Читать книгу Mr Good Enough: The case for choosing a Real Man over holding out for Mr Perfect - Lori Gottlieb - Страница 11

I know this is an unpopular thing to say, but feminism has completely fucked up my love life. To be fair, it’s not feminism, exactly—after all, “feminism” never published a dating manual—but what I considered to be “the feminist way of doing things” certainly didn’t help. It’s not that I would give back the gains of feminism for anything. Believe me, I wouldn’t. It’s just that I wish I hadn’t tried to apply what I believed to be “feminist ideals” to dating.

Growing up, my friends and I thought feminism was fabulous. To us, feminism meant we had “freedom” and “choice” in all aspects of our lives. We could pursue professional careers, take time to “find ourselves” before getting married, decide not to get married at all, and have our sexual needs met whenever we felt like it. The fact that we didn’t need a man to have a fulfilling life felt empowering. After all, who wanted to do what our moms did—find a man, marry him, and have kids—all before most of us had gotten our first promotion?

But then, in our late twenties and early thirties, as more of us moved from relationship to relationship, or went long periods with no meaningful relationship at all, we didn’t feel quite so empowered. The truth was, every one of my single friends wanted to be married, but none of us would admit how badly we craved it for fear of sounding weak or needy or, God forbid, antifeminist. We were the generation of women who were supposed to be independent and self-sufficient, but we didn’t have a clue how to navigate this modern terrain without sacrificing some core desires.

We didn’t want yet another Sunday brunch with the girls. We wanted a lifetime with The Guy.

Meanwhile, we were praised for our ambition out in the world, but at the same time told that our ambition would distract us from finding a husband. That never made sense to me. I don’t think that women are so caught up in their careers that they “forget” to focus on their personal lives. After all, 90 percent of conversations most women I know of dating age have, even those trying to make partner in a law firm or slogging through a medical residency, involve men: who the cute new doctor is at the hospital, whether to move in with a boyfriend, what it means that the guy stopped calling after five dates. In fact, working in environments where we’re likely to meet interesting men may actually be a dating advantage. Our long hours and high-minded aspirations weren’t the problem, but none of us could figure out what was.

It wasn’t until I found myself still single in my late thirties that something hit me. Maybe the problem was this misconception: We thought that “having it all” equaled “happily ever after.”

Except that a lot of us weren’t so happy.

Instead, I started to see a pattern that went like this: We grew up believing that we could “have it all.” “Having it all” meant that we shouldn’t compromise in any area of life, including dating. Not compromising meant “having high standards.” The higher our standards, the more “empowered” we were.

But were we?

Here’s what actually happened: Empowerment somehow became synonymous with having impossible standards and disregarding the fact that in real life, you can’t get everything you want, when you want it, on your terms only. Which is exactly how many of us empowered ourselves out of a good mate.

I HAD IT ALL—AT 23

According to the most recent Census Bureau report, one-third of men and one-fourth of women between 30 and 34 have never been married. These numbers are four times higher than they were in 1970. At first, this might look like a positive trend—people are more mature at the age of marriage now. But many single women I talked to feel differently. It may seem liberating to look for love when it’s expected that we’ll date a lot of people (and have a lot of choices) before we find The One, but dating all these people ends up being exhausting and painful, not to mention confusing. The cultural pressure to marry later (but not too late!) often hurts us more than it helps us.

Jessica, a 29-year-old communications director for a museum, told me about the night, six years ago, when her college boyfriend, Dave, proposed to her. They were both almost 23 and living in Chicago. He was in medical school. She was applying for her first job. They’d been together for four years, and she was very much in love with Dave, but Jessica turned him down for one reason and one reason only: She thought she was too young to get married.

“I thought, what kind of independent woman gets married before she even has her first job? So I told him I had to grow on my own, and I worried that if we got married so young, I wouldn’t be able to do that. I also thought I shouldn’t marry the first serious boyfriend I ever had. I thought I should have other experiences with men.”

After their breakup, Dave was heartbroken and asked that they have no contact, and Jessica started doing everything she felt she needed to do to “grow as a person.” She moved to a new city, met new people, focused on her work, and went on lots of dates. But she couldn’t stop thinking about Dave.

Over the next two years, she often considered calling him up and telling him what a huge mistake she’d made, but her friends, who were also living the so-called empowered single girl life, would talk her out of it.

“Every time I considered calling him,” she said, “my friends made me doubt myself. ‘What, you’re going to settle down at twenty-four? What about your life?’ I started to wonder, is this life so wonderful? I liked my work, I liked my friends, and I hated dating. I had a couple of boyfriends that I got excited about at first, but I didn’t ultimately feel the way about them that I had about Dave. I didn’t have that comfort level. They didn’t ‘get me’ the way he did. Either I wasn’t into them or they weren’t into me, and I kept thinking, what am I looking for when I already found the guy I want to spend my life with?”

Secretly, Jessica would Google Dave at night, but she didn’t find much information, other than that he was still in medical school.

“I’d sit there on the computer at night, like a junkie, and I’d be thinking, this is pathetic,” she said. “This isn’t the exciting life I was supposed to be having as an empowered single woman in the big city! Dating other people and having more life experience didn’t enrich my life in any substantial way. I loved my work, but I could have gotten a similar job in Chicago. Instead of ordering takeout for myself or going out to dinner with a group of single friends, I wanted to make Dave dinner when he was on call.” But she hid all these feelings because she was embarrassed by them.

Finally, three years after Dave’s proposal, Jessica found his number through the medical school switchboard and got up the nerve to call him. Her heart was pounding when she heard his voice.

“The second he answered,” she said, “it felt like home again. I almost cried.” But then, as she told him why she called, Dave went silent. Now it was Jessica’s turn to have her heart broken. Dave had spent more than two years trying to get over Jessica, and finally, about eight months before, he’d met someone new. They were dating exclusively. She was a year older than Dave—a 27-year-old resident at the hospital—and was looking to meet the man she would marry.

Dave is now married to this woman and both are pediatricians. Jessica learned through a mutual college friend that they recently had a son.

Jessica’s voice cracked as she spoke. “I gave him up because it was drilled into me that first you establish your own life, then you share it with someone else. That first you go out and pursue your dreams. Well, here I am, still dreaming I’ll meet someone as great as Dave.”

I could relate to Jessica’s story. I also grew up believing that my early twenties were a time to experiment with different careers and different men and then suddenly, according my time table, The Guy would arrive on my doorstep. I didn’t even consider looking for a spouse in any serious way in my early or mid-twenties—when I was, in fact, most desirable in the dating pool. The goal was to go out and become “self-actualized” before marriage. I didn’t imagine that one day I’d be self-actualized but regretful.

Nor did Jessica. “I thought the message was, ‘You can have it all—but not at twenty-three,’ “ she said. “But now that I’m twenty-nine and I’m supposed to have it all, I don’t. I had it at twenty-three! The problem is that people judge you if you marry too early, but then if you end up single at thirty or thirty-five, they judge you for not being married.”

She was right: There’s a stigma for not waiting long enough, and there’s a stigma for waiting too long. People may have called me “brave” for having a baby on my own when my biological clock was ticking, but it was always said in the way you might call a cancer patient “brave.” I knew all too well that many people considered me a mildly tragic figure, if not a cautionary tale. For some, I was their biggest nightmare. They may not want to be tied to any old-fashioned rules, but they also want a traditional family. The women I spoke to in their late twenties and thirties seemed baffled by the way the feminist messages they grew up with don’t necessarily reflect what they might want personally. What they’re supposed to want and what they actually want seem at odds.

And that’s how a lot of us get screwed.

NO-STRINGS-ATTACHED DATING

Brooke is a 26-year-old in Boston who’s getting a graduate degree in women’s studies. I told her that I’m all for empowerment—sexual or otherwise—but I was surprised after a lot of young women told me that if you don’t get physically intimate with a guy by the third or fourth date, he’ll think you’re not interested and move on. Since when, I wanted to know, does not being physically intimate with someone you’ve known a total of, say, eight hours, indicate lack of interest?

More important, I wanted to know what’s in it for women, who often get emotionally attached to the men they sleep with, or who for the most part find casual sex unfulfilling. What’s so empowering about a sexual free-for-all?

Brooke sighed like I was an old fuddy-duddy. “It gives us the same choices men have,” she explained matter-of-factly.

“Okay,” I said. “But is casual sex what you want?”

“No,” she admitted. “But I’d want any woman who had that desire to have the freedom to pursue it.”

Meanwhile, Brooke has been living with her boyfriend for two years and confessed that she’s been wondering whether to move out when she turns 27 next month. “I’m ready for a serious relationship,” she said.

I wondered what she meant by a serious relationship. Wasn’t living together pretty serious?

“Everyone’s living together,” she replied. “It’s no big deal.” Indeed, thanks to the “freedom” we now have, half of women 25 to 29 have lived with a guy. What do marriage-minded women get out of spending their most desirable years with a boyfriend instead of a husband? I wondered why Brooke moved into her boyfriend’s apartment in the first place if she wanted marriage instead of cohabitation.

She thought for a minute. “I guess a part of me wanted living together to mean something it doesn’t,” she confessed. “Most people who move in together don’t talk about what it means for the future. I mean, vaguely, but it’s not like they’re engaged. They just move in because they’re in love.”

Love with no future plans: Hooray for freedom! But has this kind of “freedom” made us happier?

D-A-T-E IS A FOUR-LETTER WORD

Take our approach to romance. Today’s singles talk about romance like it’s the Holy Grail, but do we even have romance anymore? What happened to courtship? The very word sounds quaint to the single women I spoke to, who are used to hookups and group dates and friends with benefits. I don’t even know if “dating” would be the right word for what happens today. Somehow d-a-t-e has become a four-letter word (“It’s not a date; it’s just coffee”), and I have no idea what “dating” means in an era when people say, “We’re not in a relationship, we’re just dating,” while spending time and sleeping together. Sometimes there isn’t even an actual “date” involved in a date. You’ll be invited to join a guy and his friends at a party (and to bring attractive girlfriends!), you’ll be called from a cell phone at 9 p.m. and asked to “hang out” and watch a video at his place, or you’ll be asked to meet him for coffee for twenty minutes after his basketball game (which means he shows up reeking of sweat and letting you buy your own latte).

And women are supposed to be cool with all this. There seems to be lack of respect in the dating world but, these women say, we’re supposed to deny any expectations of chivalrous behavior, traditional gender roles, and marriage within a reasonable time frame because that level of detachment or independence supposedly makes us empowered.

Some women say they actually appreciate these non-date dates, and I have to admit, I used to be in that camp. Then an older married friend set me straight.

“Why should I waste time having a two-hour dinner on a first date when I know within thirty seconds of meeting for a quick coffee whether a guy is my type?” I asked her.

“Because you don’t know within thirty seconds whether he might be a person who would make you happy in a marriage,” she said.

And that’s just it. I was so busy trying to “have it all” that I lost sight of what might make me happy in a marriage. Marriage used to be thought of as comfortable and stable, and those were good things. But since women don’t need marriage for economic security and even to have children anymore, the primary purpose of marriage, many singles say today, is to make us happy—immediately and always. We don’t wait to see if connection develops by spending real time with a person. If a relationship takes too much effort, we decide it’s no longer making us happy, and we bail. The One doesn’t get grumpy. The One doesn’t misunderstand us. The One doesn’t want some alone time after work when we want to give him the rundown of our day.

In my mother’s generation, you were “happy” in your marriage because you had a family together, you had companionship, you had a teammate, you had stability and security. Now women say they also need all-consuming passion, stimulation, excitement, and fifty other things our mothers never had on their checklists. And yet, according to data on marital satisfaction compiled by David Popenoe at the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University, women in those early marriages were happier.

But because I had a twisted notion of what being a “feminist” meant, my priorities were all mixed up.

WHAT SHOULD A WOMAN WANT?

Caroline, a 33-year-old fashion buyer, told me that she considers herself a feminist but still wants “a guy to be a guy.”

As she put it, “I don’t need a guy to take care of me, but I wouldn’t be with someone who couldn’t. I want to have a career when I have kids, but I want to have the option not to work if I change my mind.” Interestingly, when I asked what qualities she’s looking for in a relationship, she talked about romance and passion and chemistry, but none of the practical things that would give her the option not to work.

Then there are women like many of my college classmates who, when they were dating, got offended if they were disqualified as relationship material by a guy who wanted to marry a woman who would stay home with the kids. They felt that these modern-seeming guys who also wanted a more traditional family structure reduced the number of eligible men even more—and yet, much to their surprise, most of these same women ended up becoming very happy moms who work part time or not at all. They weren’t as progressive as they once believed themselves to be, and were glad that they weren’t expected to bring in half of the family income.

In a 2006 New York Times column, John Tierney wrote that whereas the age-old question used to be, “What does a woman want?” modern feminists ask instead, “What should a woman want?” He went on to cite a study by two University of Virginia sociologists, Bradford Wilcox and Steven Nock, who looked at the question of what makes a woman happy in her marriage nowadays. It turns out that stay-at-home wives were more satisfied with their husbands and their marriages than working wives—and that even among working wives, those who were happiest had husbands who brought in two-thirds of the income.

“Women today expect more help around the home and more emotional engagement from their husbands,” Wilcox told Tierney. “But they still want their husbands to be providers who give them financial security and freedom.”

And no wonder: The traditional workplace often turns out to be unfulfilling for women after they’ve been at it for fifteen or twenty years. With its inflexible hours, office politics, fifty-hour weeks to stay “on track” for promotions, and later, younger bosses making irrational demands, the whole setup isn’t just a drag, it’s incompatible with the kind of family life many women want.

As the study’s other sociologist, Steven Nock, told Tierney, “A woman wants equity. That’s not necessarily the same as equality.”

WHY MEN CAN’T FIGURE US OUT

Many guys I spoke to say this affects the way people date.

“I have a daughter, and I’m glad she’s growing up in an era when women can run for president,” said Eric, who is 38 and has been married for seven years. “But when I was dating, most women wanted to be able to run for president but didn’t really want the actual job. They just wanted the opportunity to have it. Because now when we men say, ‘Great, go for it,’ our wives tell us they want to work part time or work fewer hours. Our wives want us to do half the child care and half the laundry, but they don’t want to earn half the income. So while I’m all for feminism, I do find it thoroughly confusing.”

My friend Paul, who is a 30-year-old lawyer, told me that while he’d only be interested in dating a smart woman, he’s less interested in how professionally successful she is or what she does for a living.

“Some of my single women friends can’t understand why guys don’t find them unbelievable catches because they made partner in their law firms at thirty, or make a certain amount of money in a business they started,” he explained. “But honestly, the point of being successful for a woman is for personal fulfillment and so that she can support herself. It’s not so that she can attract a man, because men know that we can’t count on women to provide the lion’s share of the income, so we’re more interested in what kind of partner this person is going to be. Do we like being around her? Is she interesting? Will she be a good parent?”

Paul said he was reluctant to talk about this because he worried it would make him sound sexist. Then again, he added, “I wouldn’t pursue a woman just because she was very successful, but I know many women who can find a man attractive based on success or wealth, and still call themselves feminists.”

Paul’s colleague Brandon, who is single and 33, told me that the women in his law firm think guys have it made because they don’t have a biological clock to contend with. That’s true, he said, but at the same time, when he and his friends are ready to get married, women hold them to impossibly high standards.

“You can’t just be a woman’s equal—you have to be slightly more successful than she is,” he said. “That rules out most of their colleagues, and many men in general. Then if you are more successful—you’re more senior in the firm than they are—you also have to be tall enough, and funny enough, to be worthy of even a first date.”

Paul, who is 5’7” and starting to lose his hair, told me that when he was dating a shoe store sales clerk (they met when he was trying on loafers), his women friends complained that male lawyers don’t want to date their equals.

Paul says that’s not true. “I was dating her for two reasons: One, I genuinely liked her. And two, she would actually date me! Women say that their equals won’t date them, but they’re the ones who won’t date their equals. They think they’re so empowered or whatever but they just seem standoffish. And I don’t think they’re that happy.”

EMPOWERED OR ALONE?

Paul might be right. I grew up interpreting feminism to be about this idea of empowerment: We aren’t just supposed to be strong and independent—we’re also supposed to be happy about it. We’re supposed to focus on our own lives, and when a partner comes along, that’s gravy, not the main course. We can’t be happy in a relationship until we learn to be happy alone.

For many years, I went along with these notions, but deep down, I didn’t want to learn to be happy alone. No matter how full my life (career and good friends; later, delightful child, career and good friends) I always wanted to go through life with a partner. And while I wasn’t someone who tore out pictures of bridal dresses or dreamed of my wedding day in great detail, I took it for granted that it would happen. It never occurred to me that my life wouldn’t include the husband and the kids and the Little Tikes slide in the backyard. So I certainly wasn’t trying to be a “trailblazer” by having a kid on my own. I simply wanted to be a mother before it was too late.

But the mere fact that, at 40, I outed myself in the Atlantic article by saying that I craved a conventional family with a good enough guy put me in the category, in some people’s minds, of the kind of woman who wanted it too badly. According to some readers, I was nothing short of an affront to the entire women’s movement. Here’s what some said:

“Could you be any more desperate?”

“How sad that your son is not enough for you.”

“I am totally appalled by your need for a man.”

“You are positively tragic.”

“Get some self-esteem!”

“You have taken codependency to a whole new low.”

“I feel sorry for you that you had such an all-encompassing desire to reproduce. Now I feel sorry for you that have such an all-encompassing desire to be married.”

“Don’t you think you owe it to yourself to be a little more comfortable with yourself before you look for a mate?”

“Maybe if you change your outlook, and aren’t so needy, you might meet the right person.”

“If my daughter grows up to want a man half as much as you do, I will know that I’ve done something wrong in raising her.”

Somehow, post–Jane Austen, it’s become shameful for a woman to admit how lonely she is and how strongly she wants to be part of a traditional family. What kind of educated, sophisticated modern woman with an active social life has time to be lonely?

You’re lonely? Get a life! Get a promotion! Get a hobby! Get a haircut! You go, girl!

I remember seeing a group of women on a morning TV news show discussing the fact that they’d rather be alone than with Mr. Good Enough. Would they? Really? They’d rather be 40 years old and going to bars with a group of female friends who are all looking past them for Mr. Right to walk in the door? None of the women on the show was movie-star attractive, a fact that didn’t seem to shake their belief that they’d land Prince Charming. One even said she’d rather be alone because you never know when you might find true love—maybe you’d find it in the nursing home. The nursing home! Would she really like to be single until she’s 80? And even then, doesn’t she realize she’d have even more competition for the one single man (who probably has Alzheimer’s) in the entire retirement community than she has now?

My 29-year-old colleague Haley told me that while she’d like to go through life with a partner, she doesn’t want to have to change for anyone. But is that empowerment or inflexibility? Isn’t change integral to compromise and being in a mature relationship? Has “girl power” made us self-absorbed, poor partners?

It’s probably no accident that once women adopted this “I don’t need a man” attitude, many of us were left without men. In a 2007 Time magazine article entitled “Who Needs a Husband?” (um, me), Sex and the City’s Sarah Jessica Parker is quoted as saying that because women don’t have to rely on men for financial support anymore, “my friends are looking for a relationship as fulfilling, challenging, and fun as the one they have with their girlfriends.”

What an idiotic idea! No matter how much I enjoy my female friendships, I don’t want my marriage to be like the relationship I have with my girlfriends. I doubt very many of us would. Factor in your girlfriends’ emotional requirements and quirks and mood swings and imagine how “fulfilling, challenging, and fun” it would be to live with them 24/7 for the rest of your life. Your girlfriend may listen ad nauseam to the minutiae of your day, but is she really the person you want to raise kids and run a household with?

In that same Time article, one woman, a 32-year-old media producer, explains that she ended a seven-year relationship with her investment banker boyfriend because although she “totally adored him,” she felt like life with him would be “too limiting.” She wasn’t happy, she explained, because she didn’t think she could “retain her spirit.” Yet she “adored him” enough to stay with him for seven years. What’s going to happen to this woman ten years from now when she looks back on this decision?

She might want to listen to what a 49-year-old single woman said in the article: “There was a point where I had men coming out of my ears. I don’t think I was so nice to some of them. Every now and then I wonder if God is punishing me. Sometimes I look back and say, ‘I wish I had made a different decision there.’”

Another woman is quoted as saying that she can easily get her sexual needs taken care of without marriage. So what? In a Time/CNN poll cited in the article, 4 percent of women said what they wanted most from marriage was sex, while 75 percent said it was companionship. Can she get that need easily taken care of outside of marriage—on a daily basis, and for the rest of her life?

TEA FOR ONE

Whether we admit it or not, being single is often lonely, especially by the time we reach our mid-thirties and many of our friends are busy with families of their own. It’s not that women don’t feel complete without a man. It’s that if no man is an island, most women aren’t, either. How lonely it was, before I had my son, to wake up in an empty house every morning, eat breakfast alone, read the paper alone, do the dishes alone.

How tedious it was to do the post-date play-by-play each week, reassuring my friend that there’s nothing wrong with her, that the guy was lame, only to have her parrot back that same bland reassurance the next week, after my own dating escapade. How disappointing it was to waste my short time on this planet in a string of temporary encounters when I could be building a lifetime of shared experience with one committed person. How much longer could I spend my time analyzing phone or e-mail messages, wasting hours talking about a guy who would be out of the picture three days, three weeks, or three months later, only to be replaced by another, and another, and another?

How bleak it felt to move to a new apartment alone, to shop for groceries for only myself, to have nobody to talk to in those intimate moments before bed except for girlfriends on the phone, chatting about—what else?—men! It was so boring. If we ruled out guys because they were “too boring,” nothing could be as boring as the endless merry-go-round of single life.

Having a child in the house changes the specifics—you’re never alone and, in fact, you desperately crave some solitude—but the longing for an adult partner remains. When I decided to have a child, it had nothing to do with staving off loneliness. It had to do with hoping to find The One without the time pressure of a biological clock. If I was aware enough to know that a child would be no cure-all for a lack of male companionship, I truly believed, in an astoundingly naive way, that I could simply do things backward: child first, soul mate later. But as hard as it was to meet The One before I became a parent, I hadn’t anticipated that once you have a baby alone, not only do you age about ten years in the first ten months, but if you don’t have time to shower, eat, urinate in a timely manner, or even leave the house except for work, where you spend every waking moment that your child is at day care, there’s very little chance that a man—much less The One—is going to knock on your door and join that party.

And then there’s the question of where you even meet single men once you’re a parent. They’re certainly not at toddler birthday parties or Gymboree, and the few I’d see at the grocery store weren’t exactly looking to pick up a mom singing “Apples and Bananas” to entertain the toddler sitting in the basket. (If the genders were reversed, of course, female shoppers would be all over that single dad.)

The loneliness I experienced after having a child wasn’t diminished; it was different and perhaps even compounded. It’s both single-person loneliness, and the loneliness of not sharing the little moments of my son’s life with the one person who cares about him as profoundly as I do.

But saying this aloud makes people uncomfortable. I remember getting an e-mail from a never-married single mom like me who told me that when she shared her loneliness on a single-mom listserve, people told her to stop feeling sorry for herself and to “get a life.” One woman even suggested that if she was so unhappy being a single mom, she should put her child in foster care.

“I got flamed for saying I get lonely sometimes,” this single mom told me. “But nobody flamed this other woman for telling me to put my kid in foster care!”

What’s so hard to accept about loneliness and desire for connection? Is there really something wrong with our self-esteem or our values if we want someone to share the literal and metaphorical driving with? We’re so worried about not “settling,” but then we find ourselves unhappily “unsettled”—living in our single-person apartments, eating takeout for dinner in front of the TV, and hoping for a guy to show up so we can “settle down.”

When I asked several women what “feminism” meant, I got a lot of responses that boiled down to having the same opportunities as men. But the more we talked, the more we came up against the fact that our needs are different and that we might not, in fact, want the same things. And when it comes to dating, we don’t have the same opportunities as men, especially as we get older.

This might seem obvious, but somehow I thought that I could just have a baby on my own, put my dating life on hold for a year or two, and then get right back in the game. I thought that’s what “equality” and “having it all” meant.

Then, when I was ready to date again, I went to a Thursday night speed dating event. I was now over 40 and everything had changed.

Let me tell you about that Thursday night.