out,” she said, “I remember being shocked at this, because I thought love could conquer all. But it can’t conquer fundamental differences in what you want your life to be.”

  Then, at 30, she met Will.

  “He didn’t seem like someone I would be with at all,” she said, “and I spent about six months sort of holding him at arm’s length because he didn’t meet my ‘criteria’ of what I wanted. He was a scientist and I didn’t understand what he did at all for the first three months. He was totally scruffy in a college dude way—he hadn’t cut his hair in like six months when I first met him, and he had no actual furniture in his apartment. It was all milk crates and a futon. He was really shy and not good at witty banter.”

  So Will didn’t meet some of her “wants.” But, she told me, he met her c
ore “needs”: (1) He was interesting and intellectually curious, (2) They had shared values and goals, and (3) He was dependable and loyal.

  Meanwhile, she said, “All of our other differences are things that I’ve come to find fun and interesting.” They didn’t have many interests in common when they first got together, but they’ve had a lot of fun introducing each other to new things. She goes mountain biking and hiking with him now, and he likes going to plays with her. They also connected on the practical stuff.

  “We both, thankfully, had the same opinions, by and large, about money and kids. These two things I think are the most important externals that challenge compatibility, so I’m relieved for us that we were so much on the same page from the beginning.”

  What Maggie ended up with is a happy balance of wants and needs. She learned in her early thirties something essential that I was just learning in my forties: “Love” isn’t independent of practical things, and if we want to find a happy relationship, we have to learn how to take those practical things into consideration.

  But just how practical should we be in the search for love?

  18

  The Business of Love

  Soon after I spoke to Maggie, a guy named John Curtis offered to send me a copy of his book. It arrived with a heart divided by a ticker tape symbol on the cover, and this quote right above it, attributed to the New York Times: