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.

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).

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.

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.