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

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СКАЧАТЬ roommates in my early twenties, but I can’t imagine having to eat all my dinners and sleep in the same bed with a male roommate who happens to be the husband I settled for.”

      The others nodded.

      “I don’t know about you,” Olivia continued, half-joking, “but I would need to love someone very deeply in order to brush my teeth two feet away from where he’s taking a dump every morning.”

      I suggested that, all kidding aside, bathroom doors can be closed, but opportunities to meet good men aren’t always open, and I asked the group how they defined settling. Did it mean picking a guy who’s truly annoying, or compromising on some desired qualities but getting other, more important ones? And what would those important ones be?

      “Even if he’s nice and smart and attractive, I can’t be with someone boring,” said Nora, a radio producer.

      “Exactly,” said Claire, a graduate student. “There are guys who are smart but then you’re shocked to learn that for all that intelligence, they’re just not that interesting. They have to be smart in an interesting way. They have to be curious.”

      “Curious, but not earnest,” said Nina, a marketing executive. “They have to be a little edgy.”

      “But not too edgy,” said Nora. “They have to be normal. But just not boring.”

      I asked the women for examples of what they meant by boring.

      “They have to have a sense of humor,” said Nina. “They can’t just be sitting there laughing at something funny I might say. Boring guys aren’t funny, but they think you’re funny.”

      “Or the opposite,” said Claire. “They think that if a woman laughs at their jokes, she has a sense of humor. Only a boring person believes that.”

      “Or a narcissist!” said Lauren, a fund-raiser for political causes.

      “Well, narcissists are boring!” said Olivia, and the group broke into laughter.

      I told these women—all reasonably attractive but not drop-dead gorgeous; all interesting but not off-the-charts fascinating—that at a certain point, they might get lonely going on all these dates looking for The Perfect One instead of building a nice life with Some One.

      “I’m already lonely, but loneliness is better than boredom,” said Lauren. She’s finds her stable fund-raising job boring at times but it’s often fulfilling, too, so she won’t leave it for her true passion, painting, because it seems too risky.

      “So you’ll compromise in your choice of a job but not your choice of a partner?” I asked. “You’re willing to spend eight hours a day in a good enough career instead of leaving it for your true love, being an artist?”

      Lauren thought about this for a minute.

      “Well, that’s different,” she said. “I’m practical about my career. But to be practical about love? You can’t be practical about a feeling. That seems so … unromantic.”

      Just then, a cute-ish guy who seemed to be about thirty walked by and checked out the women. They ignored him. I asked why.

      “Too short,” said Olivia, who is 5’2”.

      “And what’s up with those glasses?” added Claire, who wears chunky glasses herself.

      I wondered if they’d be open to dating a short guy with last year’s style of glasses if he had many of the other qualities they wanted: smart, funny, slightly edgy, kind, successful—and, of course, not boring. How much do first appearances matter?

      “I’ve tried that,” Nora said, “but I can’t make myself become attracted to someone. You have to feel it from the beginning. If you aren’t physically attracted when you meet them, you’re always forcing it and it never works.”

      At first I was surprised by how readily the twenty-somethings dismissed this cute guy without even considering starting up a conversation to learn more about him. I mean, this wasn’t college, where the playing field was pretty evenly matched in terms of available romantic prospects. This was the adult world, where people were pairing off and getting married, where the pool of single men was getting smaller, where there wasn’t a built-in mechanism for meeting like-minded people the way there’d been in the past.

      But then I remembered myself in my twenties, when the possibilities still seemed tantalizingly endless—even if they weren’t.

       DESPERATE BUT PICKY

      Ah, the difference a decade makes. A few nights later, five single women in their late thirties to early forties met me at the same bar, where I asked the same question: Why is it so hard to find a good guy? I filled them in on the conversation I had with the younger women about boredom and loneliness.

      “Check back with them in ten years,” Stephanie, an attractive 39-year-old pediatrician, said. “If they’re holding out for Prince Charming, they’ll be bored and lonely. The job won’t seem as exciting anymore, drinks with the girls will get old, and on holidays, they’ll be hanging out with their married friends and their kids, or their nieces and nephews, which will only make them depressed that they don’t have a family themselves.”

      I admitted that I related to those younger women, who wanted to be in a relationship but had a very specific idea of what that guy would have to be like. And as I got older, I explained, my dating life slowly became this lethal paradox: desperate but picky. They knew exactly what I meant.

      “That’s so true!” said Liz, a 37-year-old screenwriter. “I want to shake younger women and say, you know, the guy who laughs too loud in public may not love the way you chew raw carrots at dinner parties, but it’s not a deal-breaker for him.”

      These women could easily list their former deal-breakers—the reasons they didn’t pursue relationships when they were younger. Here’s what they said:

       • “He was very loving but he wasn’t romantic enough. On Valentine’s Day he made a mix tape of my favorite music and gave me an hour-long massage, but all day at work, whenever I saw the flower guy going up the hall delivering flowers to my colleagues, I kept thinking, where are my flowers? I wanted a guy who sent flowers.”

       “He brought me flowers, but cheesy ones that just spoke to bad taste—and the sense that I wasn’t worth something more thoughtful.”

       “He wasn’t exciting enough. I felt like we were already married, which was nice in a way, but this was supposed to be the courting period.”

       “He had long nose hairs and they grossed me out, but I didn’t have the courage to ask him to trim them, so I stopped seeing him.”

       “He cried. The first time, I wasn’t thrilled, but okay. The second time, I bailed. I felt he was too weak for me.”

       “He was too predictable. Then I started dating guys who always kept me on edge and I never knew what to expect. It was terrible. Now I’d give anything for predictable.”

       “I was embarrassed by his voice. Sometimes when he’d answer the phone at my place, people would think he was me, because I have kind of a low voice. But otherwise, he was very СКАЧАТЬ