Mr Good Enough: The case for choosing a Real Man over holding out for Mr Perfect. Lori Gottlieb

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СКАЧАТЬ to talk endlessly with her girlfriends about why he’s not right for her, and why maybe she should look for someone better. There was always the assumption that she’d end up with her “true love” in the end—that there was a single soul mate and therefore a clear right choice when it came to a partner. These characters worried about making a mistake because there seemed to be only one chance at getting right, so they’d better be darn sure this guy was it. Nobody seemed to be saying there might be lots of “right” guys. In real life, of course, each partner has his pleasures and his drawbacks, but we rarely see real life played out onscreen.

       “REALITY” SHOWS

      The closest we get to “real life” are so-called reality shows like The Bachelor. It’s telling that the audience was horrified when Brad, one season’s bachelor, whittled his choices down to two women, picked DeAnna, then changed his mind before he was supposed to propose to her.

      The audience was incensed: What was wrong with DeAnna, they wanted to know. She was charming, family-oriented, smart, and attractive. Who did Brad think he was, letting her go?

      But Brad just wasn’t feeling it. If a woman turns down a perfectly acceptable partner because she just isn’t feeling it, we support her and tell her to go find “true love.” We say that she made an empowered decision. But if a man turns down a perfectly acceptable partner because he’s just not feeling it, he’s a villain. Brad was whipped on everything from talk shows to blogs because viewers wanted him to take this woman and grow into that big love if he didn’t feel it right from the start. They didn’t want him to hold out for something better.

      DeAnna, of course, got her own shot on The Bachelorette, but when she was down to her final two candidates, she choose the wacky snowboarder who wasn’t sure he was ready to get married and have babies over the single dad who doted on her and who already lived the domestic life she claimed to want so badly. Audiences supported her decision to pick romance over practicality. For a woman, viewers seemed to think, romance was more important. Never mind that DeAnna later broke off her engagement.

      The messages about love that we take away from the media are as contradictory as they are counterproductive. If the typical love story goes like this—Boy meets Girl. Boy and Girl hate each other. Boy and Girl exchange witty banter. Boy and Girl grudgingly realize they love each other. Boy and Girl live happily ever after (although we never see this part)—what message does that send? Should we look for the person who annoys us initially or who attracts us initially? And if love comes when we least expect it, does that mean if we actively seek love, it’s not true love? That we shouldn’t even try because true love will find us only when we aren’t looking? Should we go by the message “You can’t hurry love” or “Get out there and be proactive"?

      Of course, as confused as I was, I knew that I wasn’t still single just because I’d seen too many romantic comedies or watched too much reality TV. Earlier generations of women grew up on similar themes, but my generation and those after me have another set of conflicting messages to make sense of, too: What does it mean to be empowered and also want happily ever after? In other words, if feminism taught us that we don’t really need the White Knight, how do we reconcile that with the fact that many of us are women who want a husband and a family?

      If the fairy tale is to “have it all,” what does “having it all” even mean?

3 How Feminism Fucked Up My Love Life

      I know this is an unpopular thing to say, but feminism has completely fucked up my love life. To be fair, it’s not feminism, exactly—after all, “feminism” never published a dating manual—but what I considered to be “the feminist way of doing things” certainly didn’t help. It’s not that I would give back the gains of feminism for anything. Believe me, I wouldn’t. It’s just that I wish I hadn’t tried to apply what I believed to be “feminist ideals” to dating.

      Growing up, my friends and I thought feminism was fabulous. To us, feminism meant we had “freedom” and “choice” in all aspects of our lives. We could pursue professional careers, take time to “find ourselves” before getting married, decide not to get married at all, and have our sexual needs met whenever we felt like it. The fact that we didn’t need a man to have a fulfilling life felt empowering. After all, who wanted to do what our moms did—find a man, marry him, and have kids—all before most of us had gotten our first promotion?

      But then, in our late twenties and early thirties, as more of us moved from relationship to relationship, or went long periods with no meaningful relationship at all, we didn’t feel quite so empowered. 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. We were the generation of women who were supposed to be independent and self-sufficient, but we didn’t have a clue how to navigate this modern terrain without sacrificing some core desires.

      We didn’t want yet another Sunday brunch with the girls. We wanted a lifetime with The Guy.

      Meanwhile, we were praised for our ambition out in the world, but at the same time told that our ambition would distract us from finding a husband. That never made sense to me. I don’t think that women are so caught up in their careers that they “forget” to focus on their personal lives. After all, 90 percent of conversations most women I know of dating age have, even those trying to make partner in a law firm or slogging through a medical residency, involve men: who the cute new doctor is at the hospital, whether to move in with a boyfriend, what it means that the guy stopped calling after five dates. In fact, working in environments where we’re likely to meet interesting men may actually be a dating advantage. Our long hours and high-minded aspirations weren’t the problem, but none of us could figure out what was.

      It wasn’t until I found myself still single in my late thirties that something hit me. Maybe the problem was this misconception: We thought that “having it all” equaled “happily ever after.”

      Except that a lot of us weren’t so happy.

      Instead, I started to see a pattern that went like this: We grew up believing that we could “have it all.” “Having it all” meant that we shouldn’t compromise in any area of life, including dating. Not compromising meant “having high standards.” The higher our standards, the more “empowered” we were.

      But were we?

      Here’s what actually happened: Empowerment somehow became synonymous with having impossible standards and disregarding the fact that in real life, you can’t get everything you want, when you want it, on your terms only. Which is exactly how many of us empowered ourselves out of a good mate.

       I HAD IT ALL—AT 23

      According to the most recent Census Bureau report, one-third of men and one-fourth of women between 30 and 34 have never been married. These numbers are four times higher than they were in 1970. At first, this might look like a positive trend—people are more mature at the age of marriage now. But many single women I talked to feel differently. It may seem liberating to look for love when it’s expected that we’ll date a lot of people (and have a lot of choices) before we find The One, but dating all these people ends up being exhausting and painful, not to mention confusing. The cultural pressure to marry later (but not too late!) often hurts us more than it helps us.

      Jessica, a 29-year-old communications director for a museum, told me about the night, six years ago, when her college boyfriend, Dave, proposed to her. They were both almost 23 and living in Chicago. He was in medical school. СКАЧАТЬ