Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

Lori Gottlieb's Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough is mostly about managing expectations, which sounds dry but is actually hilarious and thoughtful. I especially loved reading the lists of expectations, sometimes implicit and sometimes explicit, Gottlieb and her girlfriends carried around with them, and I often read their complaints about men to others. Where do these unrealistically high expectations come from?

Gottlieb worries that they might stem from her feminist worldview. She reflects on her conversations with girlfriends and how they always validate each other’s obsessive pickiness about men. Although they think something like “that guy is on your level,� they say something like “you’re way out of his league� or something like "it makes total sense that you'd want someone more adventurous and predictable." Gottlieb later considers a scene in Sex in the City in which one character dumps a man who has stood by her through cancer so she can be true to her love of herself. Women in the audience cheered, which, upon reflection, Gottlieb finds less than admirable. Speaking generally, I envy the way my female friends validate each other, but perhaps its utility has limits. Then again, I notice that the older feminists in Daum’s Selfish Shallow and Self-Absorbed: On the Decision to Not Have Children consistently warn their younger peers that “you can’t have it all.� If feminism has changed from “you can’t have it all� to “you can have it all and deserve the best version of it all,� I wonder if it has changed in concert with other trends (commercialism, maybe?).

I didn’t want to get my hopes up that Gottlieb would consider the ideas of Dan Ariely (Predictably Irrational) and Barry Schwartz (The Paradox of Choice)—but she does! I was so happy when she summarized their theories and applied them to dating and went on to discuss hedonistic adaptation, evolutionary theory (but not obnoxiously), and money's influence on women's choices. At one point, Ariely reveals that he would need to earn an additional $40000/ year to become as attractive to women as a man one inch taller. There is also a lot of engaging participatory journalism, mostly consisting of Gottlieb’s interactions with matchmakers and dating coaches. I didn’t know these jobs were so common in North America, but they sound interesting.

And frustrating. The dating coach's job is to just stop Gottlieb from shredding every man she encounters. Even taking into account how much work can go into a date, I could not believe how difficult it was for her to consider meeting someone for coffee. I'd love to add Haidt's ideas about motivated reasoning to this work. In The Righteous Mind, Haidt argues that people mostly use reason to validate their impulsive reactions. Gottlieb is a master at impulsively dismissing men and then rationalizing that feeling. (Most of Marry Him's reviews on GR, imho, also seem to prove Haidt right—my own, naturally, is no exception.)

If our rational minds are simply validating our irrational impulses, how should we think about dating? First, mostly dismiss first impressions and broadly lower expectations, if only to make it possible to meet anyone. And we should definitely turn off the part of our brain that invents life stories about people based on their favourite film, height, or hair line (this last being my advice for others, of course). But that would be good advice for nearly all social interactions, which is why I recommended Marry Him to many of my friends, male or female, married or otherwise, many times before I had finished it.

Update 2021. The Vox Conversations podcast interviewed Logan Ury on broadly similar content in an episode entitled "The Science of Dating." It seems that the broad takeaways of Marry Him have mostly aged well.

Update 2023. My GF follows a dating coach on instagram, and almost all of her advice can be found in this book.