There’s been a lot of feminist response to the fact that Lori Gottlieb expanded her article imploring women to settle down for Mr. Good Enough into a book titled Marry Him: The Case For Settling For Mr. Good Enough. It’s based on the false assumption that educated, middle class women are too picky and have trouble getting married. I’m not going to tear up the logic—-the links provided do a handy job—-but I have a serious question to ask in the face of this argument about “settling”: What about love?
The underlying assumption in this book and anything of the “you’d better settle or you’ll die alone with your cats!” genre is that women marry (or at least partner up) for children, companionship, and above all, so to prove that someone liked it enough to put a ring on it. And that men marry so that they have a nice house, children, and a regular source of sexual release that isn’t their hand. Anna at Jezebel summarizes Gottlieb’s point of view on this:
It’s not just that Lori Gottlieb takes an incredibly narrow view of what marriage is for (she keeps mentioning the desire “to be part of a traditional family”), or that she views life without a man as necessarily lonely and shitty (she’s especially harsh on the topic of girlfriends) — she also does all this with a vitriol that’s frankly bizarre.
This narrative about why people want to marry and do marry has a lot of traction in media, because it’s basically sexist and a lot of people fucking love that. But it also has no relationship to why most people actually want to marry, and what most people want their marriage (or partnership) to look like, which is love, baby, love. That’s what’s never directly discussed, and it’s frankly bizarre. The reason that women balk at the term “settle” isn’t because they’ve been poisoned by feminism to have too high of standards. It’s because the term implies marrying someone you don’t love, and agreeing to a terse exchange of your body and housework for the social approval and companionship of being a wife.
“But,” you might say, “She’s just saying that women are too picky and need to consider guys who aren’t maybe as tall or rich or handsome as they’ve been told they should want!” Well, I have to agree with the link to Matt above that at best you’re talking about a few women who refuse to listen to sensible advice like that. But more importantly, that argument is a red herring. The book isn’t titled Hey, Go Out With The Guy And Enjoy New Experiences, You Never Know Who’ll Knock You Off Your Feet. It’s titled Marry Him. To which I say to Ms Gottlieb: You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make her drink.
Hey, maybe I’m all wrong here, and Gottlieb addresses the giant flaw I’m seeing. But I honestly doubt it. From Anna’s review, it seems Gottlieb thinks there’s a nationwide problem of women who are madly in love with excellent men, but throw them over for something relatively inconsequential. Or maybe Gottlieb is skeptical of love and romance, and sees dating as a game like “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire”, where you see how high you can go without failing out, and she’s suggesting you cut your losses at the quarter million question. Either way, “settling” is something people don’t do as much as Gottlieb would like, mostly because it falls out of the realm of how dating actually works.