Marry Him_The Case for Settling for Mr Good Enough

by Lori Gottlieb

  SELLING TOO EARLY

  That’s what happened to Emily who, at 27, broke up with Sam, a nice, loving, and smart but not particularly “hip” technology guy she adored, in order to go out with Jonathan, an irresistibly sexy film agent who shared all of her interests. Two years later, that relationship fizzled out, and she realized that Sam was the right guy for her after all. Meanwhile, once Sam hit 30, his stock shot up in value, he had tons of women who wanted to date him, he didn’t forgive Emily for dumping him, and she couldn’t get him back (she tried!). Three years later, he was married. She sold too early.

  In economics, what she did made no sense. If your goal is financial stability, you don’t invest in risky, volatile stocks because they’re the “hot” picks of the week. Everyone knows that they rarely turn out to be good long-term investments (like the “hot” men who often aren’t as great as they seem).

  But many of us play those odds anyway. We take incredible risks, because we believe that everything is reversible, that no one decision is make or break. But when you have a time limit, one bad choice can make or break whether you’ll ever marry, whether you’ll have kids, whether you’ll have more than one kid, and whether you’ll marry someone as enjoyable as the person you turned away three or thirteen years earlier. We don’t know how to stop while we’re ahead, so we give up our best (and perhaps last) chance for marital happiness.

  Emily is now 37 and single. She dates a lot of older, divorced men with kids. She didn’t realize that holding out for Prince Charming rarely means ending up with a storybook family. She certainly didn’t grow up dreaming about marrying a middle-aged divorced guy with resentful kids who don’t want a stepmom and an ex-wife who pages him at 10 p.m. to talk about the school carpool the next day.

  When she was younger, she thought the price of compromising was too high. Now, though, she’s paying an even higher price for having not compromised.

  DEPRECIATING ASSETS

  I’ll be the first to admit that there’s something unseemly about discussing relationships from an economic perspective. In this post-feminist era, we say we believe that finding a partner should be a matter of love and love only. But as recently as 2007, a 25-year-old woman in New York, who claimed she was “articulate” and “classy” and described her looks as “spectacularly beautiful” posted a query on Craigslist in which she asked why she couldn’t find a wealthy husband. A guy replied, in part, as follows: Your offer, from the prospective of a guy like me, is plain and simple a crappy business deal. Here’s why. Cutting through all the B.S., what you suggest is a simple trade: you bring your looks to the party and I bring my money. Fine, simple. But here’s the rub, your looks will fade and my money will likely continue into perpetuity . . . in fact, it is very likely that my income increases but it is an absolute certainty that you won’t be getting any more beautiful!

  So, in economic terms you are a depreciating asset and I am an earning asset. Not only are you a depreciating asset, your depreciation accelerates! Let me explain, you’re 25 now and will likely stay pretty hot for the next 5 years, but less so each year. Then the fade begins in earnest. By 35 stick a fork in you!

  In case you think I’m being cruel, I would say the following. If my money were to go away, so would you, so when your beauty fades I need an out. It’s as simple as that. So a deal that makes sense is dating, not marriage.

  While this guy probably didn’t charm the ladies with his viewpoint, many men I asked admitted that he’s not far off base. But before women get incensed, we should realize that it’s not just men being crass. According to Dan Ariely, the MIT researcher, women give economic value to physical attributes as well.

  $I0,000 AN INCH

  In one of Ariely’s studies, men’s online photos were ranked for attractiveness by independent male and female observers. Then the researchers looked at how much online attention these men got. It turns out that if you’re an ordinary-looking guy whose online picture is ranked around the median in attractiveness, you’d need to make $143,000 more per year than a guy whose picture ranked in the top tenth percentile. If your picture ranks in the bottom tenth, you’d need to make $186,000 more than the guy in the top tenth percentile.

  “Women care so much about height,” he told me, “that to be as appealing as the average five foot ten man, I’d have to earn $40,000 more per year at my height of five feet nine.” Ariely found that a 5’4” man would need to make $229,000 more than a 6’ tall man to have equal appeal; a 5’6” man would need $183,000 more; a 5’10” man would need $32,000 more.

  Of course, the tall workaholic might not make as good a spouse as the shorter involved parent, just as the hot 26-year-old woman might not make as good a spouse as the mature 42-year-old woman. We’ve all dated based on superficial factors before, and it hasn’t worked out. But we want what we want, rational or not. And the dating market proves this time and again.

  Which is how this reverse power shift occurs: Guys in their twenties are like women in their forties. Women in their twenties are like guys in their forties.

  It’s all about perceived value.

  YOU’RE ONLY AS VALUABLE AS YOUR OPTIONS

  That’s why Evan Marc Katz, my dating coach, kept reminding me that my view of my own value doesn’t matter. In dating, you’re only as valuable as your options.

  “You can be as picky as you like, as long as you have the option of being that way,” Evan said. “When we think we should be in demand and we’re not, that’s where the friction comes in. What holds you back is that you’re trying to be the twenty-seven-year-old woman who’s at the top of the dating totem pole. A twenty-seven-year-old can pretty much date anyone—older, younger. But it won’t always be this way. That’s why no matter how old you are, you can’t afford to throw people away on a technicality.”

  But how do you know where you are on the totem pole?

  “It’s economics.” Evan shrugged. “A gallon of milk is good, but nobody will buy it at ten dollars. The product is priced too high. A lot of women are setting their price point so high that they’re pricing themselves out of the market.” He says that you can assess your market value this way: If you have an in-box full of responses from men you’ve e-mailed, you’re correctly priced. If you don’t, you’ve priced yourself too high.

  “If a guy is forty and cute and makes a good living and wants to get married, it makes more sense for him to be with a thirty-two-year-old than a woman his own age,” Evan continued. “But a lot of us don’t adjust. We just say, ‘I’m valuable. This is what I’m willing to take. I’m only dating guys who are my age. I’m only dating men who are this tall.’ That’s a lovely declaration. But you may not have many buyers. I see a lot of younger women overpricing themselves, too, and when they finally price themselves more realistically five years later, it might be too late.”

  That’s exactly what I saw happening: Women under 30 might be dating a great guy, but there’s this one thing they think he’s lacking. They’re with an 8 but they want a 10. Then they’re 40 and they can only get a 5! So they gave up the 8 in order to hold out for the 10, only to end up with a 5—or nothing. The 8 would have been wonderful—the 8 is a catch—but it’s not until you can only get a 5 that you realize it.

  When I was 22, nobody would fault me for breaking up with a boyfriend who was smart, nice, funny, and cute but too into sci-fi. But by the time I was 37, I was seen as greedy, demanding, and overreaching if I wanted just smart, nice, funny, and cute. In fact, at 37, it was hard to find a guy like that in the first place. But it didn’t occur to me to take a good deal “while supplies last.”

  In business terms, Evan says romantic market value works like this: “Saying you should hold out for a ten is like saying that everyone should hold out for a five-hundred-thousand-dollar salary because that’s what you’re worth. Well, if there’s only a small percentage of those five-hundred-thousand-dollar jobs out there, there’s going to
be a lot of unemployment. That is, unless someone compromises and finds a lower-paying job—like a seven—that has much better benefits and quality of life.”

  Evan said that people who don’t take their own marketability into account are deluding themselves.

  “I would be more marketable if I were a millionaire,” he said. “Bill Gates would have an entirely different level of marketability if he weren’t Bill Gates. That goes against our ideals of love and being valued for your internal qualities only, and a lot of people find it offensive. Everyone wants to be thought of as special. But you can either pretend it isn’t true, or get more realistic about your options so you can actually meet someone.”

  He was right. If we’re really honest with ourselves, many of us probably realize that we aren’t 100 percent pure in our search for true love. Attraction is a subtle calculus involving the quality of the romantic appeal but also factoring in the quality of life you’d have with this person.

  Most women in their thirties, for instance, would feel very differently about a fabulous guy who’s unemployed versus one who’s got a lucrative job—even if both men were equally smart and cute and interesting. The discrepancy has less to do with whether the guy has ambition and passion (because the unemployed guy might be working diligently on his music or start-up company but making no money, whereas the guy with the lucrative job might have no passion for his work at all) and more to do with what colors our sense of how we’d feel about being in this situation in the future with a family. Even for the most romantic among us, the practical stuff matters.

  MARRIAGE IS A GOOD BUSINESS TO BE IN

  If the economics of dating can seem icky, the economics of a marital partnership seem, to me at least, comforting. Marriage provides an infrastructure, child care, economic security, companionship, and, studies show, better health. It’s easier and more fun to go through life as a couple. According to The Case for Marriage, a comprehensive summary of research on the benefits of marriage, by Linda J. Waite and Maggie Gallagher, married people are happier overall.

  It’s certainly a good business to be in, but it’s still a business. Just recently I came across an article on MSN Money entitled “Get Real: Marriage Is a Business” by Liz Pulliam Weston. The subhead read: “Put aside the romantic notion that love conquers all—and pull out your calculators. Successful partnerships require a plan, a CFO (usually) and regular progress reports.”

  In the article, Pulliam Weston talks about the fact that married people build significantly more wealth than singles do; that marriage has not just romantic, but legal and financial ramifications; and that, as John Curtis had said, you need to have a business plan for the marriage.

  The MSN article was linked to another called “How to Leave Your Husband,” which advises planning an exit strategy before you announce your intention to divorce—all in the service of landing the best financial outcome. So if divorce has an economic component, it logically follows that its precursor, marriage, must, too.

  But ask most young singles about the idea that there’s a socioeconomic underpinning to modern love, and they’re offended. They’ll insist that economics in mate selection is a thing of the past, a primitive relic from the days when there was little or no choice in whom you married or whether you married—like in an arranged marriage. But if using practical criteria in picking a spouse is so distasteful, how could it be that so many arranged marriages do work?

  What do people in these arranged marriages know that we love-obsessed Westerners don’t?

  19

  Love at Twenty-seventh Sight

  Jayamala Madathil is an Indian-born researcher at Sonoma State University in California, and she’s an expert on arranged marriages. I called Madathil to ask about a study she’d done that surprised me. She compared satisfaction in arranged marriages and marriages of choice—both in the United States—and found that the people in arranged marriages were just as satisfied, if not more so, than those in marriages of choice.

  Now, I’m not so out of touch to think that arranged marriages are the solution to women’s dating problems, but I found Madathil’s study intriguing: Was it really possible that a guy your parents select for you could make you just as happy as the guy you spend years and years painstakingly searching for?

  If so, why?

  Madathil said that her study didn’t investigate why (that’s her next project), but she was happy to share the story of her own fourteen-year arranged marriage as an example.

  THERE WAS NOTHING WRONG WITH HIM

  The first thing Madathil told me about her husband is that she’s “totally in love” with him—his warmth, kindness, intelligence, how handsome he is. . . . Her list went on and on. The minute she started talking about her husband, she seemed to morph from an articulate scientist into a giddy teenager.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “it’s just that we have such a romantic marriage. But if I tell you how we met, you’d probably not find it romantic at all.”

  She was right about that.

  “Our families met each other,” she explained, “and they thought it was a compatible match in terms of expectations. They decided we could proceed. So my husband and I met, and we liked each other. We agreed on basic values and what you expect from life.

  Physical appearances matter—I thought, yeah, he looks cute. But he didn’t have to be gorgeous. It seemed realistic and possible. So I said, sure.”

  Just like that. I tried to imagine sitting across from a total stranger and saying to myself, “Yeah, it seems realistic and possible. Sure, I’ll marry him!”

  In my very American mind-set, I wondered why Madathil didn’t want to meet other candidates. After all, she told me that she could have met as many men as she wanted until she found the right match. How did she know to pick this one?

  “Well, there was nothing wrong with him,” she replied matter-of-factly.

  That sounded hilarious to me. “There was nothing wrong with him” isn’t the reasoning most single American women use when it comes to marriage decisions. (In fact, often we seem to find something wrong with a guy.) Besides, based on what she’d just told me, some women wouldn’t have gone on even a second date with Madathil’s husband—much less agreed to marriage—because there were no initial sparks.

  “I think what’s different from the coffee date is that we’re not looking for sparks or anything like that,” she said. “It’s more like on a friendship level, where you meet someone and you know pretty quickly whether you want to hang out with them again. Romance isn’t the primary focus in the beginning. It’s more about whether this is a good fit value-wise.”

  She believes that’s one area couples in love marriages sometimes overlook.

  “I know couples here in America who can date for two years and not know if they have the same values,” she said. “They think they know, but they haven’t really talked about the important issues that would come up in a marriage. In an arranged marriage, all the requirements are laid out in the beginning. There are no games to be played. It is what it is—if you seem compatible, fine. You get married. What’s the point of seeing each other a second or third or fourth time? What other information are you going to get?”

  Madathil, in fact, was introduced to another prospective husband before she met her current husband, but she turned that first guy down. She didn’t marry the first guy precisely because she already had all the information she needed from that initial meeting. If a typical American woman might nix a guy on a first date for any number of superficial reasons—too hairy, chews funny—Madathil told me that she and that first suitor didn’t proceed because of major lifestyle issues: He wanted a stay-at-home partner and she wanted to do graduate work and get a job.

  “It’s a very realistic way of doing things,” Madathil said. “We realize there are going to have to be adjustments and you’ll have to be flexible, but not on the basic thi
ngs—career, children, where you want to live. It’s seeing the bigger picture. It’s not about, “Well, he plays golf and I hate golf, so forget it.’”

  THE COMMITMENT IS LIBERATING

  Madathil said that when she and her husband got married, “It’s like we started dating at that point—but it’s better than dating, because you know that no matter what happens, you’ll both be there tomorrow. I don’t have to wait by the phone and wonder if he’ll continue the relationship. Ironically enough, it’s the commitment that makes it liberating!”

  The focus, she added, goes from “Is this going to work?” to “How can we make this work?” As Madathil and her husband got to know each other, she liked a lot of things about him. She liked the way they talked about things. She liked how they treated each other. But she wasn’t in love with him yet. She fell in love with her husband because of the way they disagreed with each other.

  “When everything’s great, it’s easy to fall in love,” she said. “But when you disagree—how you come to a consensus is very telling. My husband both met and exceeded my expectations. I have never once thought that I could have found someone better.”

  How different that was from our culture’s view of love, where having disagreements in the beginning of a relationship seems like the death knell. The beginning of a relationship is supposed to be like a honeymoon. A couple is supposed to feel totally in synch. Any deviation from that is a sign that you’re not compatible. But Madathil is saying it’s not whether you argue—its how you get through the arguments. And the more practice you have getting through those arguments gracefully, she told me, the less you’ll argue later.