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

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СКАЧАТЬ more attractive men, while he’d go off and marry someone else. Maybe she’d find someone, but maybe she wouldn’t. Or maybe she would, but not someone she connects with as strongly as Harry, or not in time to have the children she wants.

      I had no sense of this when I was 22 years old and watched Sally sob to Harry, after she learns that her ex-boyfriend is getting married, “I’m going to be forty!” Harry reminds her that she’s only 32 years old and that 40 is eight years away, but Sally cries: “But it’s there, it’s just sitting there like a big dead end. It’s not the same for men. Charlie Chaplin had babies when he was seventy-three.”

      At the time, the idea of being 40, much less 32, seemed eons away to me. I took it for granted that I’d be married by then. I never thought my life would be like Jane’s at the end of Broadcast News; I thought my life would be more like Sally’s, a wonderfully romantic story of best friends who fall in love, except it would happen at age 30, and I’d be married to a man I considered to be not just my best friend, but also incredibly sexy—a better-looking Billy Crystal, a smoother Albert Brooks. Quite an assumption, given that I look nothing like Meg Ryan and, on a good day, have maybe half the charm of Holly Hunter. But like many young women, I identified with Meg and Holly. Delusional as it sounds, when I was dating in my twenties, I thought my romantic prospects should be on par with theirs.

      And so did many of my friends. Sure, we would have denied it, but we would have been lying. We said we didn’t believe in the fairy tale, but when push came to shove, we wouldn’t settle for less than the fairy tale, either. We said we wanted true love, but we sought out romance and confused it with love. We knew that movies were fiction, but on some unconscious level, we watched them as if they were documentaries.

      As Allison, a single 38-year-old in Minneapolis wrote to me, “At twenty-seven, when I got into an argument with my boyfriend—who I loved—I was looking for the romantic comedy response. My mistake.” They broke up, and she regrets that decision. Now with no romantic prospects on deck, she was planning to get inseminated to become a mom on her own.

       BRIDEZILLA

      It’s not just movies, of course. There’s an entire industry devoted to fairy-tale weddings (which, incidentally, became a source of conflict in the hugely popular Sex and the City movie), and even the newspaper announcements themselves, with their over-the-top “we looked across the room and our eyes met instantly” stories, fuel the fantasy of what love is supposed to look like when we find it. But just as in the movies, these newspaper accounts—the so-called sports pages for women—never tell you what happens in the actual marriage.

      Elisa Albert, whose own wedding was featured in The New York Times, knows this all too well. As she put it: “My Times wedding announcement read, as so many do, like a smug sigh of relief.” What followed, though, was a train wreck of a relationship. She was separated within a year, and divorced shortly thereafter.

      In her essay in The Modern Jewish Girl’s Guide to Guilt, Albert describes her whirlwind romance leading up to the Times announcement, the fabulous and moving wedding ceremony, and the post-wedding reality that set in as she and her husband realized they were—and always had been—incompatible when it came to marriage. Just as it might be helpful if movies made sequels showing the couples’ marriages, Albert wishes that wedding columns would print “divorce announcements” as follow-ups to all the enviable romantic courtship stories. At least then, she believes, single people would have a better idea of what love is and isn’t.

      She has a point. I went through my twenties and thirties saying that I wanted true love, but how could I even know what that was? Married people rarely talk about the reality of their marriages with their single friends, and the only “love” stories most of us see onscreen are the kind where once a couple finally kisses after working out their conflict, it’s like a collective orgasm for the audience. After that, our interest in them deflates. The story’s over. We’re left to assume that these couples go on to happily ever after, but if the couple had so much trouble simply getting together, what makes us think they’ll have more success in holding a marriage together?

      You’re probably wondering why any of this matters in a book about finding the right guy. You’re probably wondering why I think anyone with half a brain is going to be influenced in their dating lives by movies or TV shows or romance novels or wedding announcements or the covers of People magazine. If you’d asked me years ago whether I thought this stuff influenced me, I would have rolled my eyes. I mean, we all know that even leading men don’t meet the leading man ideal in real life. (Remember Hugh Grant cheating on Elizabeth Hurley with a prostitute? How about Brad Pitt leaving Jennifer Aniston for his costar?) But then why do many of us overlook men who don’t fit a fantasy man ideal but who would make wonderful life partners?

      I thought about what the late psychologists Willard and Marguerite Beecher wrote about what they called “the infantile attitude toward marriage” in their book Beyond Success and Failure: Ways to Self-Reliance and Maturity: “We can only guess at the extent of it when we realize the number of love stories that are ground out and consumed each month for books, periodicals, TV, radio, movies, and the like. People would not buy such stuff if they did not believe in its probability. We find no such sale for fairy stories, which are no more fantastic.”

       THE NON-PROBLEM PROBLEM

      These days, in the movies or in real life, there’s not a lot of external conflict to overcome in order for two people to get together. It’s less about class or religion or geography or valid value differences than it is about the inner conflict of not knowing whether this person is The One.

      In other words, nowadays you don’t fall in love with Romeo and say that the relationship is doomed because he’s a Montague. Instead, you start dating Romeo and overlook the fact that he’s a Montague, but the second he spends too much time playing video games, or he forgets the name of your best friend from high school, you wonder if you should try to find someone more mature or attentive. Instead of falling for a guy and discovering a seemingly insurmountable practical obstacle (like, there will be a civil war if you get together), we fall for a guy and then create our own seemingly insurmountable obstacles as to why we can’t be with him (isn’t funny enough, has a tendency to get stressed out during tax season). It used to be that lovers knew they wanted to be together but couldn’t. Now it’s that lovers can be together but aren’t sure they want to. And then we complain that we can’t find a suitable spouse.

      I was starting to realize that despite everything I believed on an intellectual level—despite the strong, sensible person I thought I was—deep down, I had a classic Cinderella complex. I expected that, as the famous song goes, someday my prince would come and “thrill me for ever more.” It never occurred to me to trade those impractical glass slippers for shoes I could actually wear.

       A SOLE SOUL MATE

      When I look back on the way I dated in my twenties and early thirties, it’s not surprising that I thought it was perfectly reasonable to stay single while holding out for my ideal man. After all, everyone else seemed to be doing that—in real life and every time I clicked the remote control. During my peak dating years, prime-time TV was packed with series featuring sexy, successful single women looking for love, surrounded by surrogate families of wise-cracking, lovelorn singles like themselves. Two notable exceptions were Everybody Loves Raymond, a show about a marriage that, ironically, seemed to be of little interest to young single women aspiring to marriage, and Mad About You, a hip, smart comedy about a young couple adjusting to married life, which did appeal to young single women until a baby was added to the show, at which point viewers stopped watching and the show went off the air. Was this perhaps too much reality for single women dreaming about happily ever after?

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