This nonfiction is about sucking up your pride and lowering
your standards about men or you will end up alone, sad, and regretful like the
author. Lori Gottlieb offers herself up like she is the biggest nightmare you
could imagine. She is the 41 year old single mother (who in every other respect, has it all). The
book picks apart her dating life with the kind of concise pessimistic eye that could
only be had in hindsight. She begs the reader not to make her mistakes. She
goes in through detail about what those mistakes are, how easy it is to make
those mistakes, and how many of her friends have already made them.
I found the content repetitive and the book too long. I
think I might have sufficed with the original Atlantic Article that this book
sprung from.
It probably didn’t help that I have heard all of this before
from my mom. All throughout my life she has said things like, “ [imagine a filipino
accent] If you do not find someone to marry, you will be all alone”. And, my
mom trying to tell me to act before my ship has sailed, “You better watch out
because if you wait too long, the ship will leave you and you will be all alone”.
The book went on and on and on. I relived the 20 years my mom preached that any
man that does not hit you is worth marrying. The book felt that long. It also
didn’t help that a lot of the story was about her friends as well. It felt
gossipy, and at the very least, not very scientifically rigorous.
My biggest criticism for the book is that she never really
defines her audience. She assumes every woman has the resources to live and
work alone and raise a child alone. While she says that she is struggling
financially, the fact that she is able to do it at all indicates that she has
done well for herself. Not every woman
risks being overeducated, and at the risk for never settling for a man because they
forgot they needed one. Gottlieb doesn’t realize it, but she is only speaking
to a very well off class of women. She is speaking to the class of women that
have the capability of making a choice. In fact the other side of the coin is
far more scary. There are lots and lots of women out there that are in
physically and emotionally abusive relationships that don’t have the social and
economic resources to get out of them. Some women aren’t educated enough to know
that they deserve better. She isn’t talking to them, she is talking to well off
women like herself.
But it is implied. She tells us to throw a few more dates to
the shorter and sweeter men of the world instead of spending that type looking
for unicorns. I just wished that she offset some of the time she was telling us
that we are far more unattractive than we think we are to explain that there
are some universal dealbreakers that we shouldn’t settle for.
She didn’t say however, that you shouldn’t wait for someone
you love. She just says that love might be different than you think it is. She
likens (what she thinks is) western love to the practice of arranged marriages.
Love is something that grows when two people have committed to eachother. That
is something she learned from her Indian friend.
I don’t regret that I read this book. I found it convincing,
and frankly, just because of the part of my life I am in, the message was
something I needed to hear. I just know I should take it with a grain of salt.
The author has legitimate regrets that she overassumes that we will have. I am
a pragmatic person and I have never had the fairy tale fantasies that she
assumes every woman has. As a matter of fact, I think the life she lives doesn’t
sound so bad at all. She is a glamorous well educated female author with a son
living in the big city. The whole basis of her book is based on a fear, and
maybe, just maybe, its not really something to be all that afraid of.
