Marry Him_The Case for Settling for Mr Good Enough

by Lori Gottlieb

  Her advice to women who are dating is this: First find a good match, then fall in love. Above all, don’t think you’ve “fallen in love” only to learn too late that it’s a bad match.

  It seemed like good advice. After all, given the American obsession with falling in love immediately, why were so many people getting divorced or feeling empty in marriages that started out as “true love”?

  WHAT’S A HUSBAND FOR ?

  A New Jersey-born attorney and journalist named Reva Seth seemed to have some answers. In her book First Comes Marriage: Modern Relationship Advice from the Wisdom of Arranged Marriage, she explains that after years of being in the dating trenches, she realized she was doing something wrong. Eventually, she found her own husband not through an arranged marriage, but by using the principles she learned from interviews with hundreds of women in arranged marriages. Her advice is aimed at people like me, people who will never, ever sit down with Mom and Dad and some guy’s parents and decide to tie the knot on the spot—but who could benefit from the stories of those who have.

  Like me, when Seth was dating she wanted to fall in love and get married, but she’d never really focused on why. So in her book, Seth asks an important question in an era when women can take care of themselves: “What do you think a husband today is for, and why do you want one?”

  It’s a hard question to answer, if only because it seems obvious. You might say, “I want a soul mate to share my life with.”

  Okay, a soul mate. What, exactly, does that mean? As Diane Sollee, founder and director of the Coalition for Marriage, Family, and Couples Education, put it, “People think they have to find their soul mate to have a good marriage. You’re not going to ‘find’ your soul mate. Anyone you meet already has soul mates. Dozens of them. Their mother. Their father. Their lifelong friends. You get married, and after twenty years of loving, bearing and raising children, meeting challenges—then you’ll have ‘created’ soul mate status.”

  In arranged marriages, the husband question is easier to answer. Your parents are looking for someone to provide contented companionship, children (if you both want them), and the infrastructure for family life. They want someone with qualities like integrity, humility, ambition, and generosity—the things that are going to matter. If a guy can read your mind but he can’t hold a job, or if he’s incredibly funny but doesn’t call when he says he will, is that the kind of guy you want to marry?

  I know—you want him to read your mind and hold a job, to be funny and reliable. But do you want a husband or someone who practices telepathy? Do you want the life of the party or a guy you can count on?

  As Seth writes in her book, husbands are life partners, not life savers. A full 50 percent of marital satisfaction is up to you, but many women dating today don’t see it that way.

  A friend of my mother’s who’s been happily married for forty years made the same observation: “Marriage alone won’t make you happy. A good marriage will bring you much happiness, but it’s not your husband’s job to provide constant entertainment and stimulation. So many of my daughters’ friends expect the impossible of what a husband should be.”

  Indeed, one 30-year-old woman I spoke to can’t decide whether or not to stay with a guy who spends his Sundays watching football. Her boyfriend is a kind, loving, well-educated public defender, but still she wonders if she can live with a guy who sits on the sofa every Sunday for five hours.

  “I don’t expect all of our interests to overlap,” she told me. “But on a Sunday, I wish we could do something together that we’d both enjoy.”

  In arranged marriages, parents look for someone who is similar to their child—but that doesn’t mean a male twin who’s musical like she is, shares her obsession with Rollerblading, and has the same favorite restaurants. Spouses do have many things in common, but they’re common goals, not hobbies: They share the kind of life they want to build together. So what if your husband is alphabetizing his video game collection while you’re out on a run? Why is that a problem? How many guys have you dated who shared practically all of your interests but the relationship didn’t work out anyway? We all know that “We both love sushi” doesn’t make for happily ever after.

  In a 2009 New York Times “Modern Love” column, Farahad Zama, whose marriage was arranged after he met his wife-to-be for forty-five minutes, writes about how different he and his wife are on things ranging from cleanliness to reading habits to food preferences.

  “Would we have gotten married if we had met in the conventional Western manner and dated each other?” he asks. “Or would we have given up on each other and moved on, searching for the perfect ‘one’? I don’t know.

  “But,” he continues, “what I am sure about is that our marriage, arranged with other considerations in mind, took us from acquaintanceship to love and kept us together until we realized that our differences are the yin and yang that make our relationship whole. Now we consider ourselves absolutely perfect for each other.”

  LOVE IS TIMING,A VERB, AND A NOUN

  Zama believes that a lot of what makes arranged marriages work is the fact that the Hollywood version of “love” isn’t in the equation. He’s probably right. Our Western expectations of what “being in love” means seem to have so skewed what we value in a partner that many single women today, when asked what kind of guy they’re looking for, often say, “Someone tall, funny, and successful,” instead of “Someone warm, trustworthy, loyal, and who can compromise and handle life’s stresses well.”

  I was starting to wonder if arranged marriages were similar to those of people who say they got married because of “timing.” You know, people who were eager to get married and get on with their lives, and the next good enough person they dated became their spouse. It’s not an arranged marriage, exactly, but it’s certainly entered into with a very pragmatic eye.

  “I was ready to be married,” Angela, a 35-year-old editor in New York who got married five years ago, told me. “He wasn’t my soul mate, but I thought we’d be happy together. Now he’s my soul mate. But could another guy have become my soul mate? Sure. It was timing—we were both ready for the commitment and wanted it very badly. We weren’t looking for perfection. We were looking for compatibility. And then we fell in love.”

  Vimal Vora, a 27-year-old Indian American strategy consultant living in New York City, told me that in Indian culture, people treat “love” as both a verb and a noun.

  “You love someone by honoring them, cherishing them, caring for them,” he said, but to Americans, love seems to be only a noun: “You feel this exogenous wonderful passion. It’s this absurd and uncomfortable and irrational and floaty feeling that almost feels like it chose you.”

  His point was that if you have everything you need in a relationship, but you’re just not feeling it anymore, maybe you’re focusing too much on whether you’re in love (the noun) and not making enough of an effort to love (the verb) your partner. There’s an aspect of love (the verb) that’s a choice.

  Vora feels that you need both the noun and verb, but, as he put it, what we tend to forget is this: “The verb can create the noun, and the noun can inspire the verb.”

  20

  Mondays with Evan

  Session 5—The Chemistry-to-Compatibility Ratio

  “We’re going out again,” I announced at my final session with Evan. “But it’s weird, because I don’t feel the way I’m used to feeling. There was no chemistry, but I’m really looking forward to seeing him again.”

  Evan smiled. “Isn’t that chemistry?” he asked. “If you’re excited to see someone again?”

  We were talking about my date with Sheldon2, the widowed 46-year-old who designed and sold houses, and who had an 8-year-old son. He’s the guy I didn’t even want to e-mail, until Evan read me the riot act. I’d ruled him out because he was 5’6” and balding, worked in what I (mistakenly) thought was a boring job,
and wore a pink polka-dot bow tie in his online photo.

  Now I was telling Evan about our hike.

  A week earlier, Sheldon2 and I had met at the bottom of a local trail, where I found him sitting on a rock and listening to his iPod. With his baseball cap, trendy shorts, and Coldplay T-shirt, he looked to be in his late thirties. I might not have noticed him at a party, but when he said hello to me, my first thought was, “He’s kind of cute.” I wasn’t attracted to him in an I-imagine-myself-sleeping-with-him way. He wasn’t my physical type at all. But there was something about his cuteness and the warmth of his hello that instantly put me at ease.

  If I were telling a friend about our date, there wouldn’t be anything exciting to report. A month ago, I might not even have gone a second date with Sheldon2. He wasn’t an intellectual—but he was curious and smart. He had “a bright mind,” a vitality, and mental nimbleness. We didn’t share flirtatious banter to the degree I had with boyfriends in the past—but we never lacked for conversation. He wasn’t slick—but he was thoughtful. He helped me climb over big rocks and made me laugh. There were no butterflies, there was no good-bye kiss, but the thing is, I had a nice time.

  I told Evan about that study on arranged marriages, and how my focus on intense chemistry screwed me up in the past. There was the cute urban planner who flew across the country to meet me, but because I’d built up such a fantasy around him, I found him disappointing in real life. Not that he was actually disappointing. He was smart, funny, interesting, and self-aware, if a bit shy and reserved. As we walked around town, I had a nice time, but given what my friend who put us in touch had said about him, I expected that when we met, there would be some, well, zing. A nice time didn’t count. It felt like too much effort to keep in touch long-distance, even though he would be moving to my city six months later. But the guys I’d put so much effort into—the sparks guys—were often bad matches for me. (I looked up the urban planner on Facebook recently, and he’s married to a psychologist and has a baby girl. He also looked adorable in his photos.)

  Now, with Sheldon2, I felt like the John Cusack character when he said about his girlfriend in the movie High Fidelity: “She didn’t make me miserable, or anxious, or ill at ease. You know, it sounds boring, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t spectacular either. It was just good. But really good.”

  And I was starting to ask myself the same question he did: “Should I bolt every time I get that feeling in my gut when I meet someone new? Well, I’ve been listening to my gut since I was fourteen years old, and frankly speaking, I’ve come to the conclusion that my guts have shit for brains.”

  Mine, too. All it took was one look on Match to confirm that my gut didn’t pick the best guys.

  GOING FOR THE SEXY

  Evan and I opened up my hotlist picks and e-mail exchanges from the first few weeks of our sessions. Mostly, they were filled with sexy forty-something never-married men who wrote great profiles and either never e-mailed me back, or if we did start a correspondence, seemed to have no history of committed relationships, had a pattern of serial short-term relationships, bragged about themselves obnoxiously, used sexual innuendo in a creepy way, had complicated relationships with their families, were stalled in their careers, or just generally didn’t seem like nice, normal, stable husbands-to-be.

  Evan said that’s typical. He told me he knows full well that single men in their late thirties and early forties are in great demand and can easily get married, and if they’ve never been married by their mid-forties, often they come with some kind of baggage or issue.

  My friend Kayla, who’s 36, noticed the same thing.

  “At that age, if he seems like a catch, there’s a catch,” she said. “Never-married men in their forties are bad news—there’s something fishy there. I’ve found they have one of five tragic problems: mommy, addiction, gay, job, or commitment. Divorced with kids controls for the insanity factor. At least it says he’s interested in a certain conventional life that I’m also interested in.”

  By now of course, I knew that divorced dads were probably better matches for me. “But it’s interesting,” Evan said, “that your hotlist is filled with never marrieds. What does this tell you?”

  “That I suck at dating? That I’m a bad judge of character?”

  Evan shook his head. “It tells you that you’re blinded by what you think of as chemistry. You go for the sexy. I’m guessing that if you were at a party and you had a nice conversation with a divorced guy who was a little overweight and gray and worked in finance and lived in the valley—but he was a cool guy and you liked being around him—you’d probably give him your phone number. Five years ago you may not have. You’re learning to let more people through the filter.

  “But,” he continued, “I’m also guessing that if you started dating this guy, you’d be on the phone with your friends saying, ‘I’m not sure if this feels right—he’s overweight and gray.’ You’d date him, but you’d probably keep thinking that you want someone more creative and who lives closer to you. The trouble we have is reconciling the people we’d pick out of a dating lineup with the people we actually like to spend time with.”

  LET’S TALK ABOUT YOUR CHILDHOOD

  When I told Gian Gonzaga, the eHarmony researcher, about my “type,” he said that people commonly confuse “chemistry” with their type, and their “type” with someone they have a lot in common with on the surface. But there’s a problem with that way of thinking.

  “With relationships,” he said, “you don’t change much in terms of personality or temperament, so your partner won’t suddenly become more generous, or more extroverted. But couples do tend to take on the other person’s interests somewhat, so that can change over time. People get hung up on what they have in common when what they need to have in common is the ‘getting each other’ aspect. That’s the chemistry.”

  One woman made this exact mistake. In her twenties, Amy, a broadcast journalist, broke up with her long-term boyfriend, a law student, because she thought she had more chemistry with the exciting new guy she met at work. They were both passionate about TV news, and loved sharing their daily experiences with each other. They were both equally obsessed with the industry.

  “I ended up marrying the man I worked with in TV news and we’ve been married for fifteen years and have three children,” she said. “But I’m miserable. We have nothing in common that matters. My husband eventually got out of TV news and into PR. He’s a videographer and is working freelance and isn’t the most motivated guy in the world.”

  Now, she regrets breaking up with her long-term boyfriend, who became a lawyer. She had more real chemistry him. “After the kids grow up,” Amy said of her marriage, “we’ll probably get divorced and go our separate ways since we won’t have anything that holds us together.”

  Lisa Clampitt, the matchmaker in New York who used to be a social worker, told me that often what seems like “chemistry” might be emotional baggage from childhood. That’s why if she sees a client repeatedly going after men who aren’t working out, she looks at the psychological roots of the attraction.

  “Sometimes what people consider chemistry is actually a replay of what happened in their families,” Clampitt said. “So a person who had a workaholic father might grow up to be attracted to someone married or emotionally unavailable, and when someone’s available in a healthy way, she doesn’t feel the spark.”

  In these cases, Clampitt focuses on the good qualities the woman is attracted to and tries to blend them with someone healthier.

  “I’ll say, ‘Let’s find someone funny and passionate, but who’s also communicative and stable and wants kids—even if it seems at first that you won’t have as much chemistry with this person.’ I remind clients that chemistry sometimes leads to bad decisions.”

  THE CHEMISTRY ADDICTION

  Evan reminded me of this, too.

  “What happens when your chemistry is diale
d up to ten?” he asked. “What has that been like for you?”

  I thought back to those times when I felt the rush with a new guy.

  “It was amazing!” I said.

  “Was it?” Evan asked. “Or were you checking your voice mail every twenty minutes, unable to focus at work, ignoring your friends and the rest of your life, and generally acting like an idiot?”

  It was more like that, I admitted.

  “Exactly,” he continued. “When the rush is there, you’re not acting like yourself. You’re nervous and insecure. There’s no critical thinking and you make idiotic choices: I just want to rip his clothes off and breathe his air and so what if he’s clinically depressed!

  Evan often encounters situations like these with his clients: The intense three-month relationship that burns out quickly. The passionate relationship that can’t survive the incompatible life goals. The intensely attracted couple who also intensely argue all the time.

  But when his clients meet wonderful men and don’t have that amped-up level of excitement, they say, “But I’m not feeling what I felt with so-and-so.” To which Evan replies, “So-and-so dumped you. So-and-so was married to someone else. So-and-so didn’t want kids. So-and-so was irresponsible. How exciting was that?”

  It seems so obvious, but how many women are drawn to completely inappropriate men—guys who are too old or too young or unemployed or unavailable—and insist that he is, despite the hurdles, her soul mate? (He rarely turns out to be. Either that or her soul is a liar, cheater, slacker, etc.)

  When I’ve felt that intense chemistry, how often did I overlook things I shouldn’t have? How often did I give leeway I shouldn’t have and try to “figure him out”—maybe he has intimacy issues, his father didn’t love him enough, his mother loved him too much—instead of moving on to someone who could give me what I really wanted?