Lori Gottlieb, the author of Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough, surveyed women and men and discovered that when asked, “If you got 80 percent of everything you wanted—of your ideal traits in a mate or partner—would you be happy?,” the majority of women said, “No, that’s settling.” On the other hand, the majority of men said, “Eighty percent? I’d be thrilled; that’s a catch.” The women in Gottlieb’s survey are clearly searching for the fairy tale ending, the soul mate who will complete them.
Gottlieb differentiates between lowering your expectations and lowering your standards. She notes: “Lower your expectations is saying, ‘be realistic.’ If you just put us all in a dating lineup, we’re not going to get perfect ratings from the world at large. We should lower our expectations in the sense of, we have to realize nobody is perfect. If you have unrealistic expectations, it’s going to be hard to find a real human being who can meet them.” Lowering your standards is settling for traits that are undesirable for many people, such as domestic violence.
Why do women (and a small minority of men) set such high expectations for their partners? I believe, and Gottlieb would agree, that our society equates success with perfection. The perfect life includes beautiful children (a boy and a girl, of course), the large house with the white picket fence, and a great career, that is not only emotionally, but financially satisfying. These aspects of “perfection” must include the perfect mate, who is not only physically attractive, but kind, funny, emotionally secure, and the person who completes us, who never fails to support us, and who is always there for us. But, I think we are asking too much of love, too much of our mates. The first relationships built on love were built on mutual respect and affection. The idea that a single person can completely satisfy us emotionally and physically is simply asking too much of love.
http://www.cnn.com/2010/LIVING/02/24/lori.gottlieb.marry.him/index.html?hpt=Sbin
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Couldn't you argue that equating love with things like financial, emotional, and physical security is dangerous or incorrect? I'm sure there are people out there who would satisfy people perfectly with an ideal life, emotional support, and physical attractiveness, but isn't love deeper than that? Or has love become superficial to meaning those things?
ReplyDeleteLove, many would argue, is putting another person before yourself and loving them for who they are -- imperfections and all. Maybe a lot of women these days aren't looking for love necessarily. Perhaps they're just looking for security and status.
First of all, let me begin by saying thank you to you, Cara. Though I know you posted this piece approximately 3 weeks ago, I just hadn’t found the time to comment on it. While there have been many great blogs, I sincerely believe that this is the most thought provoking and generally relevant to our societal conceptions within and beyond fairy tales. One of the real take away points that resonated for me personally harkened back to one of our earliest discussions in class about the concept of love at first sight. I recently watched the movie The Ugly Truth with my girlfriend and many of the ideas central to the premise of that film are articulated or at least supported by Gottlieb’s advice. The main character, portrayed by Katherine Heigl, has a vast array of conceptions about what her “Prince Charming” should and shouldn’t be, and literally brings a checklist to her first date with a prospective Mr. Right. She is so compulsively obsessed with all of the things that in her mind that he should be that she doesn’t even get to begin to understand who he actually is. Aside from looking at his Match.com profile, she even does a background check to research this guy to further realize her expectations of what he should be. As one might expect, as a normal human being he isn’t all of the things that she demanded, and he is subsequently dismissed as a result.
ReplyDeleteSo many individuals (both guys and girls are guilty) have to try to persuade themselves that love at first sight exists. IT DOESN’T. If you truly loved someone from the moment you saw them, what kind of sad indictment is that against the nature of love? To take something that we were talking about with Sexton, we willingly pull the wool over our own eyes so that we aren’t held culpable for choosing to exist in society the manner in which we do, for holding unrealistic expectations. Ladies, your Prince Charming exists. He just doesn’t necessarily look like Patrick Dempsey. He may be older than you thought, have ear hair, be bespectacled, or even (gasp) be a nerd. Looking for a type if anything is more likely to result in your being alone than achieving happiness. Though I have thoroughly pointed the finger at others for doing this, I am just as guilty. My type is blonde, tall, with green or blue eyes, who loves sports of all kinds. I hope or at least believe that I am in love with my girlfriend and she is a 5’3’’ brunette with brown eyes who doesn’t know Carleton Scott from Carlton Banks. My point and I think largely Gottlieb’s point is that we need to stop building up in our minds what people should be, and learn to appreciate and eventually over time learn to love them for who they are.