First Drafts - The Prospect magazine blog

Valentine’s day is over for another year, but just as single women were breathing easily again, I’m going to have to bring up Lori Gottlieb’s article, Marry Him!, from the March 2008 issue of the Atlantic Monthly. Since Gottlieb’s article appeared on the magazine’s website last week, it has triggered the type of howls of wild rage from female bloggers usually reserved for mommy-wars combatant and fellow Atlantic contributor Caitlin Flanagan.

Gottlieb’s thesis is that single thirtysomething women shouldn’t hold out for Mr Right. “My advice is this: Settle! That’s right. Don’t worry about passion or intense connection,” she writes. “What I and many women who hold out for true love forget is that we won’t always have the same appeal that we may have had in our 20s and early 30s.” And “ask any soul-baring 40-year-old single heterosexual woman what she most longs for in life, and… most likely, she’ll say that what she really wants is a husband (and, by extension, a child).” In other words, don’t leave it too late girls!

Which is an all-too-familiar line of argument. But there’s a twist—Gottlieb is giving us this advice as a fortyish single mother who conceived her son via donor sperm. The plan was “to search for true connection afterward,” but dating is much harder as a parent, and it hasn’t panned out. “It took not settling to make me realize that settling is the better option.” But ironically she may have to settle anyway, and “doing it older… involves selling your very soul in exchange for damaged goods.” Cripes.

Gottlieb is at pains to anticipate potential objections to her article, with varying degrees of success. But it’s hard to see what she was trying to prove by, for instance, citing in evidence the sitcom Friends. “Rachel Green leaves her nice-guy orthodontist fiancé at the altar simply because she isn’t feeling it. And while Rachel and her supposed soul mate, Ross, finally get together… do we feel confident that she’ll be happier with Ross than she would have been had she settled down with Barry, the orthodontist, 10 years earlier?” Well, it’s hard to say, given that neither of them are real people, and that the on-again off-again nature of their relationship mostly reflected the need of the scriptwriters to spin out one love affair over ten seasons of a television programme. (But, if we are playing that game, wasn’t “nice guy” Barry cheating on Rachel with her almost-maid-of-honour, Mindy?)

It is of course single women who have reacted most strongly to the article. But there’s something there for everyone to be offended by. Single women may be too picky, and “either lying and in denial” if they say they’re not worried about finding someone, but single men in Gottlieb’s universe are unattractive losers. “Overlook his halitosis or abysmal sense of aesthetics,” she advises. And, though she envies couples, she doesn’t seem to know any happy ones, and in her view marriage is “like a partnership formed to run a very small, mundane, and often boring nonprofit business.”

Gottlieb’s article could be summed up in “the grass is always greener” (a fact she acknowledges). But her descriptions of the hardships of single parenting are too poignantly convincing for that—if also the rather obvious consequences of taking on a job that two people usually do alone. Hers is a cautionary tale. It’s also rather alarming to contrast it with her optimistic article from 2005, The XY Files, about her original decision to conceive via sperm donor, and with the most recent poster girl for going it alone, Louise Sloan, author of the book Knock Yourself Up: A Tell-All Guide to Becoming a Single Mom. Although I disagree with the majority of her article, I hope that people do at least take some of her advice on board, and not take the path that she has. Because we really don’t we need any more Lori Gottliebs.