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Finding a mate gets a lot harder for women once they hit 35 or 40. I just stumbled on this article below that is excellently realistic about the fix that women can get themselves in—with good advice on how to get out of said fix. I’ve underlined the parts that I think are particularly good. What do you think? (Actually, I think the whole thing is so good that I recommend you just read the whole thing.
How to meet a man at 40 It doesn’t get any easier the older you get. So just how do you win the dating game?
Shane Watson
Before we get started, you need to know that the man you fall in love with will bear absolutely no resemblance to the man you were planning to fall in love with. He will live an hour away from where you live, minimum. He will be wearing a shiny suit and, possibly, a brown shirt. And he’ll have the sort of baggage that requires its own baggage handler. This much you can guarantee.
Because one of the reasons you are single (and this is the only one that is strictly your fault) is that you have written off every kind of man who might conceivably cross your path. You have built a fortress out of your preconditions and you are glowering down from the battlements. Men do approach from time to time, but then they see the vats of boiling oil teetering on the ramparts and think better of it.
As far as you are concerned, this fortress is a normal precaution for vetting prospective men, and so it was, initially. Then time passed, you settled into a routine and now you are mistress of the You Won’t Get Past Me checklist.
As it happens, I was set up with the One at a lunch three years before the party at which we officially met. The reason the lunch doesn’t count as the first meeting is because we barely spoke, and the reason we didn’t speak is because I ran his details through the List database and, in 0.2 seconds, it came up with a You Cannot Be Serious rating. Of course it did! The One was very recently divorced (not for me, thanks). He had three children in tow (uh-oh). I think he’d had a savage £5 haircut, and I’m almost certain he was wearing the brown shirt. So, at that first meeting, I summoned the List and the List gave me permission to do nothing.
This List, let’s be clear, is not made up of sensible broad guidelines such as must not be married or should live on same continent; it is extremely specific. Here are some edited highlights from my List, and I’m not making a word of it up:
- Must have hair. Hair is good, but what if top of his List was “must have large breasts”? That puts a rather different complexion on it, doesn’t it?
- Must not have ex-wife or children. Like the pool isn’t small enough as it is.
- Must not wear fleeces. The bulky navy ones. I’m not going to budge on this one. Fleeces say you’re the kind of man who takes his wife to the pub for your anniversary dinner.
- Must not wear short-sleeved shirts. See fleeces. Add golf/ cricket/rugby club to anniversary venue.
- Must not wear jewellery. Although you can tell a lot from jewellery. Any man wearing a leather-thong necklace is certainly a narcissist who still imagines he could have been in the Rolling Stones. Pierced earrings past the age of 40 equal midlife-crisis man. Gold chains on a mahogany chest are the equivalent of the long little fingernail (just plain sleazy).
- Must have a good job, but not one that requires him to get up at 5.30am and take a laptop on holiday.
- Must not wear hoodies or V-neck sweaters with nothing underneath. Hoodies are for boys. And “nothing underneath” is another I Love Myself sign, only this time there’s also the suggestion of And I Am Hot in Bed.
- Must not sing flat. This, too, I stand by.
- Should play sports to fairly high standard. No excuse for this. It’s probably a hangover from school and the presex checklist of a boy’s fanciability.
When you think about it, this List would be more appropriate for an 18-year-old girl. Right now, and without any further ado, you need to abandon the List. Come on, there is nothing on your List that is genuinely non-negotiable. So you hate goatees, get him to shave it off. So you’re allergic to three-quarter-length trousers. Tell him. Liberate yourself. Start over. Not your type? Right, and that’s been such a success for you to date.
After much deliberation, these are the only up-front non-negotiables:
- Must be kind. If you have heard him be vile about anyone, seen him be cruel to animals, children or boring hostesses, then this man is not kind.
- Must like women. You think this goes without saying. Of course every man you’ve ever been out with has loved women. But are you absolutely sure? Did they like it if you contradicted them in public? Were there many women they found attractive who were a) over 50, b) large, or c) noisy? Thought not.
- Must adore you.
- Must be smarter than you, or at least as smart. Smarter, probably, or you will keep looking for that Achilles heel.
- Must have bigger feet than you. Obviously. And must be hairier.
- Must be able to make you laugh in all situations, including when you get to the airport and discover he has no passport.
- You must fancy him unconditionally.
If you cannot put a tick next to all of the above, then I would seriously consider calling it off right now.
So you’ve dumped the List, or at least made a concerted effort to put aside your prejudices. Now what? First, a small pep talk: you need to be ready for this to happen. Long-term single women have been known to get hooked on keeping their options open. You secretly like the feeling that something life-changing might be just around the corner. And the reason you — who travels solo, makes friends easily and never says no to adventure — need to rethink your future is because you may be ready to try everything and risk everything but your heart.
GETTING IN THE ZONE
- Assume that you are going to be having sex in the very near future. It generates that mixture of adrenaline and pheromones that people have been trying to bottle since the beginning of time.
- Make the extra effort. If you go to the party wearing your second-hottest dress, because you are saving your No 1 dress and you’ve already decided that you’ll only stay for an hour, then you might as well not bother. You will not exude the right anything-is-possible glow and the One will look in your direction and think “Downer”.
- Do something differently. Wear heels instead of flats, put on a slithery dress instead of jeans, do something unexpected with your hair (though obviously not involving an Alice band). You won’t necessarily look any better, but you will feel like you’ve changed up a gear. Part of the game (after a period of being overlooked) is believing you are definitely worth some attention, rather than passable in a low-lit environment.
- Lose your friends. I know, this sounds like madness. Who has the single woman got if not her loyal girlfriends? Who is going to bung you in a cab at the end of the night and then ring to check you haven’t fallen asleep in the stairwell? Nonetheless, as much as you love them and need them, your friends will cramp your style. What you don’t need is one of them rolling her eyes as you nibble provocatively on the rim of your champagne glass, or another bellowing: “Go on, do your Hoffmeister bear impersonation!” Plus, if something should happen to develop when your friends are in the vicinity, you can expect them to react in one of the following ways: gawping, followed by circling at a not-discreet- enough distance, texting all your other mutual friends with updates on your progress; giving the double thumbs-up immediately behind his head; leaping in to help things along (Isn’t she just gorgeous. I just love her! Doesn’t she look amazing tonight? Isn’t this brilliant?). Alternatively, if drunk enough, they may start popping up behind sofas, sniggering. This stuff doesn’t change the older you get; if anything, it gets worse. So don’t automatically arrange to go to the party with a couple of girls or, once you get there, rush to find the people you’ve known all your life.
- Pick your man. Don’t wait for him to find you. The One says he saw me steaming across the room, nostrils flared, elbowing women out of my path, but this is not true. I did spot him in the distance and then sort of worked my way across the room in his direction. But it’s true that I made it happen. And then, drum roll please, I did that thing happily single women so often forget to do. I set about making him like me (as opposed to waiting for him to prove to me that he was worth the trouble).
- Flirt and then some. However much you think you are flirting, double it. What the hell, quadruple it. Barely-there flirting will register as average civility, if it registers at all. Singledom makes a girl cautious. She is preoccupied with not looking like a mad, sad, ticking man-huntress. Trust me, you need to be flirting at a level where you think, “Blimey, steady on, he’ll think I’m a pro”, before you can be confident that he has twigged you might quite like him.
SOME RULES OF FLIRTING
- Be intensely interested in everything he says. Casting your eyes around is counterproductive, especially if you’re hunting the canapés.
- Maintain eye contact for long enough that you are both in no doubt it is not accidental.
- Be very impressed.
- Tease, a bit, but not about any of the no-go areas — height, hair, lisp, mothers, his level of inebriation/sweating.
- Flatter, but only lightly, in passing, and not more than once.
- Don’t touch. You could lightly touch his forearm, maybe. But better not.
- Disappear at some point. For roughly 10 minutes. You want him to have the chance to miss you.
- Some say fiddle with your hair, your cleavage, your earrings. I say don’t risk looking like you have fleas. Don’t lick your lips/teeth under any circumstances. He may think you are chasing canapé particles.
- Be extravagantly open about everything (bar medical stuff). Honesty is disarming.
- Make him responsible for you. Say, “Would you get me another drink?”, “Would you let me lean on you while I do up my shoe”, “Would you tell me what you think about buying property when the subprime market is in collapse?” Just kidding.
BEING SUCCESSFULLY SINGLE
Look, meeting a man is not your only goal in life. It doesn’t keep you awake at night (although it has been known to). But the key to being successfully single is keeping an open mind. You want to exude contentment and confidence, but also avoid giving the impression that you are so pleased with your single life, you wouldn’t give it up for anything, including the right man. It’s all about presentation:
- If there is one thing the single woman cannot afford to be, it’s a burden. You must be sunny and amenable, the best guest, the most reliable friend, the tonic at the party and the one who blends in on the family holiday. Precisely because you are not part of a couple, you need to give out the message, loud and clear, that you are no trouble and guaranteed life-enhancing. Being successfully single means having lots of different options and knowing plenty of people who might think, “Yes, bring her along!” rather than, “Maybe not”.
- People notice single women getting drunk more than they would notice any other demographic. They are waiting for you to get swervy and take to the dancefloor, on your own, clutching a bottle of champagne, and then collapse sobbing on the shoulder of some man who has long since married your best friend. All men over the age of 35 have pretty fixed views about women and drink — not women in general, you understand, but women they could be interested in. They love women who drink. They’re crazy about wild party girls. But they are all petrified of a genuinely drunk woman. Uninhibited is good. Determined to dance is good. Singing is good. Stumbling is less good. Slurring is worse. Shouty and argumentative is not good. Legs buckling is bad. Weepy is bad. Sick on floor is really bad. He decided not to call you, by the way, at slurring.
- The single woman must be prepared at all times. Even if you know that the chance of your freshly waxed areas getting man exposure is zero, there is a certain confidence that comes from being good to go at a moment’s notice. Grooming (don’t you hate that word?) works in mysterious ways. I have a friend who is living with a man she first slept with solely because, that same day, she had shelled out for a very expensive seaweed wrap. The seaweed wrap made her a) more confident on account of her baby-soft skin, and b) absolutely determined not to waste her investment. So there’s a possible double incentive for grooming.
- A woman who has a boyfriend can turn up to a party wearing a holey jumper, a ripped skirt and trodden-down ballet pumps and this woman will look bohemian and sexy. A single woman wearing exactly the same, on the same night, will look scruffy, grubby and, possibly, a bit unstable. People will look at her and think: “Poor Susie. She really has given up, hasn’t she?”
There is one unavoidable truth about clothes that many of us are still determinedly avoiding: if you want sex, then you need to dress with sex in mind. Dressing with sex in mind does not, repeat not, mean second-guessing men’s fantasies. That could work, but it will not work nearly as effectively as you wearing whatever you think is blindingly sexy, for two reasons:
a) A woman in slit satin skirt, fishnet tights, clingy top or similar will look like the reluctant deputy headmistress in the school charity performance if she simply isn’t that kind of girl. b) Who knows what men find sexy? It’s different for all of them, and just when you think you have a handle on what they like, they’ll remind you it isn’t that simple. The look you really want to avoid (apart from goth) is what your mother might describe as “lovely”. Lovely is a bias-cut floral dress and kitten-heel slingbacks, wrap dresses worn with cashmere cardigans, and pastel ballerina tops over slinky skirts. Once, a long time ago, the brilliant Isabella Blow told me I must wear a hat if I wanted to find the One. “You have to stand out in a crowd. You have to let them see you,” she said. “And men love a hat. They see the hat and they want to meet the girl.”
I never got around to wearing a hat Isabella-style (shaped like a galleon, blocking out the sun), but I should have taken the point. You don’t have to put a ship on your head to get men to notice you, but if you spend a decade wearing black trouser suits to parties, don’t be surprised if they walk right past you to get to the girl with the parrot on her shoulder.
I love it when Forbes magazine writes about dating. Here’s an article below about the problems of high-powered women in finding love. While both high-powered men AND women have similar problems making time for romance, women have the additional dilemma of being too high powered for many—if not most—men. And while power makes men MORE marketable, it makes women less so.
The Dating Game
Kiri Blakeley
Attention eligible bachelors: Sabina Ptacin would like to meet you. She’s the owner of two successful companies and is energetic and sociable.
She looks a bit like the actress Kate Winslet, with green eyes and sandy blonde hair. There’s only one problem: She spends so much time working, she breaks more dates than she keeps. “I’m not going to marry either one of my jobs,” admits Ptacin, who nevertheless often puts in 100-hour workweeks.
Loretta Talbot, a senior project manager at Wyeth, the pharmaceutical giant, wants a relationship too. She has a zest for life and enjoys photography and sailing. But it’s not a sure thing that a man will call for a second date once he finds out how much real estate she owns.
Finding one’s soul mate is never easy. But for women who are pursuing influential careers--women like Ptacin, Talbot, even Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor--the course of true love can be especially tricky. It’s not just a matter of trying to find the time to date when you’re working around the clock. Women face far more complex hurdles. Unlike their male counterparts, who generally become more desirable in the romance arena as they achieve higher career status, powerful women are often handicapped by their success.
And antiquated social mores still dictate that no matter how commanding a woman is at work, she should let her date choose the wine in a dimly lit restaurant.
“Successful men are viewed as highly desirable for women, but successful women are viewed as really scary by men,” says Patricia Cook, who runs a boutique executive recruiting firm and has worked with hundreds of senior level executive men and women. “A man needs to be confident and secure in himself in order to be with a woman who earns more than he does.”
Time Is Not On Her Side
A compatible partner can be hard to find, especially when time is hard to come by. Justice Sotomayor married her high school sweetheart just before starting Yale Law School in 1976, but they divorced seven years later. She subsequently acknowledged the difficulty she faced as a young ambitious lawyer who often had to cancel dates because of late nights at the office or sudden business trips. “He begins thinking, ‘Gee, maybe she’s not that interested,’’’ she has said. She had hopes of remarrying in her mid-40s, but that fiancé broke off the relationship and ended up marrying a younger woman. At 55, Sotomayor remains single.
The experience is shared by younger women like Ptacin, who turned 31 this year and spent the last half of her 20s co-founding a public relations firm, Red Branch, and a community for women entrepreneurs, Collective-E. She put off romance to focus on her personal and professional growth. Now both of her New York companies are humming along, and she’s ready to pursue a relationship.
But her seven-days-a-week workday begins at 7 a.m., and the e-mailing and problem-solving can go on until as late as 10 p.m., not to mention the evenings she’s out at business events or traveling to visit clients in Toronto, Washington and other cities.
As an entrepreneur, Ptacin has to “triage” her daily commitments by order of importance. Her businesses usually take precedence, especially when she suspects a prospective suitor isn’t going to turn out to be Mr. Right. “You don’t have the luxury of dating someone who might not be a good fit for you and just seeing what happens,” she explains. “There’s no time to date just for fun.”
Not surprisingly, she adds, “I end up canceling dates a lot.” Once, when Ptacin had rescheduled a get-together for the fourth time via text message, the man picked up the phone and “really went off on me,” she says. “He asked if we were ever going to go out or if he should just move on.” She let him move on.
Since the ‘70s women’s work hours have increased steadily, especially for those in managerial, professional or technical occupations. According to a study published in 2004 by Harvard University Press, 17% of women in those fields worked 50 hours or more each week, compared with 8% of women in other occupations.
When there are only so many hours in a day, something has to give, says Ann Smith, a Wernersville, Pa., marriage and relationship therapist. “It’s hard to be great at two things at the same time,” she says. “You can’t put 120% into the office and give the same amount of focus to your romantic life.”
The Achievement Dilemma
Even when they do reserve time to date, however, executive women may find that the very qualities they’ve needed to get ahead in business work against them in romance. Prevailing conventional wisdom--reinforced everywhere from the retro dating bible The Rules to the Bravo television series The Millionaire Matchmaker--holds that traits such as assertiveness and decisiveness are a turnoff to men.
“We tell women to let the guy call, let the guy decide if he wants to go out again, let the guy pick you up and don’t grill him on the phone about his background and whether he wants to have kids,” says Sherri Murphy, owner of Elite Connections, a Los Angeles matchmaking service.
Susan Posnick, a Dallas cosmetics executive in her 50s who looks at least a decade younger, thinks men where she lives view her success as a liability. It isn’t that Dallas men don’t like well-heeled women, explains Posnick, who is divorced with a 17-year-old daughter. It’s just that they’re more comfortable with women who have come into money through family or divorce. “They’re not so interested in successful businesswomen,” she says. “They’re more interested in trophies.”
Even younger women who were encouraged to compete with boys in school say they risk getting rejected if they too boldly tout their achievements. Wyeth executive Talbot went out with an information technology specialist who, after seeing her three-bedroom home in an upscale New Jersey suburb, commented, “I’d have to get another job in order to keep dating you.” The potential romance fizzled before Talbot could reveal that she also owned two rental properties and a boat.
Salary and asset differences are deal breakers for many a potential couple. But it isn’t just men who balk when a woman earns or owns more. Many women can’t envision marrying someone they view as lower on the financial and status totem pole, says Helen Fisher, a research professor at the Center for Human Evolutionary Studies at Rutgers University and the author of Why Him? Why Her? Finding Real Love by Understanding Your Personality Type.
“For evolutionary reasons, women have always looked for a partner who has status, resources and money, and can help her raise babies,” she says. “As long as our society holds money so dear, with men as the primary providers, successful women are going to have a problem in the dating market. Although this is changing,” contends Fisher.
Peach Reasoner, a divorced 58-year-old recording studio owner in Santa Monica, Calif., puts it this way: “You have this long laundry list of things you want a guy to be. And when you meet, you’re still computer processing: ‘Does he match up here? Check. Here? Check.’” She’s been dating--finance types, entrepreneurs, a photographer--but over the last two years, none has met all of her checklist criteria.
Love For Money
In order to increase their chances of finding a good match, many women are taking matters into their own hands and are joining online dating sites or hiring a matchmaker.
At the Internet service eHarmony, which caters to singles seeking long-term relationships, the number of female members earning over $125,000 has grown 85% in two years. For one-on-one dating coaches and matchmakers, who charge as much as six figures for their expertise, business has increased 8% since 2005, and the cottage industry now pulls in $260 million annually, according to research firm Marketdata Enterprises. Overall, the dating services industry, which also includes singles Web sites such as Match.com and in-person meet-up groups such as It’s Just Lunch, is a $1.8 billion industry.
Wyeth executive Talbot has been working occasionally with New York dating coaches Matt Titus and Tamsen Fadal, who charge $1,500 for six one-on-one sessions. Titus explains the difference between matchmakers and dating coaches this way: “Matchmakers bring the fish. We teach you to fish.” To that end, the couple advise Talbot on the best New York City watering holes in which to cast her line (Wall Street hangouts Wolfgang’s Steakhouse and Harry’s Café), how to bait a hook (approach a man confidently, hand him your card and then pretend you have somewhere else to be) and how to reel ‘em in (don’t talk too much about your busy schedule, which can make him feel like you don’t need him).
Talbot is still looking but thinks the coaching has been worth the price. “A year ago I wouldn’t approach men. I wasn’t as confident. But I realized unless I take control of things nothing will happen.”
Posnick, the Dallas cosmetics executive, is having fun dating men she has met while on business trips to different cities. And Ptacin, the public relations entrepreneur, now reserves one day a week--usually Sunday--to socialize, either on a date or with friends. “I won’t allow myself to look at the BlackBerry anymore when I’m out with friends,” she says. “And I’m meeting many more interesting people this way.”
She has also stopped dating men from her media and entrepreneurial circles, because that just leads to more work: “Who wants to talk about pitching angles on a date?”
Ptacin is hopeful she’ll eventually find her match because she has known men who enjoyed being attached to ambitious women. Her father, a physician, is her role model. When her mother started a catering business in her 30s, Ptacin’s father did everything from washing dishes to coming along on catering jobs. “I do want a family and a life, but I need someone like my father,” Ptacin says. “Or I need a wife.”
The longer you have been single, the more used to the single state you are and the more likely it is that you will stay that way.
I don’t have any research to back me up on that, but frankly I am pretty sure that is so. Particularly if you have never been coupled (living together for a year or more) or married before at all.
It’s pretty hard in our culture to have managed not to marry at least once by the time you are 35 or 40, if you are heterosexual. The pressures to couple and marry are fierce. In fact, you probably worked a bit to stay uncoupled, either avoiding dating at all, or getting out of developing relationships before committing.
Being and staying single is what you know how to do. Your thoughts and behaviors keep you that way. And you will probably stay single without putting in enormous effort to get different results.
Interestingly, singles are often unaware of what they do that keeps them single.
Most folks have some ambivalence about looking for love. Ambivalence means having thoughts, feelings, or actions that are in contradiction to each other, like love and hate. Because it is hard for us to keep two conflicting thoughts or emotions conscious and in focus, we are often aware of only one side of the ambivalence. Therefore, you may think and believe that you want to find a partner, that you are willing to do anything in order to get one, but you may also be equally unsure or not wanting to give up your single privileges, and you act unconsciously to undermine your best efforts to get what you think you want.
What might you be doing that undermines your finding love?
If you are stumped, take a hop over to my readers’ “50 Ways to BLEEP Your Lover” for a funny take on the question. But I’ve got some serious suggestions that might be indications of ambivalence:
 You do nothing that will move you towards finding love.
You think that love should “just happen” with no effort on your part.
You are always “too busy” in the present and vow to start sometime in the future when you have time. But that time never comes.
Perhaps you are listed on a dating site, but you do not post a photo. Or your profile essay is negative or otherwise poorly written.
You never make the first contact to potential partners.
You are critical of those who contact you.
You do not answer first or later emails promptly, waiting days or weeks to respond.
You complain about how much time Internet dating takes and the poor quality of people on your dating site.
You have long lists of “must have’s” and “deal breakers” that eliminate just about everyone.
Your schedule is so full that it is next to impossible to arrange even a coffee date.
You don’t show up at the first meeting, or you get lost, or you are late, or you change plans multiple times and then complain when your date backs out.
You are negative and critical at you first meeting, complaining about other dates or your ex.
You focus on some small detail that totally turns you off to your date, like he is balding or she is a little heavier than her pictures indicated, or he doesn’t talk easily, or she can’t spell.
You do not express positive interest, even if you are interested, and leave getting in contact again after that meeting to your date.
You consistently are not interested in people who are attracted to you, are reasonably healthy emotionally, and are truly available for a relationship.
You are interested in complicated, artistic, wealthy, elusive, moody, or eccentric people who perhaps are married or otherwise paired, or never married, alcoholic or drug-addicted, unemployed or deviant.
You expect your partner to make your life exciting. But exciting may really be a synonym for scary.
Well, as you probably can guess, I could go on and on. But I am sure you get the picture.
Now, if you keep reading, fair warning: I’m going to spoil it for you. You won’t be able to use your old excuses as reasons why you are single.
You are the reason. The consistent factor in your staying single is you.
And it’s not because you are fat or short or bald or use a cane to get around. Plenty of short, fat, bald, lame people are in relationships or married. The fact that you aren’t one of them is you.
Ugh. That’s the bad news, hard to hear and not easy to deliver, believe me. But there’s good news, too, because if you are the reason you are single, then you can do something about it.
Neenah, you go girl! Go on over and take a look at what Neenah is doing to find love.
New Jersey Woman Launches Web Site to Find Husband in ‘09
Off-beat news.
Neenah Pickett has a unique New Year’s resolution: Find a husband, or quit dating for a year.
The 42-year-old Somerset, N.J., woman created a spin on online dating by launching a Web site, 52weeks2findhim.com, on New Year’s Day.
Pickett told Gannett New Jersey that she’s not looking for someone to support her, but she would like to find someone to settle down with.
So what does she want in a mate? Pickett said a sense of humor and laid-back attitude are important.
If Pickett doesn’t meet Mr. Right by next New Year’s Eve, she’ll take a year off from dating.
Okay, this is a very long reprint, and I apologize in advance, but I thought that this article which appeared in a recent “Atlantic” was too good not to put here in it’s entirety. A dilemma that I hear all to often is from women who fret about “settling,” staying with the less-than-perfect guy rather than continuing their search for the ideal. Here’s a long and thoughtful piece from the other side. Author Lori Gottlieb went ahead and had her baby, since Mr. Perfect had not shown up. Here what she is thinking now:
The case for settling for Mr. Good Enough
by Lori Gottlieb
Marry Him!
About six months after my son was born, he and I were sitting on a blanket at the park with a close friend and her daughter. It was a sunny summer weekend, and other parents and their kids picnicked nearby—mothers munching berries and lounging on the grass, fathers tossing balls with their giddy toddlers. My friend and I, who, in fits of self-empowerment, had conceived our babies with donor sperm because we hadn’t met Mr. Right yet, surveyed the idyllic scene.
“Ah, this is the dream,” I said, and we nodded in silence for a minute, then burst out laughing. In some ways, I meant it: we’d both dreamed of motherhood, and here we were, picnicking in the park with our children. But it was also decidedly not the dream. The dream, like that of our mothers and their mothers from time immemorial, was to fall in love, get married, and live happily ever after. Of course, we’d be loath to admit it in this day and age, but ask any soul-baring 40-year-old single heterosexual woman what she most longs for in life, and she probably won’t tell you it’s a better career or a smaller waistline or a bigger apartment. Most likely, she’ll say that what she really wants is a husband (and, by extension, a child).
To the outside world, of course, we still call ourselves feminists and insist—vehemently, even—that we’re independent and self-sufficient and don’t believe in any of that damsel-in-distress stuff, but in reality, we aren’t fish who can do without a bicycle, we’re women who want a traditional family. And despite growing up in an era when the centuries-old mantra to get married young was finally (and, it seemed, refreshingly) replaced by encouragement to postpone that milestone in pursuit of high ideals (education! career! but also true love!), every woman I know—no matter how successful and ambitious, how financially and emotionally secure—feels panic, occasionally coupled with desperation, if she hits 30 and finds herself unmarried.
Oh, I know—I’m guessing there are single 30-year-old women reading this right now who will be writing letters to the editor to say that the women I know aren’t widely representative, that I’ve been co-opted by the cult of the feminist backlash, and basically, that I have no idea what I’m talking about. And all I can say is, if you say you’re not worried, either you’re in denial or you’re lying. In fact, take a good look in the mirror and try to convince yourself that you’re not worried, because you’ll see how silly your face looks when you’re being disingenuous.
Whether you acknowledge it or not, there’s good reason to worry. By the time 35th-birthday-brunch celebrations roll around for still-single women, serious, irreversible life issues masquerading as “jokes” creep into public conversation: Well, I don’t feel old, but my eggs sure do! or Maybe this year I’ll marry Todd. I’m not getting any younger! The birthday girl smiles a bit too widely as she delivers these lines, and everyone laughs a little too hard for a little too long, not because we find these sentiments funny, but because we’re awkwardly acknowledging how unfunny they are. At their core, they pose one of the most complicated, painful, and pervasive dilemmas many single women are forced to grapple with nowadays: Is it better to be alone, or to settle?
My advice is this: Settle! That’s right. Don’t worry about passion or intense connection. Don’t nix a guy based on his annoying habit of yelling “Bravo!” in movie theaters. Overlook his halitosis or abysmal sense of aesthetics. Because if you want to have the infrastructure in place to have a family, settling is the way to go. Based on my observations, in fact, settling will probably make you happier in the long run, since many of those who marry with great expectations become more disillusioned with each passing year. (It’s hard to maintain that level of zing when the conversation morphs into discussions about who’s changing the diapers or balancing the checkbook.)
Obviously, I wasn’t always an advocate of settling. In fact, it took not settling to make me realize that settling is the better option, and even though settling is a rampant phenomenon, talking about it in a positive light makes people profoundly uncomfortable. Whenever I make the case for settling, people look at me with creased brows of disapproval or frowns of disappointment, the way a child might look at an older sibling who just informed her that Jerry’s Kids aren’t going to walk, even if you send them money. It’s not only politically incorrect to get behind settling, it’s downright un-American. Our culture tells us to keep our eyes on the prize (while our mothers, who know better, tell us not to be so picky), and the theme of holding out for true love (whatever that is—look at the divorce rate) permeates our collective mentality.
Even situation comedies, starting in the 1970s with The Mary Tyler Moore Show and going all the way to Friends, feature endearing single women in the dating trenches, and there’s supposed to be something romantic and even heroic about their search for true love. Of course, the crucial difference is that, whereas the earlier series begins after Mary has been jilted by her fiancé, the more modern-day Friends opens as Rachel Green leaves her nice-guy orthodontist fiancé at the altar simply because she isn’t feeling it. But either way, in episode after episode, as both women continue to be unlucky in love, settling starts to look pretty darn appealing. Mary is supposed to be contentedly independent and fulfilled by her newsroom family, but in fact her life seems lonely. Are we to assume that at the end of the series, Mary, by then in her late 30s, found her soul mate after the lights in the newsroom went out and her work family was disbanded? If her experience was anything like mine or that of my single friends, it’s unlikely.
And while Rachel and her supposed soul mate, Ross, finally get together (for the umpteenth time) in the finale of Friends, 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? She and Ross have passion but have never had long-term stability, and the fireworks she experiences with him but not with Barry might actually turn out to be a liability, given how many times their relationship has already gone up in flames. It’s equally questionable whether Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw, who cheated on her kindhearted and generous boyfriend, Aidan, only to end up with the more exciting but self-absorbed Mr. Big, will be better off in the framework of marriage and family. (Some time after the breakup, when Carrie ran into Aidan on the street, he was carrying his infant in a Baby Björn. Can anyone imagine Mr. Big walking around with a Björn?)
When we’re holding out for deep romantic love, we have the fantasy that this level of passionate intensity will make us happier. But marrying Mr. Good Enough might be an equally viable option, especially if you’re looking for a stable, reliable life companion. Madame Bovary might not see it that way, but if she’d remained single, I’ll bet she would have been even more depressed than she was while living with her tedious but caring husband.
What I didn’t realize when I decided, in my 30s, to break up with boyfriends I might otherwise have ended up marrying, is that while settling seems like an enormous act of resignation when you’re looking at it from the vantage point of a single person, once you take the plunge and do it, you’ll probably be relatively content. It sounds obvious now, but I didn’t fully appreciate back then that what makes for a good marriage isn’t necessarily what makes for a good romantic relationship. Once you’re married, it’s not about whom you want to go on vacation with; it’s about whom you want to run a household with. Marriage isn’t a passion-fest; it’s more like a partnership formed to run a very small, mundane, and often boring nonprofit business. And I mean this in a good way.
I don’t mean to say that settling is ideal. I’m simply saying that it might have gotten an undeservedly bad rap. As the only single woman in my son’s mommy-and-me group, I used to listen each week to a litany of unrelenting complaints about people’s husbands and feel pretty good about my decision to hold out for the right guy, only to realize that these women wouldn’t trade places with me for a second, no matter how dull their marriages might be or how desperately they might long for a different husband. They, like me, would rather feel alone in a marriage than actually be alone, because they, like me, realize that marriage ultimately isn’t about cosmic connection—it’s about how having a teammate, even if he’s not the love of your life, is better than not having one at all.
The couples my friend and I saw at the park that summer were enviable but not because they seemed so in love—they were enviable because the husbands played with the kids for 20 minutes so their wives could eat lunch. In practice, my married friends with kids don’t spend that much time with their husbands anyway (between work and child care), and in many cases, their biggest complaint seems to be that they never see each other. So if you rarely see your husband—but he’s a decent guy who takes out the trash and sets up the baby gear, and he provides a second income that allows you to spend time with your child instead of working 60 hours a week to support a family on your own—how much does it matter whether the guy you marry is The One?
It’s not that I’ve become jaded to the point that I don’t believe in, or even crave, romantic connection. It’s that my understanding of it has changed. In my formative years, romance was John Cusack and Ione Skye in Say Anything. But when I think about marriage nowadays, my role models are the television characters Will and Grace, who, though Will was gay and his relationship with Grace was platonic, were one of the most romantic couples I can think of. What I long for in a marriage is that sense of having a partner in crime. Someone who knows your day-to-day trivia. Someone who both calls you on your bullshit and puts up with your quirks. So what if Will and Grace weren’t having sex with each other? How many long- married couples are having much sex anyway?
“I just want someone who’s willing to be in the trenches with me,” my single friend Jennifer told me, “and I never thought of marriage that way before.” Two of Jennifer’s friends married men who Jennifer believes aren’t even straight, and while Jennifer wouldn’t have made that choice a few years back, she wonders whether she might be capable of it in the future. “Maybe they understood something that I didn’t,” she said.
What they understood is this: as your priorities change from romance to family, the so-called “deal breakers” change. Some guys aren’t worldly, but they’d make great dads. Or you walk into a room and start talking to this person who is 5’4” and has an unfortunate nose, but he “gets” you. My long-married friend Renée offered this dating advice to me in an e-mail:
I would say even if he’s not the love of your life, make sure he’s someone you respect intellectually, makes you laugh, appreciates you … I bet there are plenty of these men in the older, overweight, and bald category (which they all eventually become anyway).
She wasn’t joking.
A number of my single women friends admit (in hushed voices and after I swear I won’t use their real names here) that they’d readily settle now but wouldn’t have 10 years ago. They believe that part of the problem is that we grew up idealizing marriage—and that if we’d had a more realistic understanding of its cold, hard benefits, we might have done things differently. Instead, we grew up thinking that marriage meant feeling some kind of divine spark, and so we walked away from uninspiring relationships that might have made us happy in the context of a family.
All marriages, of course, involve compromise, but where’s the cutoff? Where’s the line between compromising and settling, and at what age does that line seem to fade away? Choosing to spend your life with a guy who doesn’t delight in the small things in life might be considered settling at 30, but not at 35. By 40, if you get a cold shiver down your spine at the thought of embracing a certain guy, but you enjoy his company more than anyone else’s, is that settling or making an adult compromise?
Take the date I went on last night. The guy was substantially older. He had a long history of major depression and said, in reference to the movies he was writing, “I’m fascinated by comas” and “I have a strong interest in terrorists.” He’d never been married. He was rude to the waiter. But he very much wanted a family, and he was successful, handsome, and smart. As I looked at him from across the table, I thought, Yeah, I’ll see him again. Maybe I can settle for that. But my very next thought was, Maybe I can settle for better. It’s like musical chairs—when do you take a seat, any seat, just so you’re not left standing alone?
Back when I was still convinced I’d find my soul mate, I did, although I never articulated this, have certain requirements. I thought that the person I married would have to have a sense of wonderment about the world, would be both spontaneous and grounded, and would acknowledge that life is hard but also be able to navigate its ups and downs with humor. Many of the guys I dated possessed these qualities, but if one of them lacked a certain degree of kindness, another didn’t seem emotionally stable enough, and another’s values clashed with mine. Others were sweet but so boring that I preferred reading during dinner to sitting through another tedious conversation. I also dated someone who appeared to be highly compatible with me—we had much in common, and strong physical chemistry—but while our sensibilities were similar, they proved to be a half-note off, so we never quite felt in harmony, or never viewed the world through quite the same lens.
Now, though, I realize that if I don’t want to be alone for the rest of my life, I’m at the age where I’ll likely need to settle for someone who is settling for me. 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. Having turned 40, I now have wrinkles, bags under my eyes, and hair in places I didn’t know hair could grow on women. With my nonworking life consumed by thoughts of potty training and playdates, I’ve become a far less interesting person than the one who went on hiking adventures and performed at comedy clubs. But when I chose to have a baby on my own, the plan was that I would continue to search for true connection afterward; it certainly wasn’t that I would have a baby alone only to settle later. After all, wouldn’t it have been wiser to settle for a higher caliber of “not Mr. Right” while my marital value was at its peak?
Those of us who choose not to settle in hopes of finding a soul mate later are almost like teenagers who believe they’re invulnerable to dying in a drunk-driving accident. We lose sight of our mortality. We forget that we, too, will age and become less alluring. And even if some men do find us engaging, and they’re ready to have a family, they’ll likely decide to marry someone younger with whom they can have their own biological children. Which is all the more reason to settle before settling is no longer an option.
I’ll be the first to admit that there’s something objectionable about making the case for settling, because it’s based on the premise that women’s biological clocks place them at the mercy of men, and that therefore a power dynamic dictates what should be an affair solely of the heart (not the heart and the ovaries). But I’m not the only woman who accepts settling as a valid choice—apparently so do the millions who buy bestselling relationship books that advocate settling but that, so as not to offend, simply spin the concept as a form of female empowerment.
Take, for instance, books like Men Are Like Fish: What Every Woman Needs to Know About Catching a Man or Find a Husband After 35 Using What I Learned at Harvard Business School, whose titles alone make it clear that today’s supposedly progressive bachelorettes aren’t waiting for old-fashioned true love to strike before they can get married. Instead, they’re buying dozens of proactive coaching manuals to learn how to strategically land a man. The actual man in question, though, seems so irrelevant that, to my mind, these women might as well grab a well-dressed guy off the street, drag him into the nearest bar, buy him a drink, and ask him to marry her. (Or, to retain her “power,” she should manipulate him into asking her.)
The approaches in these books may differ, but the message is the same: more important than love is marriage. To achieve that goal, women across the country are poring over guidebooks that all boil down to determining, “Does he like me?,” while completely overlooking the equally essential question, “Do I like him?” In other words, whatever compromises you have to make—including, but not limited to, pretending to be or actually becoming an entirely different person—make sure that you get some schmo to propose to you before you turn into a spinster.
Last year’s Why Smart Men Marry Smart Women makes the most blatant case for settling: if women were more willing to “think outside the box,” as one of the book’s married sources advises, many of them would be married. The author then trots out tales of professional, accomplished women happily dating a plumber, a park ranger, and an Army helicopter nurse. The moral is supposed to be “Don’t be too picky” but many of the anecdotes quote women who seem to be trying to convince not just the reader, but themselves, that they haven’t settled.
“I should be with some guy with a vast vocabulary who is very smart,” said Heather, a 30-year-old lawyer turned journalist. Instead, she’s dating an actor who didn’t finish college. “My boyfriend is fun, he’s smart, but he hasn’t gone through years of school. He wanted to pursue acting. And you can tell—he doesn’t have that background, and it never ever once bothered me. But for everyone else, [his lack of education] is what they see.” Another woman says she dates “the ‘secrets’ … guys other women don’t recognize as great.” How’s that for damning praise?
Meanwhile, in sugarcoating this message, the authors often resort to flattery, telling the reader to remember how fabulous, attractive, charming, and intelligent she is, in the hopes that she’ll project a more confident vibe on dates. In my case, though, the flattery backfired. I read these books thinking, Wait, if I’m such a great catch, why should I settle for anyone less than my equal? If I’m so fabulous, don’t I deserve true romantic connection?
Only one popular book that I can think of in the vast “find a man” genre (like most single women confounded by their singleness, I’m embarrassingly well versed) takes the opposite approach. In He’s Just Not That Into You, written by the happily married Greg Behrendt and the unhappily single Liz Tuccillo, the duo exhorts women not to settle. But the book’s format is telling: Behrendt gives perky pep talks to women unable to find a worthy match, while Tuccillo repeatedly comments on how hard it is to take her co-author’s advice, because while being with a partner who is “beneath you” (Behrendt’s term) is problematic, being single just plain “sucks” (Tuccillo’s term).
Before I got pregnant, though, I also read single-mom books such as Choosing Single Motherhood: The Thinking Woman’s Guide, whose chapter titles “Can I Afford It?” and “Dealing With the Stress” seemed like realistic antidotes to the faux-empowering man-hunting manual headings like “A Little Lingerie Can Go a Long Way.” But the book’s author, Mikki Morrissette, held out a tantalizing carrot. In her introduction, she describes having a daughter on her own; then, she writes, a few years later and five months pregnant with her son, “I met a guy I fell in love with. He and my daughter were in the delivery room when my son was born in January 2004.” Each time I read about single women having babies on their own and thriving instead of settling for Mr. Wrong and hiring a divorce lawyer, I felt all jazzed and ready to go. At the time, I truly believed, “I can have it all—a baby now, my soul mate later!”
Well … ha! Hahahaha. And ha.
Just as the relationship books fail to mention what happens after you triumphantly land a husband (you actually have to live with each other), these single-mom books fail to mention that once you have a baby alone, not only do you age about 10 years in the first 10 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.
They also gloss over the cost of dating as a single mom: the time and money spent on online dating (because there are no single men at toddler birthday parties); the babysitter tab for all those boring blind dates; and, most frustrating, hours spent away from your beloved child. Even women who settle but end up divorced might be in a better position than those of us who became mothers on our own, because many ex-wives get both child-support payments and a free night off when the kids go to Dad’s house for a sleepover. Never-married moms don’t get the night off. At the end of the evening, we rush home to pay the babysitter, make any houseguest tiptoe around and speak in a hushed voice, then wake up at 6 a.m. at the first cries of “Mommy!”
Try bringing a guy home to that.
Settling is mostly a women’s game. Men settle far less often and, when they do, they don’t seem the least bit bothered by the fact that they’re settling.
My friend Alan, for instance, justified his choice of a “bland” wife who’s a good mom but with whom he shares little connection this way: “I think one-stop shopping is overrated. I get passion at my office with my work, or with my friends that I sometimes call or chat with—it’s not the same, and, boy, it would be exciting to have it with my spouse. But I spend more time with people at my office than I do with my spouse.”
Then there’s my friend Chris, a single 35-year-old marketing consultant who for three years dated someone he calls “the perfect woman”—a kind and beautiful surgeon. She broke off the relationship several times because, she told him with regret, she didn’t think she wanted to spend her life with him. Each time, Chris would persuade her to reconsider, until finally she called it off for good, saying that she just couldn’t marry somebody she wasn’t in love with. Chris was devastated, but now that his ex-girlfriend has reached 35, he’s suddenly hopeful about their future.
“By the time she turns 37,” Chris said confidently, “she’ll come back. And I’ll bet she’ll marry me then. I know she wants to have kids.” I asked Chris why he would want to be with a woman who wasn’t in love with him. Wouldn’t he be settling, too, by marrying someone who would be using him to have a family? Chris didn’t see it that way at all. “She’ll be settling,” Chris said cheerfully. “But not me. I get to marry the woman of my dreams. That’s not settling. That’s the fantasy.”
Chris believes that women are far too picky: everyone knows, he says, that a single middle-aged man still has appealing prospects; a single middle-aged woman likely doesn’t. And he’s right. Single women are painfully aware of this. I hear far more women than men talk about getting married as a goal to be met by a certain deadline. My friend Gabe points out that this allows men to be the true romantics; when a man breaks up with a perfectly acceptable woman because he’s “just not feeling it,” there’s none of the ambivalence a woman with a deadline feels. “Women are the least romantic,” Gabe said. “They think, ‘I can do that.’ For a lot of women, it becomes less about love and more about what they can live with.”
Not long ago, Gabe, who is 43, dated a woman he liked very much one-on-one, but he broke up with her because “she couldn’t be haimish”—comfortable—with his friends in a group setting. He has no regrets. A female friend who broke up with a guy because he “didn’t like to read” and who is now, too, a single mom (with, ironically, no time to read herself) similarly felt no regrets—at first. At the time, she couldn’t imagine settling, but here’s the Catch-22: “If I’d settled at 39,” she said, “I always would have had the fantasy that something better exists out there. Now I know better. Either way, I was screwed.”
The paradox, of course, is that the more it behooves a woman to settle, the less willing she is to settle; a woman in her mid- to late 30s is more discriminating than one in her 20s. She has friends who have known her since childhood, friends who will know her more intimately and understand her more viscerally than any man she meets in midlife. Her tastes and sense of self are more solidly formed. She says things like “He wants me to move downtown, but I love my home at the beach,” and, “But he’s just not curious,” and “Can I really spend my life with someone who’s allergic to dogs?”
I’ve been told that the reason so many women end up alone is that we have too many choices. I think it’s the opposite: we have no choice. If we could choose, we’d choose to be in a healthy marriage based on reciprocal passion and friendship. But the only choices on the table, it sometimes seems, are settle or risk being alone forever.That’s not a whole lot of choice.
Remember the movie Broadcast News? Holly Hunter’s dilemma—the choice between passion and friendship—is exactly the one many women over 30 are faced with. In the end, Holly Hunter’s character decides to wait for the right guy, but he (of course) never materializes. Meanwhile, her emotional soul mate, the Albert Brooks character, gets married (of course) and has children.
And no matter what women decide—settle or don’t settle—there’s a price to be paid, because there’s always going to be regret. Unless you meet the man of your dreams (who, by the way, doesn’t exist, precisely because you dreamed him up), there’s going to be a downside to getting married, but a possibly more profound downside to holding out for someone better.
My friend Jennifer summed it up this way: “When I used to hear women complaining bitterly about their husbands, I’d think, ‘How sad, they settled.’ Now it’s like, ‘God, that would be nice.’”
That’s why mothers tell their daughters to “keep an open mind” about the guy who spends his weekends playing Internet poker or touches your back for two minutes while watching ESPN and calls that “a massage.” The more-pertinent questions, to most concerned mothers of daughters in their 30s, have to do with whether the daughter’s boyfriend will make a good father; or, if he’s a workaholic, whether he can provide the environment for her to be a good mother. As my own mother once advised me, when I was dating a musician, “Everyone settles to some degree. You might as well settle pragmatically.”
I know all this now, and yet—here’s the problem—much as I’d like to settle, I can’t seem to do it. It’s not that I have to be dazzled by a guy anymore (though it would be nice). It’s not even that I have to think about him when he’s not around (though that would be nice, too). Nor is it that I’m unable to accept reality and make significant compromises because that’s what grown-ups do (I can and have—I had a baby on my own).
No, the problem is that the very nature of dating leaves women my age to wrestle with a completely different level of settling. It’s no longer a matter, as it was in my early 30s, of “just not feeling it,” of wanting to be in love. Consider the men whom older women I know have married in varying degrees of desperation over the past few years: a recovering alcoholic who doesn’t always go to his meetings; a trying-to-make-it-in-his-40s actor; a widower who has three nightmarish kids and who’s still actively grieving for his dead wife; and a socially awkward engineer (so socially awkward that he declined to attend his wife’s book party). It’s not that these women are crazy; it’s that the dating pool has dwindled dramatically and that, due to gender politics, the few available men tend to require far more of a concession than those who were single when we were younger. And while I have a much higher tolerance for settling than I did back then, now I have my son to consider. It’s one thing to settle for a subpar mate; it’s quite another to settle for a subpar father figure for my child. So while there’s more incentive to settle now, there’s less willingness to settle too much, because that would be a disservice to my son.
This doesn’t undermine my case for settling. Instead, it supports my argument to do it young, when settling involves constructing a family environment with a perfectly acceptable man who may not trip your romantic trigger—as opposed to doing it older, when settling involves selling your very soul in exchange for damaged goods. Admittedly, it’s a dicey case to make because, like the divorced women I know who claim they wouldn’t have done anything differently, because then they wouldn’t have Biff and Buffy, I, too, can’t imagine life without my magical son. (Although, had I had children with a Mr. Good Enough, wouldn’t I be as hopelessly in love with those children, too?) I also acknowledge the power of the grass-is-always-greener phenomenon, and allow for the possibility that my life alone is better (if far more difficult) than the life I would have in a comfortable but tepid marriage.
But then my married friends say things like, “Oh, you’re so lucky, you don’t have to negotiate with your husband about the cost of piano lessons” or “You’re so lucky, you don’t have anyone putting the kid in front of the TV and you can raise your son the way you want.” I’ll even hear things like, “You’re so lucky, you don’t have to have sex with someone you don’t want to.”
The lists go on, and each time, I say, “OK, if you’re so unhappy, and if I’m so lucky, leave your husband! In fact, send him over here!”
Not one person has taken me up on this offer.
The more educated and successful a man is, the more marketable he is for love. Just the opposite for women. Ergo, the complaint of women in their 30’s, 40’s and up: Where does a high-powered, successful woman find a date, let alone a mate?
It’s a real conundrum. More women are going to college and grad school now than men. Younger women are at least as concerned and focused on their career as men have traditionally been. Men have tradionally “married down,” paired with women who were younger, less educated and career-minded, and perhaps even lower on the social ladder. Women have tradionally done the opposite: “Married up” to older, more successful men. As women rise in education, success and finances, there is a dwindling pool of men who are more and better than they are.
Then you have the “I don’t want to ‘settle’” attitude, meaning “accept less than what I think I deserve.” And then you have an gigantic demand (highly qualified women) meeting an extremely limited pool of applicants (well-qualified guys, who may be wanting to do what guys have always done, marry down).
Women need to rethink what “settling” would be. What might fit the traditional model of “more than” for the women might be nice for a date, but not so good for the longer haul. What if both parnters were heavily career focused? Who does the important support functions that a marriage and family needs? And remember that careers don’t go on forever. But hopefully a mate will.
Qualities that work better in a mate than tall, dark, handsome, and more successful might be trustworthiness, dependability, and persevereness. What women—and men—might want in a date (handsome or beautiful, exciting, fun) might wear thin rather soon in a marriage.
From Your Romance Coach, Kathryn Lord
If you are single and wondering if it’s worth it to change your status to married, you are not alone. Particularly if you live in Boston. One of my Romance clients lives in Boston, and she told me recently that the culture there is very much single—her friends say “Why get married? Just live together.” And the figures support that: in a recent Boston Globe article, author Keith O’Brien quoted the US Census figures - 53.6% of men there have never married, tops in the nation. And Boston women are close behind, with 45% never married, following only Newark and Washington, DC.
O’Brien also notes results from a Pew Internet and American Life Project report in February: 55% of singles in the US have no interest in pursuing a partner. While 26% are in committed relationships, only 16% identified themselves as “actively looking.” Interestingly, the Pew study started out looking at the significance of Internet dating and stumbled on this interesting phenomenon: While we assume that singles must naturally want to be paired, this may no longer be so.
In my book “Find a Sweetheart Soon!” I tackle this issue right off in Chapter 4. Never, as I write there, has there been a better time to be single and have a good and happy life. Since for many folks, a partner search is so anxiety-provoking that it is paralyzing, why do it at all? As well, so many singles have set themselves up quite nicely with complete lives that they are unwilling to change. So why do it?
It’s nice to see that more and more, people are giving themselves permission to opt out of the romance race. And if that’s what you decide to do, go for it. Unless you are giving up out of fear or worse. Positive choice? Yes! A negative one? Why?
From Your Romance Coach, Kathryn Lord
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