I hope people, and myself, would incorporate this useful article into our lives. It'll really save us a whole lot of trouble. Her words sent a strong shockwave through my mind and made me just wonder, and just wonder, if I should really just settle for Mr. Good Enough. It indeed is better than just Mr. Nobody!
Taken from : http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/relationships/article7009556.ece
Wise girls settle for Mr Good Enough
Lori Gottlieb’s marriage advice has caused a storm. She tells us why women should get real about romance
Author : Lori Gottleib
According to Jewish lore, anyone who sets up three successful matches secures a place in heaven. If that’s so, the queen of heavenly matchmakers must be Lori Gottlieb, author of Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr Good Enough. Indeed, I owe my own marriage, in part, to Gottlieb. It wasn’t her match-making skills but her straight talk that helped me down the aisle.
The point of her new book, due out in Britain this spring, is that many single women get to a state of desperation in searching for a husband because they don’t make wise decisions early on, such as dating dependable men rather than handsome cads — the sort who take you to bed for six months, spend your money, rip out your heart and stomp it to a bloody pulp.
When I speak to Gottlieb for her first British interview, I tell her that my mother sent me the original 2008 magazine article on which her book is based within, oh, about five minutes of publication. In the article Gottlieb wrote of her deep regret at having passed on all the nice guys in her thirties in the search for allconsuming love.
Her stark message ran directly counter to the neofeminist Sex and the Cityperpetuated mantra that we should all hold out for The One because we’re worth it. “Don’t worry about passion or intense connection,” Gottlieb wrote, “because if you want to have the infrastructure in place to have a family, settling is the way to go.
“Based on my observations, settling will probably make you happier in the long run, since many of those who marry with great expectations become more disillusioned with each passing year.”
Her words set off a furore that the book has now reignited. Last week, as Marry Him came out in America, the papers were full of thirtysomethings passionately arguing that every girl should hold out for Mr Perfect against others who believe practicality rules: that Mr Second Best is better than Mr Nobody.
I married my husband for love but I’d be lying if I said that Gottlieb’s dry-eyed observation that family life is not about bodice-ripping passion but akin to “running a small tedious non-profit business” didn’t affect me. Besides, at 33 I wasn’t getting any younger. Woe betide the naive singleton who assumes her choice of men will widen, rather than narrow, with time.
“The truth is, once you’re closing in on 40 you can certainly find love and companionship and all those things but it’s probably going to look different from what you imagined,” Gottlieb says. “I look at my friends who got married later on and I look at who they married and let me tell you, it’s very different from who they would have married 10 years earlier.”
It’s a bitter pill and one that Gottlieb, 42, has herself been forced to swallow. Having accepted that she would not find a man in time to have a conventional family, she had a baby using donor sperm in her late thirties. She then resumed dating as a single mother, banking on the idea that a toddler-friendly George Clooney would materialise now that she was older, wiser and without a loudly ticking biological clock.
As Marry Him chronicles, she was wrong — brutally so. She began to see all those empowering, so-called truisms about women reaching their sexual prime in middle age as a load of hooey. Today she is still single and on a mission to prevent young women interested in having a conventional family from making the same mistakes.
“I’m all for the feminist movement but I think what happened is we took certain feminist ideals — for instance, the idea of ‘you can have it all’, or ‘you deserve the best’, or girl power in general — and we applied that to dating,” she says. “That doesn’t work because we’re dealing with real life and where human beings are concerned you have to make a compromise.”
Gottlieb doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to the competitive reality of trying to find a mate. The problem is not, she says, that there’s an epidemic of commitment phobia among the males.
“If you think all men are commitment-phobes, then commitment-phobes are clearly the only kind of man you date,” she says tartly.
Rather, women don’t know how to manage their own expectations when it comes to looking for a suitable man. Single women often declare they’d “rather be alone” than settle for someone who doesn’t fill out their (usually unrealistic) checklist. Gottlieb’s advice is: think carefully, ladies. Because, with that mentality, alone is how you’re probably going to end up.
“Feminism gave women this sense of entitlement that we deserve someone who’s perfect. And then we meet the so-called perfect guy and he’s out of our league and has no interest in us and we tell our girlfriends, ‘He must be secretly gay’ when in fact he’s just really not that into us,” she says.
Add to this the heart-sinking demographics. Gottlieb likens being single in your late thirties to a terrifying game of musical chairs in which the options keep narrowing the longer you refuse to sit down. In other words, the more stubbornly you hold out for The One and the more you invest in that particular fantasy, the less likely he is to appear. Even if he did miraculously appear in a white convertible Porsche, who is more likely to be The One’s One? You or the carefree 25-year-old who’s putting herself through university by doing a bit of modelling on the side?
“Some people think it’s horrible to talk about it, but I think it’s actually really empowering,” Gottlieb insists.
“If you are in denial of this you will make bad decisions and end up single. Whereas if you look at the reality and say: okay, the reality is, as I get older there are going to be fewer available men because people are going to be married; there are going to be fewer available men in my age group because men would like to date someone who is younger and more fertile; there will be fewer available men that I will be interested in because the best guys have already been married. Then maybe you can make an informed choice while you still have time.”
This is wisdom born of Gottlieb’s struggle to come to grips with her own diminishing value on the dating market. It involved taking an honest look in the mirror, literally and figuratively: “A lot of it was about self-perception. I kept looking at profiles of these guys online and thinking: they look middle-aged, yuck! But then I realised that I probably look middle-aged to them, too. I’m frozen in time in my own mind. I picture myself at 30. But the truth is I have wrinkles and jowls and grey hairs. Everything’s changed.”
Her book chronicles her search for a husband. She travels around the United States talking to experts, she hires a dating coach, she consults a professional matchmaker and trawls the internet, always coming back to the same home truth. To paraphrase Clint Eastwood: when it comes to dating, deserve’s got nothing to do with it.
“The issue of disappointment is real. There was one moment with my dating coach when I was looking over the profiles of potential dates and he was trying to get me to change my settings in terms of height and age and I said, ‘This sucks!’ and he said, ‘Well, this is reality’. And I said, ‘Reality sucks!’ and he said, ‘If you didn’t have the fantasy, the reality would be just fine’.”
As for Gottlieb’s reality, she’s got a hit book, a Hollywood movie deal and a son she adores — everything, in other words, except the very thing she has made a career of advising others how to obtain. But she’s not giving up the search for Mr Good Enough. Not just yet.
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