The Case For Settling For Mr. Good Enough: Marriage Myths Galore

There's something tragic about Lori Gottlieb. Not the fact that she wrote an Atlantic article and later a book based on the assumption that any single woman who hits thirty is desperate to get married and start a family; not the fact that her abhorrent Atlantic piece exhorted women to settle now and start a family with "Mr. Good Enough"; not the fact that she sees herself as the only voice of reason in a sea of backwards feminist theory that harms women's innate desires for a husband and children; and not the fact that she has been justifiably vilified by feminists the world over. No.

It's the fact that her book, "Marry Him: The Case For Settling For Mr. Good Enough," and her whole resigned, martyred persona represent the ongoing and very much alive misconception that marriage, motherhood, and feminism are always at odds with each other.

Sure, you can see the ancient wisdom in her arguments. Of course it might be counter-intuitive to disregard a loving, passionate partner because he's named "Sheldon." Of course the search for perfection, for the (loathe saying it) "fairy tale" romantic comedy dream we're fed so often by Hollywood might not be healthy in the long term. And in the context of what the media wants to tell us about relationships -- that they are fairy tales, full of bubbly sweet passion and pseudo-disputes resolved with wine and flowers -- her argument sort of makes sense. Relationships are hard. They might not be perfect. Marriage, in particular, is a long and tricky road to navigate. As it happens, Elizabeth Gilbert manages to make this same point without pointing the finger at single women everywhere and calling them liars if they don't fess up to craving a husband and a baby.

But Gottlieb can't simply stop with exploring the intricacies of marriage and the pressure women feel related to it. She has to take on feminism as an institution, setting up the same bored false paradox between the feminist/raging/self-destructively demanding single woman and the resigned/tricked by feminism/"traditional" married mother who has seen the light.

The Guardian has gotten on board with this by reinforcing the feminism vs. Gottlieb and feminism vs. marriage dichotomy, setting up feminists as reactive raging crusaders attacking the poor Gottlieb -- who was only acknowledging the truth after all. So has the New York Times, by painting successful single women as agents of their own destruction, making themselves unmarriagable in their success. There is nothing new here, really. It's just that Gottlieb has managed to rather artlessly exacerbate the same old debates.

How long will it have to fight before it's accepted that feminists can get married and have babies and work and perhaps also look for a husband who isn't simply a prop in the "infrastructure" of a family? This isn't even "having it all," Lori Gottlieb. It's just what men have gotten for thousands of years -- the expectation of finding a loving partner, and perhaps starting a family and a life together, and getting to work and be successful and feel fulfilled as well. And it isn't inherently opposed to feminism. But damn, it does serve your book sales well to court the mainstream media and the public's anti-feminist tendencies by staking it out that way.

That's what makes this book tragic: it forces feminists to make spot-on critiques of it because it's so erroneous and ridiculous, yet Gottlieb becomes the media darling standing up to those mean feminists in denial. And the same old false are dichotomies perpetuated over and over.

Photo credit: WTL Photos