relationships.milaulas.com
Settling for Mr. “Good Enough”
Should women learn to accept being with a man who is good, but who doesn’t feel like the “one”? Here are the women’s thoughts.
Christen
My first thought after reading Marry Him! was, ‘why do I remember this name?’ Turns out, I remember Lori Gottlieb from a feature on This American Life in a show called Mind Games where she describes something akin to falling in love with a guy based on a photo within a magazine’s contributor page.
The short begins with Ms. Gottlieb writing this man with a completely fictional account of meeting him at an airport and ends with her realizing she’s not really interested in the guy, her subsequent confession that the airport story was fabricated, and the guy insisting that he remembers the fake event!
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At the time, I thought it was pure crazy and felt she was unrealistically invested in the story of it all. Reading “Marry Him!” I’m fairly convinced that the story is the goal; not love, not a relationship, not a living breathing being to wake up to every day, but pure and simple fiction.
Cutting through the self-deprecation and rather annoying “given” that no woman could ever really be happy without a husband and kids, all I hear is Lori Gottlieb’s desire for the perfect traditional family story; one that includes a beautiful baby, a handsome husband and all the impressive finery that fits into meeting Mr. Wonderful, even as she promotes the new pitch…settling.
Giving up the laundry list, recognizing our shallow desires as negatives, and settling for a guy is the story that sells today (despite the fact that most moms have been sharing that wisdom with their daughters for generations–along with you can’t do/have it all. Shocking!), but in some crazy proof of her point, Lori doesn’t settle.
She doesn’t marry a socially awkward, short, or sometimes smelly guy, or ditch her checklist and be honest about an unrealistic search for romantic movie love, she picks a (perfectly 2-dimensional) man out of a donor catalogue, has a child, lounges in a self-described “idyllic scene” at a park and complains to her friend about how she’s not really living “the dream” because she hasn’t found “Mr. Right.”
So whether she “settles” or not, I get the feeling Ms. Gottlieb is just seeking a character to fit the role of her male sidekick. I don’t sense any introspection, or anger, shame or loss about the men she broke up with, or could have married if not for some previously insurmountable and now maybe minor flaw.
It seems to me that she still wants a guy who makes the day-to-day feel more like “Say Anything,” or at the very least “Will & Grace” (Because who needs sex, right?). But let’s say we jump into movie world for a second and Gottlieb is the pretty “brain”, Diane Court. Our simple hero, Lloyd Dobler, approaches her with boom box in hand…are we really to assume that she would “settle” for a guy who doesn’t “want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career” and whose only passion in life is kickboxing? I kinda doubt it.
Christine:
The moment I began reading this article, I became infuriated with Lori Gottlieb. What woman wouldn’t – even one in a similar position to the author – be annoyed with her notion of settling for less than the best in relationships? She basically dismantles the whole idea that Disney movies and the “Secret” shoved down women’s throats for years – the perfect man is out there if you are patient and don’t accept anything less.
Wait. I guess she has a point. Dammit.
That’s the thing about her book (one I have yet to read), my friend said – it goes beyond Gottlieb’s strikingly obvious issues and includes a lot of other people’s true experiences, ones that show many women will discard men based on silly issues, like feet that are too big or eyes that twitch a little too often. And they do this in the name of holding out for the “perfect” man.
I get that. I’m sure at different points in my life, I’ve let a good guy go because his hair was parted too closely to the middle, or he emailed me too many times too early in the relationship. But the reality is, that had more to do with me and the work I needed to do than necessarily changing course and giving those guys a chance. I wouldn’t have given much in a relationship at that point, so in some ways, those ridiculous reasons to not date them mirrored a much larger issue going on inside of me.
And that is something that Lori doesn’t touch upon, at least in the Atlantic article. She talks incessantly about characters on TV who waited for that romantic love (and were at least partially insane, because they were, well, TV characters) and got it, but how that’s not how it really works in a long-lasting, stable relationship (well, duh). But she fails to focus on the fact that she needed to go through her own growth, and probably would have made a shitty partner for those poor slubs. So who got off easy here?
Nor do I believe that the married women who have husbands that aren’t around enough or don’t pull their weight “wouldn’t trade places with me for a second, no matter how dull their marriages might be or how desperately they might long for a different husband.” I know some of these women, and they are by far, the unhappiest women I know. Who wants to take care of a baby on your own when you actually do have a partner? Or carry around a 15-pound baby and another 10 pounds of resentment?
The more I read around the internet about Ms. Gottlieb’s style, the more I gathered how much of her writing is “creative non-fiction”, as Christen alluded to. Hey, I’m all about art imitating life, but if you’re gonna put it out there, you gotta be authentic, plain and simple. Especially when it’s to such a large and eager crowd.
But ah, there it is. A large and eager crowd only appears when something controversial shows up. Would her books have been such best sellers if she had said, “I realized I lacked self-love, and that’s why I saw these men in the way I did”? Yeah, probably not.
And no, Lori, my 32-year-old self is not lying to its reflection in the mirror when it says it doesn’t need marriage or babies. That’s not subscribing to false feminist ideals; that’s being true to myself, which is the most important practice.