This will make you happy.
Meet Lori Gottlieb. She’s a 40-year-old single mother—she got artificially inseminated because she wanted to have a baby but didn’t have a boyfriend—who has discovered the secret to why more women aren’t married: their standards aren’t low enough.
No, seriously. Gottlieb recently expanded this 2008 article from the Atlantic into a full-length book called Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough. Her basic premise? Modern women all have “checklists” for their potential life partners, and we’re too quick to dismiss guys who don’t necessarily satisfy all of those requirements. So in order to avoid being single and, therefore, miserable in our 40s, women in their 20s like you and me should forget searching for Mr. Right and, instead, make do with Mr. Good Enough.
Don’t worry if this advice sounds ridiculously retro—Gottlieb freely admits that she’s telling women to ignore modern ideas about male/female relations because, as she says at the beginning of her book’s third chapter, “feminism has completely f*cked up my love life.” All that talk about “freedom” and “choice”—yes, she actually puts those words in quotation marks—is a bunch of hooey because, as opposed to what Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan would have you believe, women really do need to get married and have lots of babies in order to be fulfilled: “The truth was, every one of my single friends wanted to be married, but none of us would admit how badly we craved it for fear of sounding weak or needy or, God forbid, antifeminist,” Gottlieb writes.
Excuse me for just a minute—AAAARRRRGGGGG!!! This crap is so ludicrous that I can only express my anger in capital letters and multiple exclamation points. I can immediately think of about fifty things that are totally wrong with Gottlieb’s thought process, but I’ll spare all of you and just mention what I think are her most glaring errors:
1) How can this lady seriously make a blanket statement like “If you say you’re not worried [about getting married], either you’re in denial or you’re lying”? How can she possibly believe that every single woman on the face of the Earth must, without exception, ultimately aspire to be a wife and mother? Her most basic assumption is incredibly insulting—especially to girls our age, who are in a better position than any women before us to really do whatever we want with our lives. (That is, unless your dream is to be a print journalist…)
2) And on that note—do any real women really keep the sort of extensive checklists Gottlieb assume we all have? I’ve got maybe three qualities that I look for in a guy (reasonably good-looking, not dumber than me, good sense of humor)… and I might even be able to let two of them slide if a dude was funny enough. Gottlieb hews closely to the age-old stereotype that women are uniformly demanding, stubborn, and delusional. What year is it, again?
3) Just like that Cosmo article I talked about last week, this book makes lowering expectations and learning to be content with what you can get the woman’s burden exclusively. Women have to settle, says Gottlieb, but men—even the fat, balding, boring dudes the author is recommending we settle for—can get with whoever they want because all chicks are desperate. Again: so insulting I can barely find the words to describe it.
4) Maybe the craziest part of all this is that for all her sage wisdom, Gottlieb herself isn’t married. She’s basing her entire philosophy on a hypothetical idea: if she had settled, maybe she would be happier now because maybe she would be in a dull but stable relationship. Gottlieb is talking about marriage like she understands it intimately, but how much of an authority can she really be? Would you ask someone allergic to dogs for tips on how to train your Weimaraner? Yeah, didn’t think so.
The bottom line: I would never want to be in a relationship with someone if I found out that we were only together because he had decided to “settle” for me—and I’m guessing that a guy would feel the same way. Imagine how devastated your boyfriend or fiancé would be if he found a copy of this book on your bedside table. I’ve got an idea for a title for your next book, Lori Gottlieb: The Case for Modern-Day Misogyny.
Unfortunately, it’d probably be a bestseller.
