Why Should Women ‘Settle’ For Lori Gottlieb’s Book When They Can Read Something Good?

Perhaps in the future, in an over-perfected, suspense-less, Gattaca universe, men will come with LED displays on their foreheads that read: “I mean business” or “I’m deliberately wasting your time,” or, “Actually, I’m gay,” or “I’ll marry you, but we’ll loathe each other and I’ll leave you for a 20-year old when you’re 37.”

— The Daily Beast’s Liesl Schillinger dreams of a world where single woman will no longer have to partake in the painful guessing game that is otherwise known as dating life.

Schillinger’s review of Lori Gottlieb’s newly released book ‘Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough’ (she’s turned this into an entire book!) is making the rounds of my Twitter and Facebook feeds. If you are a woman over the age of, say, 25, you will no doubt recall with some fury Gottlieb’s Atlantic article of March 2008 titled ‘Marry Him!‘ which basically encouraged women to get married to whom every would take them before it was too late. Now it’s not only a book it’s also being made into a movie.

This is perhaps not surprising since it’s hard to recall an article that generated so much attention (read: rage) so quickly. Probably the publishers are counting on a continuation of that for this book (voila! a post). Of course, perhaps instead of reading the book you can read (excerpt below) Schillinger’s super smart ‘review’ (smackdown?) and then if you’re still interested in women and marriage and self-respect and the choices involved therein, you can go out and purchase a copy of, say, ‘Pride and Prejudice‘ or ‘America’s Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines‘. More from Schillinger:

There is such a thing as luck. Many unpartnered women who grew up in Gottlieb’s era dated successfully for ages, but the relationships didn’t work out; others married and got divorced. Gottlieb moans about the misery of the sad, pathetic single woman, stuck at home with Netflix. But what of the misery of the sad, pathetic, partnered woman, stuck at home with a somnolent spouse or boyfriend who sits around watching TV and eating Chunky soup and won’t let her play her Netflix? What of the un-sad, un-pathetic single women who go to concerts, plays, films and parties, carouse with friends, date, travel, work out, dance, take classes, produce valuable work, and, generally, live life as if they were not coma patients? This is not to say that Gottlieb isn’t correct to assert that some single women are lonely (just as some single men are). This is merely to point out that a human being bears a certain amount of responsibility for his or her own entertainment; and that having a partner is no guarantee of a roaring good time or of a rich emotional life.

Related: Slate looks at Gottlieb’s screwy statistics. [Double X]