The Boy’s Alright

Lori Gottlieb played the waiting game and lost. For over 40 years she, like so many women, waited for her Prince Charming, that mythical figure ingrained in every little girl’s head since seeing Snow White carried off on horseback. But he never arrived. It’s not that she was not attractive, smart, accomplished, or that she did not look hard enough. It’s because he never existed. 

Reality bites, which is what Gottlieb is trying to teach her fellow loveless lasses in Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough. Did she say “settling”? Is that not the word the modern woman has been taught to liken to sacrilege? Yes, and she’s also ripping the wings off Mr. Right, another figure of propaganda that has been torturing Gen X women. 

A journalist whose work has appeared in numerous publications, Gottlieb wrote a piece in the Atlantic in 2008 prodding women to stop wasting time daydreaming about Mr. Right and broaden their minds with a Mr. Real. “I had the classic Cinderella complex,” she writes. “It never occurred to me to trade those impractical glass slippers for shoes I could actually wear.” Gottlieb takes the reader through her various methods for finding a man: speed dating, matchmaker consultations, online dating, blind dates, and conversations with colleagues and friends to demonstrate how she and her peers set the bar way too high, with “settling” being the ultimate fear.

Gottlieb also dedicates a good portion of her brief to the causes of this I’d-rather-be-single-than-settle mentality. 

She makes the case that, to some extent, feminism has taught women to reach for the stars in every aspect of their lives: Go to the best school you can, get the highest degree you can, get the best job you can, make the most money you can, get the smartest address you can, get the best man you can. This has, of course, caused women to postpone marriage while bypassing scores of eligible men simply because they don’t quite measure up. According to the 2003 census, a quarter of women between the ages of 30 and 34 have never been married, a statistic four times higher than in 1970. “The goal was to go out and become self-actualized before marriage. I didn’t imagine that one day I’d be self-actualized but regretful,” she says. 

In addition to the women’s movement, Gottlieb puts blame at the doorstep of popular culture. “Read any article on dating in women’s magazines or check advice books marketed to single women, and you’ll read things like ‘you deserve to be with a man who pays. You deserve a man who always puts you first. You deserve to be with a man who rubs your feet at night.’ And of course the man in question will also be tall, dark, and handsome.”

In 1995 Ellen Fein published a dating manual entitled The Rules: Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right. (There’s that pesky term again.) Among the tenets of The Rules were that women should play hard to get, feign indifference, and let the man do the pursuing. Although some may find this strategy effective, its underlying principle is that, after all, you deserve to be chased, you are a creature unlike any other, you are a Rules girl and deserve only the best. But this is also the mindset Gottlieb argues has gotten women in the self-confident-but-lonely-princess predicament. One of the more interesting of her case studies, which she labels “the tap water incident,” involves a woman who dismissed a possible suitor because he preferred tap water to bottled water at dinner: “He ordered tap water. He took the subway to meet me. He didn’t even take a cab at night. He’s cheap,” the woman lamented. 

And another love affair bites the dust.

“If you require that someone fulfill your perfect picture,” Gottlieb quotes a psychologist, “you’re in for a long-term relationship with your fantasies.”

Stephanie Green is a writer in Washington.