Too picky
Yesterday, as I was roaming the city with my camera, my lens cap flew off one too many times, so I ducked into a camera shop on Stockton (or maybe it was Grant) in search of a lens cap leash. I found one, and as long as I was there, I asked the guy to price both a 70-200 lens and a 70-300, and asked his opinion on which he thought was better. After a few minutes of chatting about photography, he got a bit flirty and asked if I was single. I could clearly see he was wearing a wedding ring and he could clearly see I wasn’t, so I shrugged and said yes. He said he found that surprising, given my looks and personality — okay, I do like a nice compliment — but then he said it: “I bet it’s because you’re too picky.”
Now, I realize that the cultural zeitgeist has currently decreed that a straight woman over 30 who’s not coupled up is stubbornly and shallowly holding out for a mythical Perfect 10 rather than giving a fair shake to the poor 6s and 7s she’s overlooking for the minor crime of not having enough money or enough hair. (I also realize that there are, in fact, women who do that, just as some men out there are convinced that even though they’re pretty damn average, they need to stay single because Heidi Klum is going to show up on their doorstep any day now.) And given this ongoing frame that single women are single not only because they expect the moon and stars, but because they don’t realize that’s their problem — this man felt free both to leap to conclusions about me and to voice them, despite knowing nothing about me other than my predilection for Canon cameras.
Yet many women are single not because they expect too much, but because they don’t expect enough — or to be more precise, we expect disappointment. We believe another pernicious canard: if we want love at all, we have to endure the unreliable, uninterested, or unavailable. That’s all that’s left, so we should make the best of it. We know we’re dating frogs and not princes, but we think maybe if we just kiss them enough…
The thing is, if I was judging the state of modern man based only on the festival of misogyny that was yesterday’s Super Bowl advertising, I would be convinced that it’s raining frogs. Madison Avenue apparently believes that if it sank a drill into the male psyche, it would release a gusher of fear and resentment toward women so powerful that we should be terrified to be alone in a room with any boy older than, say, 14. In the world of Sunday’s ads, men now consider women such universally emasculating killjoys that only buying Bud Light, Dockers pants, and a Dodge Charger will prevent their penises from falling off en masse.
And not wanting this makes women too picky?
Fortunately, I have many men-friends who prove Madison Avenue wrong. They’re contentedly, even blissfully coupled and feel their lives are bigger and better for it. If one defines “too picky” as “At a bare minimum, I deserve someone like that, someone who thinks I’m so wonderful that he wants to enjoy my company frequently and exclusively,” well, then, picky is well worth aspiring to be.
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First of all, the guy may have just been trying to flirt some more–you know–creating a little exasperation to put him in a place of less vulnerability. He may have also had a learning disability. I don’t know, I wasn’t there.
But one of the things that stuck me in your eloquent prose above, was this search for a prince. Ladies (and gentlemen), there are a lot of princes out there and it’s hard to know what to choose. My advice is this…
Look for the prince who can be a good king.
For the record, I am delighted that my wife has low standards.
Peter, I would not say that at all.
Once a prince, always a prince. But once a knight is enough?
Well, all joking aside, it is the case that if Kelly had stuck to her “ideal mate” list, I wouldn’t have been seriously considered. Kelly’s “type,” if you ask her, is tall and rangy, like Clint Eastwood or Sam Elliott. I’m (ahem) about a foot shorter than that and am built like an Irish bulldog. I don’t think this proves that Kelly “settled,” but rather that she prioritized what was on her list and realized that physicality didn’t matter as much as other things.
Or my marriage is a hollow sham. That’s also possible, I suppose.
I find this new frame merely evidence that The Atlantic has a dubious talent for finding writers who have the ability to make nonsensical contrarian arguments that mash readers’ buttons. And that male newspaper editors love a man-bites-dog lifestyle article, especially if it suggests that all the women who ever dumped them and remained single are miserable now.
I think we should take some comfort that Gottlieb’s point of view is now the contrarian one. That’s progress of a sort.
I think your point — that some things are more important than others — is the point Gottlieb was TRYING to make. Unfortunately, by using the word “settled,” she implied something a lot less sensible.
It’s not a new frame; it’s just the one that’s getting the most attention at the moment in a culture that, for all its protestations to the contrary, still pretty much uses a woman’s relationship status as tangible proof of her worth as a human being (or lack thereof).
righteous post, fawn.
i think there are women out there like gottlieb who spent their 20s and 30s with insane checklists. but that’s not most of the single women i know. my reaction to the atlantic article was that gottlieb wasn’t really writing about “settling” at all — she was writing about how hard it is to be a single parent. and it is extraordinarily hard. but how could she not have known?? did she do no research? did she think she could write with the baby cooing quietly in a moses basket at her feet for hours on end?? and really, does being saddled with a second set of responsibilities, in the form of a spouse you shouldn’t have married but you did because you didn’t want to be a single parent, make things better?
all that said: i know her a bit. she seems like a lovely person. she blurbed my book, and on like NO notice, and graciously. and i’ve only read the Atlantic piece, not the book. i suspect her “marry him” directive applies only to women who were as rigid in their criteria as she was…which is, again, not most of us. (my type is peter’s wife’s type — super-tall neurasthenic broad-shouldered rangy aesthete-swimmer! — and yet i married a barrel-chested operatic-bass type. and he had one of those bad mid-90s computer-geek haircuts and wore a purple leather jacket with epaulets! but damn he was smart, and kind, and moral, and funny. i made him over eventually. the inner workings were quite sound.)
also appreciate peter’s point that gottlieb’s point of view is now the contrarian one.