Settling is for sediment and pioneers

I like to contend that I was a child bride. Sure, I was north of the national average in terms of age, but I did get married before I turned thirty. To my internal timeline, that felt really early. I wasn't done turning into a grown-up yet! What business did I have running off to Vegas before the adult me was fully finished?

While I'm letting it all hang out: I sometimes watch those crazy bridal shows on the Style network, and every time someone says, "I've been dreaming of this since I was a little girl," my first response is, "Really?"

I can remember what I daydreamed about as a little girl: discovering live diplodoci in a swamp somewhere; crewing a space shuttle mission with my collection of stuffed animals; becoming the Mother Superior of an alpine convent so I could bring down the house with my rendition of "Climb Ev'ry Mountain"; being Princess Leia's best friend so we could borrow the Millennium Falcon and go shooting storm troopers together while Han Solo did dishes at home. I believe I may have coveted the wimple because it was a clear and unambiguous symbol of authority, and I knew Princess Leia could have helped me rock a new hairdo, but I never really played bridal dress-up. Weddings didn't capture my imagination.

This is a long way of saying I am probably not in a position to intimately understand the internal or external pressure some women feel when it comes to getting married. I got married because I found someone I wanted to spend the rest of my life with, but finding Phil was kind of the gift-with-purchase. I liked my life before he came into it; the future he opened up by becoming part of my present was a happy surprise.

So Lori Gottlieb's "Marry Him! The Case for Settling for Good Enough" (Atlantic Monthly, Mar 08) is like reading a dispatch from another planet. From the first idiotic presumption -- "if you say you’re not worried, either you’re in denial or you’re lying" -- to the flawed premise at the heart of her piece -- "settling will probably make you happier in the long run, since many of those who marry with great expectations become more disillusioned with each passing year" -- this is an article that was either a cynical attempt to cash in on the lucrative anti-feminist editorial market, or a sad reflection of someone who has internalized some deeply misogynist and unrealistic values.

Consider her argument for settling:

Our culture tells us to keep our eyes on the prize (while our mothers, who know better, tell us not to be so picky), and the theme of holding out for true love (whatever that is—look at the divorce rate) permeates our collective mentality.

Why our mothers are presumably undermining the idea that we want or deserve someone who isn't a hot mess is a whole other topic, but what I'm intrigued by is how Gottlieb manages to whiff right by a salient point without getting it. There is a world of difference between "love" and marriage. One is an emotion; the other is a social contract that requires you knowing how to manage several emotions constructively and consistently for a greater good. You can't conflate the two. It's like conflating anger and motherhood.

Let's not even touch how settling could have helped Rachel Green on Friends and Carrie Bradshaw on Sex and the City. I don't have the room to be worried about a fictional entity's marital status.

But I will take on this assertion:

Once you’re married, it’s not about whom you want to go on vacation with; it’s about whom you want to run a household with. Marriage isn’t a passion-fest; it’s more like a partnership formed to run a very small, mundane, and often boring nonprofit business. And I mean this in a good way.

Call me crazy, but my definition of marriage includes someone who can handle both kitchen duties and a week in Kaua'i. I'm also puzzled by the positioning of marriage as a nonprofit unit, since married people often benefit tremendously from cheaper insurance rates and other lower costs-of-living relative to solo households. There are also the intangible benefits that lead directly to profits for a married couple: the division of labor in a marriage can often mean that one person can pursue a lucrative career while the other takes care of business on the home front for free. If a single person wants to outsource the domestic chores, it usually costs them.

To be fair -- I'm all for marriage where people travel separately. A little distance and independence is good for any long-term relationship. But I think it's unfair to associate marriage with the drudgery of extended social contracting without admitting the possibility of incentives.

Anyway, after unsuccessfully grappling with the idea that marriage isn't always "And then we lived in the castle, where bluebirds did my hair and the Prince rescued me from a dragon eight times a week," Gottlieb moves on to what is perhaps one of the saddest parts of her piece:

Those of us who choose not to settle in hopes of finding a soul mate later are almost like teenagers who believe they’re invulnerable to dying in a drunk-driving accident. We lose sight of our mortality. We forget that we, too, will age and become less alluring.

At least the Wife of Bath owned her age, and refused to apologize for how other people saw her.

The piece deteriorates from there into one long screed that essentially comes down to this idea: Girls, why are you so picky with wanting someone who's clean and not hideous and educated and not a couch-surfing, Dane Cook-loving slacker who's prouder of his Guitar Hero score than of his professional life? Don't you know you're getting older and therefore less valuable in the eyes of men? Don't you know theirs are the only opinions that matter?

Gottlieb has romanticized the benefits of partnership by imagining that anyone who is  "spend[ing] his weekends playing Internet poker" or "touch[ing] your back for two minutes while watching ESPN and call[ing] that 'a massage'" is also going to be observant or considerate enough to be that "decent guy who takes out the trash and sets up the baby gear, and he provides a second income." Partnership requires two people who are aware of each other, and maybe, just maybe, one reason women don't settle is because they don't want to be flinging their efforts at an oblivious oaf.

There is one true sentence in this piece, which Gottlieb somehow let creep in among the anecdotal items about her friends who settled for passionless marriages. She writes:

Unless you meet the man of your dreams (who, by the way, doesn’t exist, precisely because you dreamed him up), there’s going to be a downside to getting married, but a possibly more profound downside to holding out for someone better.

It's rare for the person of your dreams to exist. And if they did -- would they be what you want or what you need or -- God help you -- what you deserve? I would argue the solution is not to settle, but to start poking at the idea of "the [X] of my dreams." The minute you do that, you are effectively resigning your active agency in your own happiness and assuming helplessness. You're also placing a monstrous burden on someone else; who wants to be the thing that stands between someone else and their personal fulfillment? How selfish and childish that is. So is settling. It's effectively carrying the toxic secret that the person who is sharing their life with you isn't good enough. Who would want to settle for someone who felt that way about them?

I have a new friend I've made in the past year, also named Lori. She married her husband when she was in her forties. We were talking last Saturday and she mentioned that her twenties were spent traveling, her thirties were spent working on her career, and now in her forties she's nesting big-time. She loves her life, and there's been a lot of great things in it, mostly because she put them there. 

"I waited for someone like him," she said of her husband. She smiled, satisfied and peaceful. "It was worth the wait."

Comments

[Polly]

I can't decide if I like the article more or less because she can't bring herself to settle. I feel like it's almost a mood piece--I've certainly had moments where I felt my life would be easier if I was a little dimmer, or one of these people who can gladly tolerate anything as long as they make lots of money, but it passes. (Clearly, I should write up my agnst--The Atlantic Monthly is buying!)

I do feel kind of weird now because my sister, who is less than two years older than me, had a lot of trouble getting pregnant this time around, so presumably I can look forward to similar age-related fertility issues if ever I do get married. But it's not enough for me to embrace the loveless marriage (followed no doubt by the psycho divorce). To be honest, nothing's enough for that--I genuinely don't care if I die single, I'd rather do that than be shackled to some bozo because I'm trying to make my mom happy or something equally pathetic.

[hannah]

I thought the gist of that whole piece was her thinking life would be easier if she had a husband. And, maybe it would--- but I don't think marrying for an extra income or someone else to do the dishes is a good enough reason. Marriage is too hard, even when you are in love, to settle just for another set of hands around the house.

[Kerry]

Whenever I feel like basing my argument on fiction, I pull myself up short and say, "Hey, Kerry--that's a surefire way to get people to not take you seriously."

But anyway...I understand the fertility pressure. I'm facing it myself. But I also realize that I settled in my 20's. And eventually I exploded from the relationship going, and it was not pretty for anyone involved.

[hannah]

Also, I question the assumption that the world is full of less-than-perfect bachelors just waiting for one of these picky women to snap them up.

[cirocco]

Ah, thank you, Lisa. I wanted to write something like this, but I was afraid it would be axe-grinding, since LG and I dated the same man. Not at the same time; she preceded me. My relationship with this man did not end positively, but between reading this and the piece that LG wrote about dating him*, I feel like all his problems are now explicable. Had I dated her, I would've come away highly wary also.

Did you notice all the sociological data Gottleib cited about the relative happiness of married and unmarried women? No? Me neither. Call me crazy, but if I were being published in the Atlantic, I'd do a little more research than talking to my friends and watching television.

* This piece appears in a nonfiction anthology called Scoot Over, Skinny, and details how she made the mistake of lowering herself to dating someone physically imperfect. Rarely have I been as outraged on someone else's behalf as I was on our mutual ex's behalf. The essay is just savage.

[Antoinette]

I question the assumption that the world is full of less-than-perfect bachelors just waiting for one of these picky women to snap them up.

My thoughts exactly. In fact, she's apparently dumped scads of just slightly less-than-perfect guys, and thus assumes all her single compatriots are in the same boat? That they've all pettishly pushed away guys who take out the garbage, have a good job, will co-parent gladly, as well as respect them intellectually, make them laugh, and appreciate them?

My mid-30s single sister hasn't had anything remotely like this experience.

Gottlieb seems a litle like an egomaniac with an ever-revolving list of reasons why she can't make room for another adult in her life. Cirocco's comments totally confirms my sense that Gottlieb, like so many of these navel-gazing columnists, just projects her personal anxieties and deficiencies onto the population at large.

[molly]

settling = divorce

[Courtney]

I spent years listening to friends and family tell me I was too picky, that I was never going to find what I was looking for. Now I'm happily married to a kind, intelligent man who loves me dearly and is excited beyond belief about the baby we're about to have.

I don't think the problem is that women expect too much, or that we reject slightly imperfect men because they don't meet some unattainable standard. Looking back at my own dating history, and watching my friends go through the same things, I think that the real problem is that we hang on to obviously bad relationships, somehow hoping that they will magically turn the corner and become exactly what we need. I've had so many friends perservere in relationships with men who were clearly not ready for the kind of relationship they wanted, or who just didn't even seem to get who they were.

I don't know what the solution is, though. It's hard to meet someone you can be comfortable with, and I understand the feeling that time is running out, especially for women who want to have kids. I just wish that there wasn't so much pressure to find someone, anyone. Maybe then my friends could relax and realize what amazing lives they have, regardless of their marital status.

[Polly]

Whenever I feel like basing my argument on fiction, I pull myself up short and say, "Hey, Kerry--that's a surefire way to get people to not take you seriously."

Apparently this is catching at The Atlantic--in the letters section in this month's issue, one of their writers defends British imperialism in India by citing Monty Python's The Life of Brian.

Dear God.

[marion]

See, here's the thing. If by "settling" you mean realizing that, say, it's more important for a guy to have a sense of humor than a great head of hair, I can get behind that. We are all immature at one point. Growing up means admitting that you yourself are imperfect, and that anyone you couple up with will also be imperfect...and then figuring out which qualities are *really* important. But I don't think of that as "settling" - I think of that as "becoming mature."

Gottlieb doesn't seem to get that. From what I can tell, she still thinks that either you marry the absolute perfect guy, or you're "settling." The fact that she thinks that her friends have settled because they complain about their husbands is almost frightening - does she really think that a marriage with any sort of feeling exists in which one person doesn't occasionally drive the other crazy? Has she never had ANY emotionally intimate relationship?

What I think is really going on here is that Gottlieb is a difficult, needy person who pushed away several decent guys in search of Prince Charming, decided that having a baby via sperm bank would be a joyful dream, and can't run away from the implications of her decisions any more. I feel sorry for her child.

And, while I hate it when people use fiction to bolster their arguments, I hate it even worse when they do that and leave out key details. Yes, I know way too much about "Friends," but...Barry, the guy Gottlieb mentions as the safe, stable choice for Rachel, was cheating on her with her maid of honor while they were engaged, and THEN cheats on the maid of honor with RACHEL when THEY get engaged. Bad, bad, bad example if you're looking for a fictional man who should have been a "settling" candidate.

[Kerry]

In case anyone's still interested in this topic, check out today's advice column in Salon. The writer settled--married the first guy she thought she ever loved, and is now out and the world and attracted to other men. The responses are fascinating.

[Richard]

Well. The settling thing is interesting. The forever lament of nice guys is that the great looking, spirited girls their own age often go out with assholes, maybe thinking that they can change them. So the decent guys who are looking for a relationship, end up settling for perhaps something other than they had desired. Fast forward ten years, the asshole guys are still running round being assholes, the nice guys are in snoozeville, and the alpha femmes are writing articles like the one we are discussing. Geez, how messed up are we (other than the asshole guys who seem to have it sussed out! LOL).