Marry Him_The Case for Settling for Mr Good Enough

by Lori Gottlieb

  It was early morning and the water was freezing. I felt slightly ridiculous, but as I stood there, barefoot, about to release my list into the sky, the most unexpected thing happened. A really cute guy came jogging toward me.

  “Hey!” he yelled. I looked behind me to see if he was talking to someone else, but I was alone at the shoreline.

  “Hey!” he yelled again. He was definitely talking to me. I couldn’t believe my luck. I released the balloon, then watched the guy run closer. He stopped next to me, breathing heavily from his run.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “What are you doing?” he asked. He had on shorts and a ripped UCLA Law sweatshirt. No ring on his left hand. I stared at his dark, curly hair and his muscular legs. I thought: Could I really be meeting The Guy while releasing my dating checklist in a helium balloon on the beach? How’s that for an incredible wedding story?

  “Um, I was just sending a message off to sea,” I said. I didn’t know how to explain it without sounding like a total dork.

  We watched the balloon float away until it got smaller and smaller and became a mere speck. Then it disappeared entirely.

  He looked me in the eye. His chocolate brown eyes were like magnets. My stomach started doing somersaults.

  “Well,” he said, “you really shouldn’t do that. It’s bad for the environment. I tried to stop you.”

  And with that, he continued his run.

  For a split second, I was disappointed. And besides, who made him the balloon police? But then I was glad I’d encountered this guy. Our two minutes together showed me, yet again, just how deeply I craved the fantasy, which rarely turned out to be the reality. Our encounter was like a haiku of a relationship: I’d projected my usual romantic notions onto him and, of course, they didn’t turn out as planned. Changing was going to be hard, I knew, but well worth it in the end.

  I walked on the beach for a while, then got back in my car and gave the parking attendant my ticket. The sun had finally come out, bright rays on my windshield, and I squinted to find some dollar bills.

  “Spring is coming,” the attendant said.

  “It is,” I replied. “A new beginning.”

  PART FIVE

  Putting It All Together

  It is not lack of love but lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.

  —Friedrich Nietzsche

  22

  The Good Enough Marriage

  Now that I was truly focused on finding Mr. Good Enough, I came across something called “the good enough marriage.” It was a phrase coined by Paul Amato, the sociologist I’d spoken to at Penn State. Amato studies marriages like these—good marriages, but not perfect ones. And what he found reminded me of the way I’d been dating.

  Back in 1980, he and his colleagues developed a study of 2,000 married people. Every two years, the researchers followed up with these couples to find out how their marriages were going. They did this for twenty years. A lot of these couples divorced. So Amato wanted to know, what predicts divorce?

  “What we found seemed surprising at first,” he told me over the phone, “because we think of couples who get divorced as going through a long, terrible period of fighting. We think of them as estranged and so miserable that they decide the marriage can’t be salvaged.”

  This was true of some couples, but many didn’t follow that pattern at all. Up until the divorce, in fact, they seemed to be getting along pretty well. They weren’t ecstatically happy, but they weren’t unhappy. They frequently went out with their spouses and when asked, said they had very few marital problems or disagreements. On a scale from 1 to 10, they’d rate their marriages as 7s—not 2s or 3s.

  “Nothing serious was going on,” Amato said. “Their marriages weren’t perfect, but they were pretty good. Two years later, they were divorced. These couples were happy enough, but wanted something more.”

  When the couples in Amato’s study were asked why they got divorced, they’d say things like, “We were drifting apart—it’s not like when we first got married,” or “I didn’t really feel like I was growing as a person,” or “I thought my spouse was a nice person but not really my soul mate.” They were disappointed, but not angry.

  “They didn’t dislike their spouse,” Amato said. “Some people said, ‘You know, I still love my spouse, but I just realized we weren’t right for each other.’ Often they’d found someone else and they thought, ‘Now, this is my soul mate.’ Even though the marriage isn’t at all bad, they think they’ve found something better.”

  DIFFERENT, BUT NOT BETTER

  Just like single women who break up with “good enough” boyfriends because they think they’ll find something “better,” a lot of these married folks were wrong. Five years later, Amato followed up and found that most people who remarried reported either no increase in satisfaction or that they were less happy than they’d been in their first marriages.

  “We didn’t ask if they regretted it,” Amato said, “because most people won’t admit to making a mistake. It makes you look like a goofball. So we looked at symptoms of depression and asked them how satisfied they were with their lives, and compared these to the results from five years earlier. Statistically, they were less happy.”

  This was because even if the second marriage was different from the first one, things traded off. “Different” didn’t necessarily mean it was an improvement. I’d read the same thing on the relationship expert Diane Sollee’s SmartMarriages Web site: “Research has shown that every happy, successful couple has approximately ten areas of ‘incompatibility’ or disagreement that they will never resolve. Instead the successful couples learn how to manage the disagreements and live life ‘around’ them—to love in spite of their areas of difference. . . . If we switch partners, we’ll just get ten new areas of disagreement.”

  No wonder the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that the divorce rate for second marriages is higher than that of first-timers. Maybe these people have a hard time accepting that a good marriage doesn’t mean the marriage has to be good all the time.

  Indeed, according to the Rutgers Marriage Project, research using a large national sample in the late 1980s found that of people who were unhappy in their marriages but stayed in them anyway, 86 percent indicated in interviews five years later that they were happier. In fact, three-fifths of the formerly unhappily married couples rated their marriages as either “very happy” or “quite happy.”

  “Most good enough marriages have the potential to become stronger and better with time, effort, and commitment,” Amato said. “I think the ‘soul mate’ concept has done a lot of harm because it sets the bar extremely high for a ‘successful’ marriage. Marriage is not about metaphysics.”

  INHERITING THE EXPECTATIONS

  Later, in 1992, Amato and his team interviewed the adult children of the “good enough marriage” couples who split up. They did this three times until 2000. Turned out, some of these kids were having trouble finding their “good enough” partner, too.

  “If it was a terrible marriage,” Amato said, “the kids bounded back pretty quickly post-divorce. It was a relief from all the fighting. But the kids who had been in these good enough marriage families were quite messed up after the divorce. They suffered from low self-esteem and depression, and they had negative views about marriage. These kids were surprised by the divorce and they couldn’t understand it, because unlike the kids in the high-conflict marriage families, it wasn’t a relief and they didn’t see it coming. The good enough marriages were good enough for the kids, because kids don’t care if their parents are being self-actualized. They had stability and ready access to both parents, and they were happy. The fact that their parents were having an existential crisis didn’t matter to them.”

  In adulthood, though, these kids from good enough marriage families replicated their parents’ marriages. As soon as prob
lems began to appear in their own relationships, they immediately began to think about breaking up or getting a divorce.

  Many of them did.

  “They got out quickly as problems of any kind began to arise,” Amato said. “Kids from the intact families, when they were married and problems arose, often said, ‘It looks like we’ve got some issues to deal with,’ but they didn’t get divorced. Yet the kids whose parents in good enough marriages divorced became very cautious about marriage. They were more likely to cohabitate. They didn’t feel like they could trust their partners. It was scary to commit because their parents had seemed happy and even then, they got divorced.”

  Overall, Amato found that these adult children had a low tolerance for problems in a relationship. They grew up believing that if the flame was going out, the solution wasn’t to rekindle it, but to find another spark.

  A SHIFT FROM “US” TO “ME”

  I asked Amato where this idea came from that the minute we feel less than completely fulfilled, we should seek something better.

  “My own thinking,” he said, “is that it comes from the 1970s. The human potential movement with Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow talking about how every facet of life should contribute to your personal growth. Maslow put self-actualization above having a good marriage in his hierarchy. So if you don’t like your friends, you find new ones. Same with a job. Same with marriage. In the 1960s, there were attitude surveys that involved university students. One study asked, What are the most important reasons for getting married? They said, I want to get married to raise a family, or so I can be economically secure, so I can have a nice home and a yard. And I want to be married to someone I love. But this part about love wasn’t the first thing they said. It was fourth or fifth.

  “But by the time you reach the 1970s and 80s,” he continued, “love is the most important reason for getting married, and the other reasons drop substantially on the list. This whole idea that love is the overriding reason for getting married is relatively new. We now see marriage based entirely on finding the perfect lover. My personal feeling is that you’ll be happier if you’re more realistic in your expectations of what you can actually get out of marriage.”

  In his book Alone Together, Amato and his cowriter talk about the difference between today’s marriages, which are more individualistic, and the pre-1970s marriages, which he calls “companionate marriages,” where you looked for a compatible and reliable partner to help you achieve mutual life goals.

  “Cooperative teamwork was the definition of a good marriage,” Amato said, “but now the focus has shifted to personal satisfaction through the marital relationship itself. Yes, he might be a good father and a good husband, but will he satisfy my deepest needs for romantic love and personal growth? The result has been a delay in the age at marriage, an increasing number of women who never marry, an increase in never-married mothers, and an increase in divorces for reasons having little to do with the spouse not being a supportive friend and cooperative teammate.”

  Choosing someone who is good enough, Amato said, is neither a personal defeat nor is it settling for less. “In most cases,” he said, “it is a reasonable and practical strategy for having a happy life over the long run.”

  I asked Amato about the studies I’d seen in the book The Case for Marriage: Why Married People Are Happier, Healthier, and Better Off Financially by Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher, which showed that one of the strongest hedges against depression—and against unhappiness more generally—is marriage.

  Did these findings apply only to great marriages, or did they also apply to “good enough” marriages?

  “Being in a dysfunctional, hostile marriage is definitely not good for a person’s sense of well-being,” he said. “But based on a variety of studies, most people in ‘good enough marriages’—nice person, works hard, will make a good parent—are happier than single people. Surveys show that the great majority of single people eventually want to be married, and people tend to be happiest when their lives are congruent with their goals. So single people who want to be married will usually get a boost in happiness when they become married, assuming they don’t make a big mistake and marry a psychopath.”

  In other words, a person doesn’t need a fairy tale marriage to achieve this happiness boost effect. Only a good enough one.

  WANTING A BOYFRIEND AND A HUSBAND

  Amato told me that both men and women have trouble accepting “good enough” partners, but in his work, he’s found that women generally have higher expectations than men. He and his colleagues studied unmarried adults in their twenties in same-sex focus groups, where they were asked questions like, “How do you know when you’ve found the right person?”

  With women, he said, the word “butterflies” came up again and again, but the guys didn’t use that word. “Guys would say, ‘I knew this person was the right person when we’d been dating for six months and she had to go away for a week, and when she was gone, I missed her so much. I thought that I felt happier when she was around. I realized how important she was.’ Women talked a lot about chemistry and fireworks.”

  With married people, Amato also found differences. “Women are more critical of relationships,” he said. “We interviewed husbands and wives and the husbands would say, ‘Well there’s this and sometimes there’s that,’ and wives would say, ‘Tell me where you want me to start!’ Men say, ‘This comes up, but it’s okay that we don’t agree on this one thing because it bothers me, but not that much.’ But his wife can’t let go of it. It might be because of the way girls’ socialization involves relationships. Women expect more of friendships, too. They expect self-disclosure and deep communication. Men are more easygoing about both relationships and friendships. They can watch a movie together and that’s fine.”

  I knew what he meant. Earlier that week, a married friend had said, “My husband loves me, I love him, he’s a good father, and he’s a wonderful person.” But now, with two toddlers, she missed the way they were when they were dating. “I want a boyfriend,” she said. “But I don’t want to give up what I have. So I guess I want a husband and a boyfriend!”

  I asked Amato if he felt there was any correlation between the higher divorce rate and the longer laundry list of traits modern women seek in a mate.

  “Oh, yeah, definitely!” he said. “One school of thought is, the increased divorce rate is because our culture became more individualistic and our expectations for marriage changed—it became a therapeutic relationship instead of a practical relationship. Marriage was supposed to improve us and make us happy. The meaning of marriage changed. Other people say it’s demographic, that there are more women in the workforce. They aren’t financially dependent on men. My personal feeling is, it’s the former. It’s about unrealistic expectations.”

  For instance, he said, more women seem to think that if they feel lonely at any point in their marriage, something’s wrong. Then they leave, and they’re even lonelier alone, or they marry someone else and are surprised when they also experience periods of loneliness.

  “They’re not lonely because of the marriage,” he said. “They’re lonely because it’s normal for people to experience loneliness.”

  Edna Pollin, the divorce attorney in Denver, told me that in her experience, many women who divorce their husbands because they “want something more” aren’t going to find it. What often happens, she said, is that her ex-husband remarries (someone much younger), and the new wife gets all of his love, companionship, financial support, and caretaking, while the wife who left him ends up in a one-bedroom apartment with a Netflix subscription and no sign of Prince Charming. Then she finally appreciates what she had, but even if her ex-husband is still single, she’s caused irreparable damage and he won’t take her back.

  Scott Haltzman, the psychiatrist at Brown University, told me that one woman came to him and said she recognized that her spouse was a good husband and fathe
r, her parents love him, he’d never have an affair, and he’s a good-looking guy, but she just “didn’t feel it anymore.” She said that she imagined herself divorced and happier.

  “So,” Haltzman told me, “I said, ‘Imagine meeting him at the sidelines at the kids’ soccer game, now that you’re divorced. Imagine his new girlfriend at his side. Imagine her looking at him with loving eyes and adoration.’ She said, ‘Okay, I could imagine that.’ So I asked, ‘Why would this woman be looking at him that way?’ and suddenly she listed all of her husband’s good qualities that she’d been overlooking. It’s a choice to look at that person with the same love in your eyes. We think our relationship is going to be perfect because our spouse will make it perfect, but two people are involved.”

  That’s why Amato suggests that people really look at why they’re thinking about breaking up or getting divorced.

  “You can ask a few questions and find out pretty quickly how someone feels about their partner,” he said. “ ‘I love him, but I’m not in love with him,’ is very different from, ‘He’s not a good spouse.’ ” In one of Amato’s studies, he looked at couples who now considered each other “good friends.” What was important over time, he found, was the ability to resolve conflict in an amicable way, general compatibility, and basic agreement on values and goals, like religion and children and how to raise children.

  “A lot comes down to more pragmatic things that keep the marriage going long-term,” he said. “This isn’t what a lot of single people find exciting. But if they want a long-term marriage, they need to start looking for the things that are going to be important in one.”

  Amato’s research confirmed what so many people in strong marriages seemed to know. Why hadn’t anyone shared these kinds of insights with me when I was dating in my twenties? Certainly there were wise people in my own community who could have filled me in.