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Reviews of Lori Gottlieb's new book Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough, along with Gottlieb's original Atlantic article (on the book is based), miss an important opportunity for addressing a serious problem in American society.

In her Atlantic article, Gottlieb calls the problem one of the "most complicated, painful, and pervasive dilemmas many single women are forced to grapple with nowadays: Is it better to be alone, or to settle?"

In her review of Gottlieb's book in The New York Times Book Review, Amy Finnerty describes Gottlieb's restatement of the problem as follows:

Gottlieb makes a case that many women today end up alone because they hold men to insanely high standards. . . . She convinces us that we women are simply too fussy, entitled and downright delusional about our own worth in the mating marketplace. We overanalyze and seek undiluted sexual and intellectual fulfillment, thus setting men up for failure.

But both formulations of the problem miss the point.  Gottlieb is closest to the real issue when, in her Atlantic article, she observes:

I've been told that the reason so many women end up alone is that we have too many choices. I think it's the opposite: we have no choice. If we could choose, we'd choose to be in a healthy marriage based on reciprocal passion and friendship. But the only choices on the table, it sometimes seems, are settle or risk being alone forever. That's not a whole lot of choice.

Sadly, Gottlieb doesn't expand upon this insight.  Neither female pickiness nor a sense of being forced to choose between settling and solitary lives is the problem; these phenomena are side-effects of the real problem: American men aren't well-matched for America's post-feminist women.

The most serious failure of feminism was to ignore the fact that gender roles are relational.  Men's and women's roles fit together like puzzle pieces (or like yin and yang).  Radical alteration of one of the roles requires a similar level of change in the other role for the two roles to continue to be compatible.  Feminists devoted extensive thought, theory and action to the cause of revising a woman's role; to the extent that the gave any thought to men's roles, however, they seem to have assumed that men would adjust.

Men have not adjusted.  While women struggle under extraordinary social pressure to be educated and sociable, have careers and families, be sexy and mothers, be emotionally competent and financially wise, men grapple with the sense of being intimidated by women, of feeling inadequate and fearing they are a disappointment to the beloved women in their lives.  In my experience, they deal with this complex of issues by taking refuge in extended adolescence and staying stoned a lot.

In this context, settling - as Gottlieb advises - is insanity.  As anyone who has lived through a divorce (or who has witnessed parents get divorced) knows, a bad marriage causes vastly more damage that no marriage.  And if a society is grooming men who aren't suited to the women that the society is producing, the choice is not between settling and solitude, but between a bad marriage and a decent life.

I'm not alone in either my conclusion or my analysis: two hundred years ago Jane Austen wrote a more persuasive argument than this blog post can offer in her novel, Pride and Prejudice.  As any reader of that novel can recognize, American women live today in a world where too many of the men are Wickhams, the con artist scourge of Pride and Prejudice.  By the conclusion of that novel, Eliza Bennett has learned that her own haughtiness and preconceived notions had prevented her both from seeing the dangers of the charming Mr. Wickham and the goodness of the more remote Mr. Darcy, her future husband.  

Gottlieb would have American women unlearn the lesson of Eliza Bennett - would have American blind themselves to the unsuitability of the available partners out of their prideful need to get married and their prejudice against carving out a satisfactory life for themselves beyond the bounds of marriage.  Gottlieb urges American women to settle for Wickham.

Jane Austen has already illustrated the perils of that choice.

(Picture of Lori Gottlieb from The New York Times Book Review) 

In 2000, I went to the Guggenheim in Bilbao and saw a show called, "Degas to Picasso: Painters, Sculptors and the Camera."  The show charted the use of photography by fourteen artists at the turn of the twentieth century.  Looking back on descriptions of the show, I gather that the artists on exhibit made various uses of photographs; but what I remember, what particularly impressed me, was the idea that a core of two or three images or concepts could and did nourish these (or some of these) artists through their entire careers.  Degas' horses and ballerinas, Gaugin's Tahitian women and (although they weren't in the show) John Singer Sargent's society ladies, James Rosenquist's spaghetti and Philip Guston's cartoon Klansmen, light bulbs and shoe souls all seem to be examples of this phenomenon.

I love reading novels for three reasons, primarily.  The first is relief of boredom.  The second is the pleasurable stimulation I experience when I'm engaged in a story.  And the third is the comfort I derive from novels.  Learning from Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, for example, that the contours of generation struggle have changed remarkably little since the nineteenth century made me feel wonder at the consistency of human travails throughout time and the support we can find in the written records of our forebears.

That said, I didn't expect to find comfort in novels for the irritation and insecurity occasioned by the current state of the publishing industry.  The decline in reading rates, the competition from the Internet and video games, the market preference for memoirs/how-to's/biz books, the current economic downturn -- these harbingers of the death of the novel I took to be burdens I'd have to shoulder without aid from authors of an earlier era.  How often I'd thought my publishing woes would be solved if only I'd been writing during the heyday of Grove Press, in the years of Max Perkins . . .

But Jane Austen set me straight.  "[I]f the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard?  I cannot approve of it. . . . Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body," Austen writes, taking her stand in Northanger Abbey.  "Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried.  From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as our readers."

Ah me.  To be assuaged with such thorny balm -- the assurance that writing novels would be a miserable pursuit whenever I'd be born; to be comforted with the knowledge that reports of the death of the novel are greatly exaggerated -- and have been so for some two hundred years; I can only love reading novels even more.

Notwithstanding the tremendous differences in style, setting and story between Gone with the Wind and Emma (as well as the 121 years between their publications), Scarlett O'Hara and Emma Woodhouse are remarkably similar.  They are both strong-willed and rich.  They are both treated by society as beautiful, but handled by their authors somewhat less deferentially.  (The first clause of Gone with the Wind is, "Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful."  And Emma, though pretty, is second in beauty to Harriet Smith.)  They are both quick witted but narrowly focused in their interests.  They are both selfish and lack self-awareness.  And, perhaps most importantly, at the time we meet them, they have -- neither of them -- been in love.

"I never have been in love: it is not my way, or my nature; and I do not think I ever shall," says Emma (at page 75).  The fact that, by the end of the book, she has fallen in love with Mr. Knightley is what salvages her from perpetual bratdom.  In gaining self-awareness of her own heart, she grows up.  Most significantly, she ventures beyond the safety of her self-sufficient life, willing to risk the ever-present failure that lurks when any of us trades our solitary satisfactions for the hope of greater bliss in pairs.

Scarlett, on the other hand, thinks she's in love with Ashley, but her love for him has always struck me as false.  Ashley doesn't possess any of the qualities -- pragmatism, forthrightness, gumption -- that Scarlett prizes most highly, and perhaps it is for this reason that she can't comprehend him.  Ashley's function is not as the love of her life, but as the shield to protect her from ever truly falling in love.

For all the horror that Scarlett confronts, the one thing she fears is falling in love.  Scarlett, who reacts to the atrocities of war by committing passionately to survival, equates that survival with self-sufficiency.  She can envision (indeed, tolerate) a survival that burdens her with dependents for whom she must provide; but she cannot fathom a survival in which she is dependent -- even in a situation of mutual and reciprocal dependency, as (presumably is possible) in marriage.  Falling in love would deprive her of the independent self-sufficiency that she feels is necessary for her existence.

A woman who doesn't want to fall in love is a challenging character.  Jane Austen remarked that Emma was a character that only she could like, and Scarlett is far from sympathetic.  And yet both characters are compelling, both books masterpieces and -- not incidentally -- popularly acclaimed. 

Perhaps that combination of tough character and popular appeal arises from the humiliation both women endure.  Emma is mortified when Mr. Knightley criticizes her sharp treatment of Miss Bates.  Scarlett is humiliated so profoundly and so frequently that Margaret Mitchell appears almost sado-masochistic. 

That audiences can endure strong female characters as long as they get their comeuppance is received wisdom.  But maybe audiences are also warming to an uncomfortable truth fundamental to both tales: openness to the humiliations and tribulations of dependency is a prerequisite to falling in love; but a refusal to countenance such indignity is no protection against it.