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СКАЧАТЬ she was right: It took me all of three minutes to give a detailed description of my ideal guy. Even if I’d never written a list, I clearly kept a mental file. Then she took it a step further: Hone down the list to make it more realistic.

      I gave it a try. I crossed off some easy items—he doesn’t have to know how to cook (besides, he could always learn); if he’s 5’7” instead of 5’10", I could live with that. But even as I eliminated some qualities, I found it hard to get rid of most entirely. Maybe I could compromise on “funny,” but where do you draw the line between a guy whose banter makes your heart race and one whose sense of humor merely makes you smile? On a sliding scale, how much passion would he need to be considered “passionate”?

      There were so many variables. In the past, I dated a freelance artist, only to say that next time I wanted someone financially stable. Then I dated a doctor, but we didn’t connect creatively. Finding a financially stable artist or a doctor who wrote novels in his spare time wasn’t impossible—but pretty rare. And combine that with all the other characteristics I wanted, not to mention “chemistry,” and suddenly the mystery of why I was still single was solved.

      Maybe the man I was looking for on paper simply didn’t exist. And maybe, as my friend suggested, some of these qualities weren’t that important when it came to a happy marriage anyway.

      Yikes. What if she was right? Had I overlooked men who might have turned out to be great husbands because I was drawn to an instant spark and a checklist instead of a solid life partner?

      Of course, I wasn’t completely clueless. By the time I hit 30, I knew that nobody was perfect (including me) and that whoever I married would be a flawed human being like the rest of us. I wasn’t expecting perfection so much as intense connection. I also knew that none of that heady first-blush excitement guaranteed everlasting love, but I felt that without this initial launching pad, romance would never get off the ground. As far as I was concerned, there was no point in going on a second date if there wasn’t a strong attraction on the first.

      So, at least in the beginning of a relationship, I expected to be dazzled (even if that meant being so distracted by my object of affection that I nearly lost my job and risked my very livelihood). I expected to “just know” that he was The One (even if it often happened that a year later, I’d “just know” that I wanted to break up). I expected to feel some sort of divine connection (even if that meant being in a constant state of nausea and having an obsessive need to check my voice mail every thirty minutes). This was what “falling in love” felt like, right?

      Meanwhile, my unconscious husband-shopping list grew even longer. Like a lot of women, the older I got, the more things I wanted in a guy, because while life experience taught me what I didn’t want in a relationship, it also gave me a better sense of what I did want. So the thinking would go: The last guy wasn’t X, so next time I want X … plus all the things I had on my list before. Basically, my Husband Store went from a six-story building to the world’s tallest skyscraper. And I didn’t think I was alone.

      Could this be one reason that in 1975, almost 90 percent of women in the United States were married by age 30 but in 2004, only a little more than half were? Or why the percentages of never-married women in every age group studied by the U.S. Census Bureau (from 25 to 44) more than doubled between 1970 and 2006?

      I wanted to find out.

       A DIFFERENT KIND OF LOVE STORY

      This book is a love story. It’s not mine, exactly, but it could be yours.

      It all started with a dinner I had with my editor at the Atlantic. I was 39 years old, a journalist and single mother with a toddler, and I was grumbling about a date I’d had the night before with a lisping 45-year-old lawyer who chewed with his mouth open and talked nonstop for three hours about his ex-wife but failed to ask a single question about me. I didn’t know if I had it in me to go on another date. Ever. I was so tired of having to talk to strangers over plates of pasta when all I wanted was to hang out in sweatpants with my husband on a Saturday night, like my married friends did.

      How had this become my life?

      Just two years earlier, I’d written “The XY Files” for the Atlantic, where I told the story of my decision, at age 37, to have a baby on my own. Obviously, this wasn’t my childhood dream, but neither was marrying someone who wasn’t The One—and so far I didn’t think I’d found him. I wanted to have a baby while I still could, so instead of signing up with another online dating site, I registered with an online sperm donor site. Soon I found myself pregnant and still hopeful that I’d meet Mr. Right. My plan was to have a baby first, find “true love” later. At the time, I felt empowered and even wrote in the pages of the magazine that what I was doing seemed somewhat romantic.

      Well … hahahahahahaha!

      Now, at dinner with my editor, I couldn’t stop laughing. Of course, I was ecstatically in love with my child, but let’s face it: Things weren’t so romantic over in the Gottlieb household. Like my married friends with small children, I was sleep-deprived, cranky, and overwhelmed, but unlike them, I was doing it all alone. Sure, sometimes they complained about their husbands and, at first, I felt proud of my decision not to end up like them—in what seemed like less-than-ideal marriages, with less-than-ideal spouses. But it didn’t take long before I realized that none of them would trade places with me for a second. In fact, despite their complaints, they actually were really happy—and in many cases, happier than they’d ever been. All those things that seemed so important when they were dating now had little relevance to their lives. Instead, the idea of choosing to run a household together—as unglamorous and challenging and mundane as that was—seemed to be the ultimate act of “true love.” Why hadn’t I looked at marriage that way five years ago?

      “If I knew then what I know now,” I told my editor, “I would have approached dating differently.” But how could I have known?

      As a single 42-year-old friend put it, for many women it’s a Catch-22. “If I’d settled at thirty-nine,” she said, “I always would have had the fantasy that something better exists out there. Now I know better. Either way, I was screwed.”

      I remember being surprised that my friend, a smart and attractive producer, was basically saying she should have settled. But she explained that I had it all wrong. She didn’t mean resigning herself to a life of quiet misery with a man she cared little about. She meant opening herself up to a fulfilling life with a great guy who might not have possessed every quality on her checklist. In her thirties, she told me, she used to consider “settling” to mean anything less than her ideal guy, but now, in her forties, she’d come to realize that she’d been confusing “settling” with “compromising.”

      I’d come to the same conclusion, and I started asking myself some important questions. What’s the difference between settling and compromising? When it comes to marriage, what can we live with, and what can we live without? How long does it make sense to hold out for someone better—who we may never find, and who may not exist or be available to us even if he did—when we could be happy with the person right in front of us?

      I brought up these questions with my editor that night, and neither of us had the answers. For the next two hours, he talked about his marriage and I talked about the dating world, and when the check came, he thought I should explore these issues in an article.

      Over the following weeks, as I spoke with friends and acquaintances about their relationships, something surprised me. Whether or not these people went into marriage head-over-heels in love, there seemed to be little difference in how happy they were now. Both kinds of marriages seemed to be working or not working equally well or СКАЧАТЬ