Lori Gottlieb - Mr Good Enough - The case for choosing a Real Man over holding out for Mr Perfect

Two weeks later, I got a quorum—but only after I expanded my definition of “single” to include men who weren’t married but were in committed relationships. These guys, for their part, seemed as baffled as the women when I went back to the same bar and asked the familiar question: Why are women saying they can’t find a good guy?

David, a funny 29-year-old professor, thinks the problem is that good guys are out there, but women don’t recognize them as the good guys.

“A woman broke up with me because she didn’t like the clothes I wore,” he explained, “but she’s madly in love with a guy who dresses well but doesn’t call her.”

His 32-year-old colleague Dan laughed—he’d been there before. “Women never want what’s available,” he said. “If they can’t find the perfect guy at thirty, they move on to find something better. But they don’t learn from this. Even if they’re still alone five years later, they get pickier. Then they’re almost forty and they haven’t found the perfect guy, so they start to regret having broken up with us, but now we’re not interested in them anymore.”

Kurt, who’s 38 and engaged, said that’s exactly what happened with his exes. “And those perfect guys, if they do exist, want to date maybe the top one percent of thirty-year-old women. But every thirty-year-old woman I know thinks she’s in that top one percent. All women want a ten, but are they all tens?”

His question reminded me of something my married friend Julie once said: “The culture tells us to approach dating like shopping—but in shopping, no one points out the shopper’s own flaws.”

Steve, who’s 35 and dating a lawyer, feels the same way. “I think the reason some women have an inflated view of themselves is that in high school, they really did have the power, so they grow up thinking it will always be that way. And even in their twenties, they still do, to some extent, because they’re so in demand. A guy will spend all of his money courting her, investing in the relationship, and then one day she’ll suddenly say, ‘You know, you’re a great guy, but I’m just not feeling like this is what I want.’

“In their thirties,” he continued, “it’s the opposite. The girl gives the guy free sex, thinking she’s investing in the relationship that will lead to marriage, but then the guy, who is now the one in demand, suddenly says, ‘You know, I think you’re great, but you’re not who I want to marry.’ And the women are shocked, because guys used to worship them, but the balance of power has changed. And I can’t say I don’t feel slightly vindicated that those same women who rejected me five years ago now complain that they can’t find anyone.”

THE MARRIED MEN

Eric, a 38-year-old married writer friend of mine, is still friendly with the three girlfriends who broke up with him before he met his wife. He said he’s going to write a book one day about the way women analyze men.

“I’ve got two working titles,” he explained. “The first is My Wife Isn’t Perfect (But I Don’t Consider That Settling) and the second is I Have No Idea Why She Broke Up with Me (But I’m Married and She’s Still Single).”

Women, he said, might call ten of their friends and discuss, point by point, how a guy measures up on a whole host of attributes. Then, in the areas he falls short (he’s too messy, he’s not sensitive enough, he’s not making enough money), they think about whether they can “fix him” or “train him” to make him into what they want. Men, he believes, know that what you see is what you get—and accept it.

“When we decide to marry someone, we don’t think we’re going to fix our wives and we don’t try to change them,” he said. “We don’t get out the spreadsheet and break it down on a microscopic level the way women do. We either want to be with her, or we don’t.”

Another married friend, Henry, who’s 36, said that while some men are afraid of commitment, most aren’t. They want to get married as much as women do. Often, he said, it’s just a case of the guy not being into that woman, but also not wanting to give up the perks of the relationship.

“He knows he’s not going to marry her,” Henry said, “so he says, ‘I’m not looking for anything serious right now’ or ‘I’m not sure I want to have kids’ or ‘I’m focused on my career right now,’ which he thinks is telling her that if she wants this relationship to lead to marriage, she should look elsewhere. But women think the guy is confused and she can change him, when really the guy has made up his mind.

“Meanwhile,” Henry continued, “women can’t make up their minds. Every perceived flaw is dissected for months or years until a verdict comes down on whether they’ll marry him. Men know early on when they’ve met the person they want to marry. It’s a very visceral feeling. That’s why women are always flabbergasted when their ‘commitment-phobe’ boyfriend goes off and gets married a year later.”

For all their talk about romantic love, Henry said, women tend to analyze the situation too much. “They’re hypocritical,” he explained. “They say they want true love but you’d better be this tall and make this much money—and not have bad moods or be a real person, either.”

He’s probably right. Two months after my friend Julia broke up with her “uninspiring” boyfriend Greg, she started dating Adam, a sexy, ambitious surgeon. Adam was all the things that Greg, her nonprofit boyfriend, wasn’t. But the low-key, supportive nonprofit guy was all the things her new beau wasn’t. She was starting to miss Greg.

“I just don’t know which things I can live with,” she sighed, as she was about to fly to Hawaii for a romantic weekend with the surgeon.

But does it have to be this way? Isn’t there a middle ground between cold, hard analysis and intense passion?

WHAT SIXTY-SOMETHINGS SAY

When I asked half a dozen of my mother’s friends who had married in their twenties about this middle ground, they said the problem they’ve seen in their kids’ generation is that the middle ground doesn’t exist.

“I hear constantly from my daughter’s friends that they want men to have the same emotions they do, but men and women express emotion differently,” said Susan, who has two daughters in their thirties. “Young women expect men to be soft and caring and rich and gorgeous—they want everything.”

Connie shook her head. “You can wait for Prince Charming,” she said, “but even Prince Charming will have holes in his socks. You can marry the most perfect person in the world and you’ll still have problems to work through. But once young women see those holes, they’re no longer interested.”

“Our expectations were different,” said Melinda. “We expected to have disagreements. You didn’t go in thinking, ‘I’ll get married and if it doesn’t work out, we’ll get divorced.’ There’s a sense of being a team. You were committed to working it out. Today’s girls always think they’ll find something better.”

Of the group, none of the moms believed in the concept of your soul mate being the only person on the planet you were meant to be with. To them, a soul mate meant someone you have a deep connection with, someone who accepts you for who you are and vice versa, someone who is there for you at the end of the day.

“I think going through difficult times together makes you feel like soul mates,” said Kathryn. “Working through an illness, a financial issue, a parent’s death.”

“People don’t expect to work in relationships today,” June added. “There have been phases of our marriage when both of us needed things at the same time, and that could be very challenging. But I think a lot of women nowadays expect that they’ll always get every single one of their needs met and if they don’t, something’s wrong. Nothing’s wrong—that’s just the nature of two people being in a relationship.”