Romantic comedies, fairy tales and Sex And The City have led us to believe that finding "The One" is the primary goal of a woman's life. Find that magical, elusive guy and you'll unlock a lifetime of love, affection and happiness, right?
You’re almost 35 now and want nothing more than a flesh-and-blood child of your own with a man you love—more than you wanted that master’s degree, that great job you have, that beautiful house you bought with your own money or that strong, athletic body you worked so hard to get back after he broke your heart the last time and ran off with someone else.
There's been a lot of of talk lately about settling for Mr. Good Enough, due to Lori Gottlieb's newest book, Marry Him. Despite the book's provocative title, however, Gottlieb's latest opus isn't really about settling. Rather, it's a case for maintaining an open mind when considering new men, instead of nitpicking over inconsequential surface details. She has a point. Looking at our track record, it's obvious that the checklist we've used on prospective men hasn't really netted us the best results. Which is why we had a powwow to put together a list of the 10 deal breakers that ... well ... shouldn't really be considered deal breakers.
The problem with a list, I realized, is that it’s hard to translate the bullet points into a real, live human being. The fact is, you can’t make a list that doesn’t either oversimplify or take things out of context. For instance, even if you make a list of qualities you want, they aren’t all weighted equally (is height as important as honesty?), and with many qualities you want, it’s not like people have them or they don’t. Often, they have some degree of that quality—like sense of humor or financial stability—which may not be exactly what you had in mind when you wrote it down. Lori Gottlieb tells us why dating Mr. Good Enough might be a better idea than dating Mr. Right.
This morning one New York woman—a veteran of every online dating site under the sun—posted a pièce de résistance of a personal ad on Craigslist. The title "SWF who isn't asking too much" was written (hopefully) with tongue firmly in cheek, as what follows is a list of more than 38 qualities her Mr. Right must have. That is, if you call owning "more than 3 items from The North Face jacket line but no more than 5" a quality. A few highlights from the reportedly 32-year-old single, white female's list:
