Mr Good Enough: The case for choosing a Real Man over holding out for Mr Perfect. Lori Gottlieb
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for a minute. “I guess a part of me wanted living together to mean something it doesn’t,” she confessed. “Most people who move in together don’t talk about what it means for the future. I mean, vaguely, but it’s not like they’re engaged. They just move in because they’re in love.”
Love with no future plans: Hooray for freedom! But has this kind of “freedom” made us happier?
D-A-T-E IS A FOUR-LETTER WORD
Take our approach to romance. Today’s singles talk about romance like it’s the Holy Grail, but do we even have romance anymore? What happened to courtship? The very word sounds quaint to the single women I spoke to, who are used to hookups and group dates and friends with benefits. I don’t even know if “dating” would be the right word for what happens today. Somehow d-a-t-e has become a four-letter word (“It’s not a date; it’s just coffee”), and I have no idea what “dating” means in an era when people say, “We’re not in a relationship, we’re just dating,” while spending time and sleeping together. Sometimes there isn’t even an actual “date” involved in a date. You’ll be invited to join a guy and his friends at a party (and to bring attractive girlfriends!), you’ll be called from a cell phone at 9 p.m. and asked to “hang out” and watch a video at his place, or you’ll be asked to meet him for coffee for twenty minutes after his basketball game (which means he shows up reeking of sweat and letting you buy your own latte).
And women are supposed to be cool with all this. There seems to be lack of respect in the dating world but, these women say, we’re supposed to deny any expectations of chivalrous behavior, traditional gender roles, and marriage within a reasonable time frame because that level of detachment or independence supposedly makes us empowered.
Some women say they actually appreciate these non-date dates, and I have to admit, I used to be in that camp. Then an older married friend set me straight.
“Why should I waste time having a two-hour dinner on a first date when I know within thirty seconds of meeting for a quick coffee whether a guy is my type?” I asked her.
“Because you don’t know within thirty seconds whether he might be a person who would make you happy in a marriage,” she said.
And that’s just it. I was so busy trying to “have it all” that I lost sight of what might make me happy in a marriage. Marriage used to be thought of as comfortable and stable, and those were good things. But since women don’t need marriage for economic security and even to have children anymore, the primary purpose of marriage, many singles say today, is to make us happy—immediately and always. We don’t wait to see if connection develops by spending real time with a person. If a relationship takes too much effort, we decide it’s no longer making us happy, and we bail. The One doesn’t get grumpy. The One doesn’t misunderstand us. The One doesn’t want some alone time after work when we want to give him the rundown of our day.
In my mother’s generation, you were “happy” in your marriage because you had a family together, you had companionship, you had a teammate, you had stability and security. Now women say they also need all-consuming passion, stimulation, excitement, and fifty other things our mothers never had on their checklists. And yet, according to data on marital satisfaction compiled by David Popenoe at the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University, women in those early marriages were happier.
But because I had a twisted notion of what being a “feminist” meant, my priorities were all mixed up.
WHAT SHOULD A WOMAN WANT?
Caroline, a 33-year-old fashion buyer, told me that she considers herself a feminist but still wants “a guy to be a guy.”
As she put it, “I don’t need a guy to take care of me, but I wouldn’t be with someone who couldn’t. I want to have a career when I have kids, but I want to have the option not to work if I change my mind.” Interestingly, when I asked what qualities she’s looking for in a relationship, she talked about romance and passion and chemistry, but none of the practical things that would give her the option not to work.
Then there are women like many of my college classmates who, when they were dating, got offended if they were disqualified as relationship material by a guy who wanted to marry a woman who would stay home with the kids. They felt that these modern-seeming guys who also wanted a more traditional family structure reduced the number of eligible men even more—and yet, much to their surprise, most of these same women ended up becoming very happy moms who work part time or not at all. They weren’t as progressive as they once believed themselves to be, and were glad that they weren’t expected to bring in half of the family income.
In a 2006 New York Times column, John Tierney wrote that whereas the age-old question used to be, “What does a woman want?” modern feminists ask instead, “What should a woman want?” He went on to cite a study by two University of Virginia sociologists, Bradford Wilcox and Steven Nock, who looked at the question of what makes a woman happy in her marriage nowadays. It turns out that stay-at-home wives were more satisfied with their husbands and their marriages than working wives—and that even among working wives, those who were happiest had husbands who brought in two-thirds of the income.
“Women today expect more help around the home and more emotional engagement from their husbands,” Wilcox told Tierney. “But they still want their husbands to be providers who give them financial security and freedom.”
And no wonder: The traditional workplace often turns out to be unfulfilling for women after they’ve been at it for fifteen or twenty years. With its inflexible hours, office politics, fifty-hour weeks to stay “on track” for promotions, and later, younger bosses making irrational demands, the whole setup isn’t just a drag, it’s incompatible with the kind of family life many women want.
As the study’s other sociologist, Steven Nock, told Tierney, “A woman wants equity. That’s not necessarily the same as equality.”
WHY MEN CAN’T FIGURE US OUT
Many guys I spoke to say this affects the way people date.
“I have a daughter, and I’m glad she’s growing up in an era when women can run for president,” said Eric, who is 38 and has been married for seven years. “But when I was dating, most women wanted to be able to run for president but didn’t really want the actual job. They just wanted the opportunity to have it. Because now when we men say, ‘Great, go for it,’ our wives tell us they want to work part time or work fewer hours. Our wives want us to do half the child care and half the laundry, but they don’t want to earn half the income. So while I’m all for feminism, I do find it thoroughly confusing.”
My friend Paul, who is a 30-year-old lawyer, told me that while he’d only be interested in dating a smart woman, he’s less interested in how professionally successful she is or what she does for a living.
“Some of my single women friends can’t understand why guys don’t find them unbelievable catches because they made partner in their law firms at thirty, or make a certain amount of money in a business they started,” he explained. “But honestly, the point of being successful for a woman is for personal fulfillment and so that she can support herself. It’s not so that she can attract a man, because men know that we can’t count on women to provide the lion’s share of the income, so we’re more interested in what kind of partner this person is going to be. Do we like being around her? Is she interesting? Will she be a good parent?”
Paul said he was reluctant to talk about this because he worried it would make him sound sexist. Then again, he added, “I wouldn’t pursue a woman just because she was very successful, but I know many women who can find a man attractive based on success or wealth, and still call themselves feminists.”
Paul’s colleague Brandon, who is single and 33, told me that the women in his law firm think guys have it made because they don’t have a biological clock to contend with. That’s true, he said, but at the same time, when he and his friends are ready to get married, women hold them to impossibly high standards.