Marry him
You have a fulfilling job, a great group of friends, the perfect apartment, and no shortage of dates. So what if you haven't found The One just yet. Surely he'll come along, right?But what if he doesn't? Or even worse, what if he already has, but you just didn't realize it?Suddenly finding herself forty and single, Lori Gottlieb said the unthinkable in her March 2008 article in The Atlantic: Maybe she and single women everywhere, needed to stop chasing the elusive Prince Charming and instead go for Mr. Good Enough.Looking at her friends' happy marriages to good enough guys who happen to be excellent husbands and fathers, Gottlieb declared it time to reevaluate what we really need in a partner. Her ideas created a firestorm of controversy from outlets like the Today show to The Washington Post, which wrote, "Given the perennial shortage of perfect men, Gottlieb's probably got a point," to Newsweek and NPR, which declared, "Lori Gottlieb didn't want to take her mother's advice to be less picky, but now that she's turned forty, she wonders if her mother is right." Women all over the world were talking.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
8mentions
6people
2009–2024years
25% recommend75% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- > Over the last two years I’ve been on over 120 dates with men I’ve met online - a few I met in person - in 3 different cities .
> You are too picky, even if you don't think you are.
Agreed. Actionable advice to OP would be to compromise and narrow down core requirements for a partner.
https://smile.amazon.com/Marry-Him-Case-Settling-Enough/dp/0... (Amazon: Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough)
https://openlibrary.org/works/OL8109804W/Marry_him?edition=i... (Open Library: Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough)
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/03/marry-h... (The original Atlantic piece that was the genesis of the above book)
https://smile.amazon.com/Science-Happily-Ever-After-Enduring... (The Science of Happily Ever After: What Really Matters in the Quest for Enduring Love)
- Work Where wizards stayed up late - Matthew Lyon, Katie Hafner: The beginning of the internet. Plenty of history and lessons
Fun The Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins. Young adult fiction that reads fast but makes you think.
Life Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough - Lori Gottlieb: Amusing book, easy read and aimed at women, but has some good insights on why we fail to get married before it's too late.
I love that I was able to scroll through pages on Amazon to check (most of) the books I read this year.
- Currently reading:
Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away by Annie Duke.
Before that:
- Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough by Lori Gottlieb
- On Settling by Robert E. Goodin
- What do you say after you say hello?: The psychology of human destiny by Eric Berne
- Top 80% of women compete for the top 20% of men on dating apps. And then, there is a funnel where unpartnered women race to find a partner in their 30s for those who race to have kids before fertility rates decline.
No one likes online dating, but everyone still defaults to it because third spaces where pairings traditionally occurred are evaporating.
https://web.archive.org/web/20091121080804/http://blog.okcup...
https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-g...
https://www.profgalloway.com/a-fewer-good-men/
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/03/marry-h...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6692099-marry-him
- >If women would rather remain single than setting for a partner who doesn't match all their expectations
This is why Lori Gottlieb wrote Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough. <https://smile.amazon.com/Marry-Him-Case-Settling-Enough-eboo...>
One can also see the relation to the message of Susan "the Princeton mom" Patton's Marry Smart. <https://www.cnn.com/2014/03/13/living/princeton-mom-book-mar...>.
- I can't recommend this book enough on the topic. TLDR Women are more picky then Men in the courtship marketplace, and finding a partner with matching values is most important to growing and staying together. People expect a fairy tale, when they're signing up for a job (relationships require work and effort).
A quote from the author 10 years post publishing: “I think the book is really, ironically, about having higher standards about the things that matter, like the character qualities, generosity, kindness, reliability, and not getting so hung up on things like, you know, whether you’re going to go on a second date with a guy because of how he dressed.”
https://smile.amazon.com/Marry-Him-Case-Settling-Enough/dp/0... (Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough)
https://openlibrary.org/books/OL23687614M/Marry_him
The Atlantic piece that was the genesis for the book: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/03/marry-h...
https://jezebel.com/lori-gottliebs-marry-him-was-always-a-ca...
EDIT: @300bps (HN throttling, can't reply directly) Indeed. The book covers exactly this (census data for the dating marketplace and the dynamic between genders as age brackets tick upwards). The market is great for women 21-30, and it rapidly declines after 35. You can borrow the book from the Internet Archive with the library link I tossed in this comment for more context.
