Still holding out for Mr. Right, even as middle age quickly
approaches? Don’t hold your breath, says Lori Gottlieb. Here, the
author and single mom explains why true love may be a fantasy — and why
that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Excerpted from “Marry Him: The Case
for Settling for Mr. Good Enough” from the March 2008 issue of The Atlantic magazine.

About six months after my son was born, he and
I were sitting on a blanket at the park with a close friend and her
daughter. It was a sunny summer weekend, and other parents and their
kids picnicked nearby — mothers munching berries and lounging on the
grass, fathers tossing balls with their giddy toddlers. My friend and
I, who, in fits of self-empowerment, had conceived our babies with
donor sperm because we hadn’t met Mr. Right yet, surveyed the idyllic
scene.

“Ah, this
is the dream,” I said, and we nodded in silence for a minute, then
burst out laughing. In some ways, I meant it: We’d both dreamed of
motherhood, and here we were, picnicking in the park with our children.
But it was also decidedly not the dream. The dream, like that
of our mothers and their mothers from time immemorial, was to fall in
love, get married, and live happily ever after.

Of course, we’d be loath to admit it in this
day and age, but ask any soul-baring 40-year-old single heterosexual
woman what she most longs for in life, and she probably won’t tell you
it’s a better career or a smaller waistline or a bigger apartment. Most
likely, she’ll say that what she really wants is a husband (and, by
extension, a child).

To
the outside world, of course, we still call ourselves feminists and
insist — vehemently, even — that we’re independent and self-sufficient
and don’t believe in any of that damsel-in-distress stuff, but in
reality, we aren’t fish who can do without a bicycle, we’re women who
want a traditional family. And despite growing up in an era when the
centuries-old mantra to get married young was finally (and, it seemed,
refreshingly) replaced by encouragement to postpone that milestone in
pursuit of high ideals (education! career! but also true love!), every
woman I know — no matter how successful and ambitious, how financially
and emotionally secure — feels panic, occasionally coupled with
desperation, if she hits 30 and finds herself unmarried.

Oh,
I know — I’m guessing there are single 30-year-old women reading this
right now who will be writing letters to say that the women I know
aren’t widely representative, that I’ve been co-opted by the cult of
the feminist backlash, and basically, that I have no idea what I’m
talking about. And all I can say is, if you say you’re not worried,
either you’re in denial or you’re lying. In fact, take a good look in
the mirror and try to convince yourself that you’re not worried,
because you’ll see how silly your face looks when you’re being
disingenuous.

Whether
you acknowledge it or not, there’s good reason to worry. By the time
35th-birthday-brunch celebrations roll around for still-single women,
serious, irreversible life issues masquerading as “jokes” creep into
public conversation: Well, I don’t feel old, but my eggs sure do! or Maybe this year I’ll marry Todd. I’m not getting any younger! The
birthday girl smiles a bit too widely as she delivers these lines, and
everyone laughs a little too hard for a little too long, not because we
find these sentiments funny, but because we’re awkwardly acknowledging
how unfunny they are. At their core, they pose one of the most
complicated, painful, and pervasive dilemmas many single women are
forced to grapple with nowadays: Is it better to be alone, or to settle?

My
advice is this: Settle! That’s right. Don’t worry about passion or
intense connection. Don’t nix a guy based on his annoying habit of
yelling “Bravo!” in movie theaters. Overlook his halitosis or abysmal
sense of aesthetics. Because if you want to have the infrastructure in
place to have a family, settling is the way to go. Based on my
observations, in fact, 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. (It’s hard to maintain that
level of zing when the conversation morphs into discussions about who’s changing the diapers or balancing the checkbook.)

Obviously, I wasn’t always an advocate of
settling. In fact, it took not settling to make me realize that
settling is the better option, and even though settling is a rampant
phenomenon, talking about it in a positive light makes people
profoundly uncomfortable. Whenever I make the case for settling, people
look at me with creased brows of disapproval or frowns of
disappointment, the way a child might look at an older sibling who just
informed her that Jerry’s Kids aren’t going to walk, even if you send
them money. It’s not only politically incorrect to get behind settling,
it’s downright un-American. Our culture tells us to keep our eyes on
the prize (while our mothers, who know better, tell us not to be so
picky), and the theme of holding out for true love (whatever that is — look at the divorce rate) permeates our collective mentality.

Even situation comedies, starting in the 1970s with The Mary Tyler Moore Show and going all the way to Friends,
feature endearing single women in the dating trenches, and there’s
supposed to be something romantic and even heroic about their search
for true love. Of course, the crucial difference is that, whereas the
earlier series begins after Mary has been jilted by her fiancé, the
more modern-day Friends opens as Rachel Green leaves her nice-guy
orthodontist fiancé at the altar simply because she isn’t feeling it.
But either way, in episode after episode, as both women continue to be
unlucky in love, settling starts to look pretty darn appealing. Mary is
supposed to be contentedly independent and fulfilled by her newsroom
family, but in fact her life seems lonely. Are we to assume that at the
end of the series, Mary, by then in her late 30s, found her soul mate
after the lights in the newsroom went out and her work family was
disbanded? If her experience was anything like mine or that of my
single friends, it’s unlikely. And while Rachel and her supposed soul
mate, Ross, finally get together (for the umpteenth time) in the finale
of Friends, do we feel confident that she’ll be happier with
Ross than she would have been had she settled down with Barry, the
orthodontist, 10 years earlier? She and Ross have passion but have
never had long-term stability, and the fireworks she experiences with
him but not with Barry might actually turn out to be a liability, given
how many times their relationship has already gone up in flames. It’s
equally questionable whether Sex and the City’s Carrie
Bradshaw, who cheated on her kindhearted and generous boyfriend, Aidan,
only to end up with the more exciting but self-absorbed Mr. Big, will
be better off in the framework of marriage and family. (Some time after
the breakup, when Carrie ran into Aidan on the street, he was carrying
his infant in a Baby Björn. Can anyone imagine Mr. Big walking around
with a Björn?)

When
we’re holding out for deep romantic love, we have the fantasy that this
level of passionate intensity will make us happier. But marrying Mr.
Good Enough might be an equally viable option, especially if you’re
looking for a stable, reliable life companion. Madame Bovary might not
see it that way, but if she’d remained single, I’ll bet she would have
been even more depressed than she was while living with her tedious but
caring husband.

What
I didn’t realize when I decided, in my 30s, to break up with boyfriends
I might otherwise have ended up marrying, is that while settling seems
like an enormous act of resignation when you’re looking at it from the
vantage point of a single person, once you take the plunge and do it,
you’ll probably be relatively content. It sounds obvious now, but I
didn’t fully appreciate back then that what makes for a good marriage
isn’t necessarily what makes for a good romantic relationship. Once
you’re married, it’s not about whom you want to go on vacation with;
it’s about whom you want to run a household with. Marriage isn’t a
passion-fest; it’s more like a partnership formed to run a very small,
mundane, and often boring nonprofit business. And I mean this in a good
way. I don’t mean to say that settling is ideal. I’m simply saying that
it might have gotten an undeservedly bad rap. As the only single woman
in my son’s mommy-and-me group, I used to listen each week to a litany
of unrelenting complaints about people’s husbands and feel pretty good
about my decision to hold out for the right guy, only to realize that
these women 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. They, like me, would rather feel alone in a marriage
than actually be alone, because they, like me, realize that marriage
ultimately isn’t about cosmic connection — it’s about how having a
teammate, even if he’s not the love of your life, is better than not
having one at all.

The
couples my friend and I saw at the park that summer were enviable but
not because they seemed so in love — they were enviable because the
husbands played with the kids for 20 minutes so their wives could eat
lunch. In practice, my married friends with kids don’t spend that much
time with their husbands anyway (between work and child care), and in
many cases, their biggest complaint seems to be that they never see
each other. So if you rarely see your husband — but he’s a decent guy
who takes out the trash and sets up the baby gear, and he provides a
second income that allows you to spend time with your child instead of
working 60 hours a week to support a family on your own — how much does
it matter whether the guy you marry is The One?

It’s
not that I’ve become jaded to the point that I don’t believe in, or
even crave, romantic connection. It’s that my understanding of it has
changed. In my formative years, romance was John Cusack and Ione Skye
in Say Anything. But when I think about marriage nowadays, my
role models are the television characters Will and Grace, who, though
Will was gay and his relationship with Grace was platonic, were one of
the most romantic couples I can think of. What I long for in a marriage
is that sense of having a partner in crime. Someone who knows your
day-to-day trivia. Someone who both calls you on your bullshit and puts
up with your quirks. So what if Will and Grace weren’t having sex with
each other? How many long-married couples are having much sex anyway?

“I just want someone who’s willing to be in
the trenches with me,” my single friend Jennifer told me, “and I never
thought of marriage that way before.” Two of Jennifer’s friends married
men who Jennifer believes aren’t even straight, and while Jennifer
wouldn’t have made that choice a few years back, she wonders whether
she might be capable of it in the future. “Maybe they understood
something that I didn’t,” she said.

What
they understood is this: as your priorities change from romance to
family, the so-called “deal breakers” change. Some guys aren’t worldly,
but they’d make great dads. Or you walk into a room and start talking
to this person who is 5′4" and has an unfortunate nose, but he “gets”
you. My long-married friend Renée offered this dating advice to me in
an e-mail: “I would say even if he’s not the love of your life, make
sure he’s someone you respect intellectually, makes you laugh,
appreciates you … I bet there are plenty of these men in the older,
overweight, and bald category (which they all eventually become
anyway).”

She wasn’t joking.

A number of my single women friends admit (in
hushed voices and after I swear I won’t use their real names here) that
they’d readily settle now but wouldn’t have 10 years ago. They believe
that part of the problem is that we grew up idealizing marriage — and
that if we’d had a more realistic understanding of its cold, hard
benefits, we might have done things differently. Instead, we grew up
thinking that marriage meant feeling some kind of divine spark, and so
we walked away from uninspiring relationships that might have made us
happy in the context of a family.

All
marriages, of course, involve compromise, but where’s the cutoff?
Where’s the line between compromising and settling, and at what age
does that line seem to fade away? Choosing to spend your life with a
guy who doesn’t delight in the small things in life might be considered
settling at 30, but not at 35. By 40, if you get a cold shiver down
your spine at the thought of embracing a certain guy, but you enjoy his
company more than anyone else’s, is that settling or making an adult
compromise?

Take
the date I went on last night. The guy was substantially older. He had
a long history of major depression and said, in reference to the movies
he was writing, “I’m fascinated by comas” and “I have a strong interest
in terrorists.” He’d never been married. He was rude to the waiter. But
he very much wanted a family, and he was successful, handsome, and
smart. As I looked at him from across the table, I thought, Yeah, I’ll see him again. Maybe I can settle for that. But my very next thought was, Maybe I can settle for better. It’s like musical chairs — when do you take a seat, any seat, just so you’re not left standing alone?

Back
when I was still convinced I’d find my soul mate, I did, although I
never articulated this, have certain requirements. I thought that the
person I married would have to have a sense of wonderment about the
world, would be both spontaneous and grounded, and would acknowledge
that life is hard but also be able to navigate its ups and downs with
humor. Many of the guys I dated possessed these qualities, but if one
of them lacked a certain degree of kindness, another didn’t seem
emotionally stable enough, and another’s values clashed with mine.
Others were sweet but so boring that I preferred reading during dinner
to sitting through another tedious conversation. I also dated someone
who appeared to be highly compatible with me — we had much in common,
and strong physical chemistry — but while our sensibilities were
similar, they proved to be a half-note off, so we never quite felt in
harmony, or never viewed the world through quite the same lens.

Now,
though, I realize that if I don’t want to be alone for the rest of my
life, I’m at the age where I’ll likely need to settle for someone who
is settling for me. What I and many women who hold out for true love
forget is that we won’t always have the same appeal that we may have
had in our 20s and early 30s. Having turned 40, I now have wrinkles,
bags under my eyes, and hair in places I didn’t know hair could grow on
women. With my nonworking life consumed by thoughts of potty training
and play dates, I’ve become a far less interesting person than the one
who went on hiking adventures and performed at comedy clubs. But when I
chose to have a baby on my own, the plan was that I would continue to
search for true connection afterward; it certainly wasn’t that I would
have a baby alone only to settle later. After all, wouldn’t it have
been wiser to settle for a higher caliber of “not Mr. Right” while my
marital value was at its peak?

Those
of us who choose not to settle in hopes of finding a soul mate later
are almost like teenagers who believe they’re invulnerable to dying in
a drunk-driving accident. We lose sight of our mortality. We forget
that we, too, will age and become less alluring. And even if some men
do find us engaging, and they’re ready to have a family, they’ll likely
decide to marry someone younger with whom they can have their own
biological children. Which is all the more reason to settle before
settling is no longer an option.

I’ll
be the first to admit that there’s something objectionable about making
the case for settling, because it’s based on the premise that women’s
biological clocks place them at the mercy of men, and that therefore a
power dynamic dictates what should be an affair solely of the heart
(not the heart and the ovaries). But I’m not the only woman
who accepts settling as a valid choice—apparently so do the millions
who buy best-selling relationship books that advocate settling but
that, so as not to offend, simply spin the concept as a form of female
empowerment.

Take, for instance, books like Men Are Like Fish: What Every Woman Needs to Know About Catching a Man or Find a Husband After 35 Using What I Learned at Harvard

Business School,
whose titles alone make it clear that today’s supposedly progressive
bachelorettes aren’t waiting for old-fashioned true love to strike
before they can get married. Instead, they’re buying dozens of
proactive coaching manuals to learn how to strategically land a man.
The actual man in question, though, seems so irrelevant that, to my
mind, these women might as well grab a well-dressed guy off the street,
drag him into the nearest bar, buy him a drink, and ask him to marry
her. (Or, to retain her “power,” she should manipulate him into asking her.)

The
approaches in these books may differ, but the message is the same: more
important than love is marriage. To achieve that goal, women across the
country are poring over guidebooks that all boil down to determining,
“Does he like me?,” while completely overlooking the equally essential
question, “Do I like him?” In other words, whatever compromises you
have to make — including, but not limited to, pretending to be or
actually becoming an entirely different person — make sure that you get
some schmo to propose to you before you turn into a spinster.

Last year’s Why Smart Men Marry Smart Women makes
the most blatant case for settling: if women were more willing to
“think outside the box,” as one of the book’s married sources advises,
many of them would be married. The author then trots out tales of
professional, accomplished women happily dating a plumber, a park
ranger, and an Army helicopter nurse. The moral is supposed to be
“Don’t be too picky” but many of the anecdotes quote women who seem to
be trying to convince not just the reader, but themselves, that they
haven’t settled. “I should be with some guy with a vast vocabulary who
is very smart,” said Heather, a 30-year-old lawyer turned journalist.
Instead, she’s dating an actor who didn’t finish college. “My boyfriend
is fun, he’s smart, but he hasn’t gone through years of school. He
wanted to pursue acting. And you can tell — he doesn’t have that
background, and it never ever once bothered me. But for everyone else,
[his lack of education] is what they see.” Another woman says she dates
“the ‘secrets’ … guys other women don’t recognize as great.” How’s that
for damning praise?

Meanwhile,
in sugarcoating this message, the authors often resort to flattery,
telling the reader to remember how fabulous, attractive, charming, and
intelligent she is, in the hopes that she’ll project a more confident
vibe on dates. In my case, though, the flattery backfired. I read these
books thinking, Wait, if I’m such a great catch, why should I
settle for anyone less than my equal? If I’m so fabulous, don’t I
deserve true romantic connection?

Only one popular book that I can think of in
the vast “find a man” genre (like most single women confounded by their
singleness, I’m embarrassingly well versed) takes the opposite
approach. In He’s Just Not That Into You, written by the
happily married Greg Behrendt and the unhappily single Liz Tuccillo,
the duo exhorts women not to settle. But the book’s format is telling:
Behrendt gives perky pep talks to women unable to find a worthy match,
while Tuccillo repeatedly comments on how hard it is to take her
co-author’s advice, because while being with a partner who is “beneath
you” (Behrendt’s term) is problematic, being single just plain “sucks”
(Tuccillo’s term).

Before I got pregnant, though, I also read single-mom books such as Choosing Single Motherhood: The Thinking Woman’s Guide,
whose chapter titles “Can I Afford It?” and “Dealing With the Stress”
seemed like realistic antidotes to the faux-empowering man-hunting
manual headings like “A Little Lingerie Can Go a Long Way.” But the
book’s author, Mikki Morrissette, held out a tantalizing carrot. In her
introduction, she describes having a daughter on her own; then, she
writes, a few years later and five months pregnant with her son, “I met
a guy I fell in love with. He and my daughter were in the delivery room
when my son was born in January 2004.” Each time I read about single
women having babies on their own and thriving instead of settling for
Mr. Wrong and hiring a divorce lawyer, I felt all jazzed and ready to
go. At the time, I truly believed, “I can have it all — a baby now, my
soul mate later!”

Well … ha! Hahahaha. And ha.

Just
as the relationship books fail to mention what happens after you
triumphantly land a husband (you actually have to live with each
other), these single-mom books fail to mention that once you have a
baby alone, not only do you age about 10 years in the first 10 months,
but if you don’t have time to shower, eat, urinate in a timely manner,
or even leave the house except for work, where you spend every waking
moment that your child is at day care, there’s very little chance that
a man — much less The One — is going to knock on your door and join that party.

They also gloss over the cost of dating as a
single mom: The time and money spent on online dating (because there
are no single men at toddler birthday parties); the babysitter tab for
all those boring blind dates; and, most frustrating, hours spent away
from your beloved child. Even women who settle but end up divorced
might be in a better position than those of us who became mothers on
our own, because many ex-wives get both child-support payments and a
free night off when the kids go to Dad’s house for a sleepover.

Never-married
moms don’t get the night off. At the end of the evening, we rush home
to pay the babysitter, make any houseguest tiptoe around and speak in a
hushed voice, then wake up at 6 a.m. at the first cries of “Mommy!”

Try bringing a guy home to that.

To read the rest of this article from the March issue of The Atlantic magazine, visit theatlantic.com.