Source: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/life/Findi ... story.html
Lori Gottlieb advises women to re-evaluate what really matters -- but chemistry still counts
By Bruce Ward, The Ottawa Citizen
February 14,
The Case for Settling
for Mr. Good Enough
By Lori Gottlieb
Dutton, $32.50
Height, humour, hair, humility. When Lori Gottlieb made a checklist of the attributes she wanted in a husband, those four must-haves were set in stone.
And those were merely the * entries on her list, which was longer than a Russian novel. Maybe it's not so surprising that Gottlieb was still single at 40.
But had she known what would make her happy in a marriage, she would have approached dating much differently in her 20s and 30s.
That's the impetus behind Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough, Gottlieb's controversial and perceptive new book.
Her central message is straightforward yet shocking to some women.
Look for the important qualities in a partner, she says, and don't get hung up on stuff that won't be a big deal a few years down the line, "when you're more concerned about child care and contented companionship than you are about height or hairlines."
But some young women have seized on the word "settling" in the subtitle and let Gottlieb have it with both barrels.
"They took literally what I meant in a more hyperbolic way," she says, and in doing so they missed the point of the book.
"It's uncomfortable for young women to hear someone like me, who is educated and sophisticated and I support myself and have a career, to say 'You know I'm really lonely and I'd like a husband' because that seems to them to be anti-feminist, that somehow I'm weak, I'm needy, I'm pathetic, I'm desperate.
"I think it's just that I'm human," she says over the phone from Los Angeles.
The book is not anti-feminist, Gottlieb insists.
"Feminism never said you should be alone. Feminism is about equality. Feminism said make sure there's equality and you're respected in a relationship.
"A lot of women took a you-can-have-it-all attitude and called that feminism, which it's not. They confused feminism with you can have it all, and tried to apply you can have it all to dating."
Gottlieb, who has a donor-conceived toddler, also takes a penetrating look at the messages women absorb from Hollywood and TV, including the hugely successful Sex And The City movie.
In the movie, Samantha tells her terrific boyfriend, who stood by her through breast cancer, that she's dumping him because "I love you but I love myself more."
When Gottlieb saw the movie, the audience cheered that moment -- a reaction that left her baffled, she writes.
"Now, this was a boyfriend who was loving and loyal and hot and put up with her demands and went through cancer with her, and she decided to leave him because she's in love with herself. And this was supposed to be empowering?
"Reverse the genders (she sticks by him through a gruelling bout of prostate cancer; he bails!), and I'm betting the entire audience would have booed and called the guy a total ass."
It also wouldn't hurt for some women to get over themselves. As a friend told Gottlieb, "The culture tells us to approach dating like shopping -- but in shopping, no one points out the shopper's own flaws."
A few years ago, Gottlieb might have counted herself among women like Samantha who have "a raging sense of entitlement."
Then she realized that she had become too concerned about trivial things and not concerned enough about what makes a long-term relationship wear like iron.
In the book, she recounts the results of a survey she sent out to single men and women.
"The majority of single women ... said that getting 80 per cent of what they wanted in a mate would be 'settling.' The majority of single men said finding a woman with 80 per cent of what they wanted would be 'a catch.' For these women, it seemed, 'settling' meant not much less than 'everything.'"
Gottlieb also says that she never "felt, thought or believed" that all women should marry. But if marriage is what you want, then it's a mistake not to adjust your perspective about dating.
"We're single because we have this underlying belief that we need to be completely in synch with our mates, and if we're not, we should find someone else.
"And that makes it hard to find anyone," she writes.
Some of her critics claim Gottlieb is saying if you're not married by 30, you should settle. Wrong.
"My book says the opposite. At any age you need to look at what's important and you should never settle for somebody that you don't truly love. But in order to find that person you have to be more open-minded about who that person might be."
And Gottlieb never said that physical attraction is not important.
"Obviously, there has to be physical attraction. A lot of women go for the chemistry of a 9 and the compatibility of a 5 when it turns out that most people who are very happily married have the compatibility and the chemistry of a 7.
"That's not settling; that's having a good balance in your relationship."
Gottlieb interviewed a slew of scientists in fields from psychology to neurobiology to behavioral economics. The experts shared their data and insights on what makes for a happy marriage, including the inevitability of "adaptation -- how familiarity tends to cool that butterflies-in-the stomach chemistry.
"Every 8 will become a 6 over time. If you know that, you're not disappointed. That 8 around the corner, you're going to adapt to him, too. It's not going to be as exciting with him either."
Young women don't really have an understanding of what a long-term relationship is like, she says.
"It's like they want a Disneyland of a marriage. Relationships have their ebbs and flows and highs and lows. That's why they say for better or worse when you marry. I think a lot of people only think about the better part. They never think, who do I want around for the worse part. There will be a worse. Somebody will lose a job, somebody will get sick. You may feel disconnected from each other the way people do in the normal course of a relationship, and then you reconnect."
Some women took umbrage because Gottlieb wrote that "marriage isn't a passionfest; it's a partnership formed to run a very small, mundane and often boring non-profit business."
Who wants mundane? they sneered. But Gottlieb learned from her married friends with children that mundane is nice.
"The things they told me they loved about their husbands were things single people might consider mundane qualities -- he got up in the middle of the night and changed the diapers, or I loved that he made me breakfast. Little tiny things like he programmed the VCR so I could watch movies while I was breastfeeding.
"It's very romantic when they say we're going through life as a team; we're experiencing this adventure of life together. Is it thrilling every second of the day? No. Mommy at 6 a.m. is not a passionfest. But it's really nice and comforting and safe. Why is safe a dirty word? It's nice to have a soft place to land at the end of the day.
"Movies always end at the wedding. We never see what actually happens when they're married because marriage isn't that exciting. But it is wonderful, if that's what you want."
Gottlieb also makes some acute observations about the rise of Internet matchmakers, which she sees as a kind of American dowry system in which a woman pays thousands of dollars "to marry off herself."
Women pore over the bios that men post on dating websites like a poker player looking for tells. Too often they reject men for silly reasons, she says.
One woman turned down what looked like a good match because the guy had not seen Casablanca. Another refused to go on a second date with a potential mate because he ordered tap water at dinner, not bottled water. One poor devil was rejected because he liked Meg Ryan movies too much. Another guy got deleted for listening to books-on-tape.
Gottlieb, who is 5-foot-2, was a stickler for height. She wanted a guy who was at least 5-foot-10 but no taller than 6-foot even.
Statistically, that reduced her dating pool by more than 90 per cent.
Here's a few other things Gottlieb was looking for in a potential mate: "Warm but not clingy. Grounded but not boring. Soulful but not new-agey. Quirky but not weird. Likes my friends (and I like his). Not moody. Is not into sci-fi or comics. Decisive but not bossy. Mature but not old. Creative but not an artist. Strong but sensitive. Free-spirited but responsible. Has shared values."
Now she has chopped that list to three items: "Intellectually curious, kid-friendly, financially stable."
Gottlieb advises women to re-evaluate their standards early on, to improve their chances of finding Mr. Right In Front of You.
"I think a lot of people have very fixed ideas of what kind of man can make them happy and they won't look at men who don't fit into that ideal. You walk into a party and there's a guy who could be the love of your life, but who's a little shorter than you'd like so you won't even talk to him. That happens a lot on Internet dating, which is so prevalent these days."
While in New York last week, Gottlieb spoke to a friend whose sister is getting married. The couple met through match.com.
"She didn't notice he had checked the box that said he had kids," she says. "On their first date, he said something about his kids and she had to fight to maintain her composure. He's 33, she 31, but she would never have e-mailed him if she had noticed that he checked that box.
"But they fell in love. That's what I'm talking about. It's not about lowering your standards. It's about having really high standards, but about the things that matter."
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