Publisher Description
Lori Gottlieb discusses Marry Him in a video on The Atlantic website.
You have a fulfilling job, a great group of friends, the perfect apartment, and no shortage of dates. So what if you haven’t found The One just yet. Surely he’ll come along, right? But what if he doesn’t? Or even worse, what if he already has, but you just didn’t realize it? Suddenly finding herself forty and single, Lori Gottlieb said the unthinkable in her March 2008 article in The Atlantic: Maybe she and single women everywhere, needed to stop chasing the elusive Prince Charming and instead go for Mr. Good Enough. Looking at her friends’ happy marriages to good enough guys who happen to be excellent husbands and fathers, Gottlieb declared it time to reevaluate what we really need in a partner. Her ideas created a firestorm of controversy from outlets like the Today show to The Washington Post, which wrote, “Given the perennial shortage of perfect men, Gottlieb’s probably got a point,” to Newsweek and NPR, which declared, “Lori Gottlieb didn’t want to take her mother’s advice to be less picky, but now that she’s turned forty, she wonders if her mother is right.” Women all over the world were talking. But while many people agreed that they should have more realistic expectations, what did that actually mean out in the real world, where Gottlieb and women like her were inexorably drawn to their “type”? That’s where Marry Him comes in. By looking at everything from culture to biology, in Marry Him Gottlieb frankly explores the dilemma that so many women today seem to face–how to reconcile the strong desire for a husband and family with a list of must-haves so long and complicated that many great guys get rejected out of the gate. Here Gottlieb shares her own journey in the quest for romantic fulfillment, and in the process gets wise guidance and surprising insights from marital researchers, matchmakers, dating coaches, behavioral economists, neuropsychologists, sociologists, couples therapists, divorce lawyers, and clergy–as well as single and married men and women, ranging in age from their twenties to their sixties. Marry Him is an eye-opening, often funny, sometimes painful, and always truthful in-depth examination of the modern dating landscape, and ultimately, a provocative wake-up call about getting real about Mr. Right.
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“This might be one of the best of the ‘date/get married’ books. What I thought would be a depressing book about settling for less turned out to be an encouraging and hopeful book that shows how a realistic approach to dating, love and marriage can get you exactly what you want. The author chronicles her own search for marriage while doing a lot of research on why the modern marriage isn’t working, why it seems so hard for women to find someone, how women sabotage themselves out of perfectly good relationships that probably would have led to marriage. I expected not to like this book. However, the author isn’t saying settle for anyone, but rather that good enough is more than enough, love/chemistry isn’t always something that happens immediately but is built over time and that the superficials women always focus on like height, hair color, common interests won’t matter down the road. Instead, women should focus on the qualities that will matter: character, values, personality, life goals and broaden the search to include men that you might have otherwise bypassed because even if they don’t seem to be what you want on the surface, they might turn out to be exactly what you need. The book is very well-written, well researched. I couldn’t put it down! Having read quite a few titles in this genre now, I’d pair this with “He’s just not that into you”. Together they cover the gamut and, in my opinion, are the only ones you need should you find yourself in this stage.”
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Charity (4 out of 5 stars)
