Marry Him: The Case For Settling For Mr. Good Enough
| (0 Comments) | Send to a Friend |
By
February 23, 2010 @ 03:50 pm
February 23, 2010 @ 03:50 pm
So what if you haven’t found The One just yet. Surely he’ll come along, right?
Lori Gottlieb's "Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough" is a must read for today's smart and savvy women.
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.
Marry Him has been optioned for film by Tobey Maguire for Warner Brothers.
Lori Gottlieb is the author of the national bestseller, Stick Figure: A Diary of My Former Self (Simon & Schuster), an American Library Association "Best Books 2001" selection and a Borders "Original New Voice" title. Based on her childhood diaries, Stick Figure was optioned for film by Martin Scorsese, who described Lori’s quirky teen narrator as "Holden Caulfield goes on a misguided diet."
Lori is also a frequent commentator for NPR’s All Things Considered, and her radio features have aired on public radio’s This American Life, Weekend Edition, and Marketplace.
As a journalist and columnist, Lori has written for a variety of publications, including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Time, People, The Atlantic, Elle, Glamour, Redbook, Self, Parents, Slate, and Salon.
After returning from Stanford Medical School, Lori published her second book, Inside the Cult of Kibu: And Other Tales of the Millennial Gold Rush (Basic Books), an exposé of her three-month experience as editor-in-chief of an online magazine with a mission to "empower" teen girls but whose culture devolved into "Heathers meets Lord of the Flies." Her third book, I Love You, Nice to Meet You (St. Martin's Press, 2006), written with Kevin Bleyer of The Daily Show with John Stewart, comically explores the status of modern relationships from the male and female points of view. Or as they like to put it: “Twice the perspective, half the insight.”
Her essays appear in the anthologies The Secret Currency of Love (William Morrow), Behind the Bedroom Door (Delacorte Press), This Side of Doctoring (Oxford University Press), Scoot Over, Skinny (Harcourt), the Los Angeles Times best-seller The Modern Jewish Girl's Guide to Guilt (Dutton), Fired! Tales of the Canned, Canceled, Downsized, and Dismissed (Simon & Schuster), Mortified: Real Words. Real People. Real Pathetic. (Simon & Schuster), and Sex, Drugs and Gefilte Fish (Grand Central Publishing).
Lori also co-created original pilots for Showtime, Oxygen, TBS and Nickelodeon, and was a staff writer on the NBC/Bravo series Significant Others, a sitcom about couples in therapy.
For more information on Lori visit www.lorigottlieb.com, to order "Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough" click here.
