There’s been much ado about love over the past week. And that’s quite apart from speculation over whether or not Brad and his wacky old-man beard might be reuniting with Jennifer Aniston.
Debate has been stirred around the world courtesy of the book ‘Marry Him: the Case for Settling for Mr Good Enough’, by American writer Lori Gottlieb, to be released in the United States this week.
In it, Gottlieb - who is 42 and the single mother of a child conceived via sperm donation - holds herself up as a cautionary tale: if you cling to the (unrealistic) ideal of finding Mr Right, you may end up all alone.
The book urges single women approaching 30 to reconsider their standards. “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,” she says.
For Gottlieb, such sparky thinking has all the makings of a disaster, “Ask any soul-baring 40-year-old single heterosexual woman what she most longs for in life … Most likely, she’ll say that what she really wants is a husband and, by extension, a child.”
Unsurprisingly, the call to settle has sparked bagfuls of outrage from the love police who think marriage is more complex and special than running an “often boring nonprofit business” - as Gottlieb describes it.
Becky Pugh recently opined in the Telegraph, “[marriage] should be born of a good, old-fashioned feeling, deep inside, which tells you both that you simply cannot be without each other.”
Others again have lambasted the modern girl for being too picky and therefore too unlucky. Oprah’s O magazine called the book “surprisingly, unnervingly convincing”.
But despite the column inches devoted to the issue so far, there has been little mention of fact that ‘Marry Him’ assumes a pretty retro view of what women want. Whatever side people have taken in the debate, is has been taken for granted that marriage and children are the number one goal for women.
Of course a husband and kids are super important for many. But as anyone who has heard of the 1970s will know, it simply isn’t true that this is every girl’s raison d’être. Or that they have been disorganised or negligent in some way if it doesn’t happen.
A survey conducted last year by the Rockefeller Foundation and Time found that being married was ‘very important’ to only 53 per cent of women surveyed, while 54 per cent of women strongly agreed they could have a fulfilling life without marriage. Having children was the top life goal for just 66 per cent of women surveyed.
In Australia, as of 2008, unmarried women outnumbered married women for the first time since World War I, with Pacific Micromarketing estimating up to 25 per cent of women will remain childless.
This lack of matrimony and procreation is not just because women are waiting for Prince William to see the light or because they plan to delay childbearing until their late 40s.
There are many widely acknowledged personal, career, lifestyle and environmental reasons why women choose to remain single and or childless. For others, it’s got more to do with circumstance. Blame a lack of serendipity or the man drought.
The book’s assumption that marriage and children will lead to fulfillment is another furphy. Studies such as those conducted at Michigan State University suggest that individuals have a happiness ‘set point’ that is not particularly effected by marriage.
Academics at Harvard and Syracuse Universities have also found that children have a negative impact on marital satisfaction and parents’ happiness.
Social mores and studies aside, for a book supposed to help single women find a man, ‘Marry Him’ also saddles them with decidedly bad PR.
With all its talk of women’s fairytale standards and horror at being single, today’s woman comes across as delusional, immature and desperate. Sure makes then sound appealing to potential partners, hey?
As for the men, with Gottlieb debunking the ‘ideal man’ as fiction, it must be good to know they’ve scraped into the B team.
Dissecting our expectations about partnership is a worthwhile discussion to have when so many marriages end in divorce.
But the ‘Marry Him’ debate wrongly assumes 1950s values for all and perpetuates the myth that marriage and children are a certain path to fulfillment. It also unfairly paints single women as desperados and men as losers.
None of which sounds like a convincing recipe for happily (or even ‘good enough’) ever after.
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