An Unimaginative Happiness: A Selection from Moira Weigel’s Labor of Love (2017)

“The Oxford English Dictionary shows that ‘settle’ has been used to mean ‘marry’ since the 1600s. For centuries, settling did not necessarily sound like a bad thing. Indeed, many young men and women seemed to regard it as an opportunity. . . . So why do we cringe at any hint that two people may be ‘settling for’ each other today?

In recent years, the subject has seemed to come up more and more often. It started with an article by Lori Gottlieb that appeared in March 2008 in The Atlantic. ‘Marry Him!’ the headline shrieked. ‘The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough.’

Gottlieb declared that every woman she knew was preoccupied with the problem of finding a partner. ‘Every woman I know—no matter how successful and ambitious, how financially and emotionally secure—feels panic, occasionally coupled with desperation, if she hits 30 and finds herself unmarried,’ she claimed in the opening paragraphs. ‘If you say you’re not worried, either you’re in denial or you’re lying.’

To make matters worse, Gottlieb continued, her friends were approaching their husband hunts all wrong. She knew it, because she had, too. Gottlieb explained that she opted to have a child using an anonymous sperm donor in her late thirties so that she could hold out for a man she liked better than the men she had been dating. In retrospect, she says, she vastly overestimated the importance of sex and romance.

‘Marriage isn’t a passion-fest,’ she wrote. ‘It’s more like a partnership formed to run a very small, mundane, and often boring nonprofit business.’ If they want to make it through this drudgery, she tells her readers that they should hurry up and lock a partner down.

Shared widely both by people who loved it and people who were enraged by it, ‘Marry Him!’ spread rapidly around the Internet. It still inspires strong feelings. ‘Lori Gottlieb ruined my twenties!’ a friend balks when I mention the article. She read it when she was twenty-five and falling out of love with the boyfriend she had been living with since college. Gottlieb persuaded her that she should slog through two more years. At that point, he confessed that he had been cheating and they both realized that there had been no point; they parted amicably.

In 2010, Gottlieb published a book of the same title. Marry Him invites us to accompany Gottlieb on her quest to find a man to settle for. The jacket copy describes it as a ‘wake-up call.’ But the book reads more like an odyssey of self-blame and regret. Once upon a time I was a girl who had the whole world at her feet, but I was too picky and now look at me! Along the way, Gottlieb makes occasional pit stops to criticize other high-achieving women.

Gottlieb uses two metaphors as touchstones for what these women do wrong when they date. The first is the ‘Husband Store.’ The second is the ‘Shopping List’—meaning the characteristics you want the husband you buy to possess. Citing a few statistics and anecdotes, she proposes that this kind of foolish choosiness may be why fewer and fewer American women are marrying. Gottlieb claims to have broken up with a man once for his taste in socks.

At some level, what Gottlieb is saying is unobjectionable. No, you should not go into dating thinking that you can find a partner premade to your highly detailed specifications. Yet Marry Him does not really offer an alternative to the logic that says dating is like shopping. It just tells readers to lower their expectations. Fast.

By the end, Lori Gottlieb seems ready to marry literally anyone. She says she would take a man who made bad jokes or had bad breath. But—spoiler alert—after 260 pages, she is still alone. She says that the moral is that she should have settled earlier. But to me, Marry Him reads more like an allegory of the limitations of the self-help genre. It tells its readers to mold themselves and their desires into very particular forms to try to attain a kind of happiness that is unimaginative at best.

Are straight women really still doomed to choose between a foolish, futile quest for Mr. Right and a mad dash after the equally elusive Mr. Anyone at All?”—Moira Weigel, Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating (2017)