Labor of Love (31 page)

 

CHAPTER 10.
HELP

There is a word for the route taken by the Clock-Watcher who decides that her time is up and bravely resolves to make the best life she can with whatever partner she has on hand. That word is
settling
.

The
Oxford English Dictionary
shows that “settle” has been used to mean “marry” since the 1600s. For centuries, settling did not necessarily sound like a bad thing. Indeed, many young men and women seemed to regard it as an opportunity. “The prudent gentlewoman … wishes to settle her daughter,” the novelist Theodore Edward Hook observed in 1825. “I am come to years of discretion, and must think … of settling myself advantageously,” a male character reflected in Thomas Love Peacock's satire
Crotchet Castle
six years later.

So why do we cringe at any hint that two people may be “settling for” each other today?

In recent years, the subject has seemed to come up more and more often. It started with an article by Lori Gottlieb that appeared in March 2008 in
The Atlantic
. “Marry Him!” the headline shrieked. “The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough.”

Gottlieb declared that every woman she knew was preoccupied with the problem of finding a partner. “Every woman I know—no matter how successful and ambitious, how financially and emotionally secure—feels panic, occasionally coupled with desperation, if she hits 30 and finds herself unmarried,” she claimed in the opening paragraphs. “If you say you're not worried, either you're in denial or you're lying.”

To make matters worse, Gottlieb continued, her friends were approaching their husband hunts all wrong. She knew it, because she had, too. Gottlieb explained that she opted to have a child using an anonymous sperm donor in her late thirties so that she could hold out for a man she liked better than the men she had been dating. In retrospect, she says, she vastly overestimated the importance of sex and romance.

“Marriage isn't a passion-fest,” she wrote. “It's more like a partnership formed to run a very small, mundane, and often boring nonprofit business.” If they want to make it through this drudgery, she tells her readers that they should hurry up and lock a partner down.

Shared widely both by people who loved it and people who were enraged by it, “Marry Him!” spread rapidly around the Internet. It still inspires strong feelings. “Lori Gottlieb ruined my twenties!” a friend balks when I mention the article. She read it when she was twenty-five and falling out of love with the boyfriend she had been living with since college. Gottlieb persuaded her that she should slog through two more years. At that point, he confessed that he had been cheating and they both realized that there had been no point; they parted amicably.

In 2010, Gottlieb published a book of the same title.
Marry Him
invites us to accompany Gottlieb on her quest to find a man to settle for. The jacket copy describes it as a “wake-up call.” But the book reads more like an odyssey of self-blame and regret.
Once upon a time I was a girl who had the whole world at her feet
,
but I was too picky and now look at me!
Along the way, Gottlieb makes occasional pit stops to criticize other high-achieving women.

Gottlieb uses two metaphors as touchstones for what these women do wrong when they date. The first is the “Husband Store.” The second is the “Shopping List”—meaning the characteristics you want the husband you buy to possess. Citing a few statistics and anecdotes, she proposes that this kind of foolish choosiness may be why fewer and fewer American women are marrying. Gottlieb claims to have broken up with a man once for his taste in socks.

At some level, what Gottlieb is saying is unobjectionable. No, you should not go into dating thinking that you can find a partner premade to your highly detailed specifications. Yet
Marry Him
does not really offer an alternative to the logic that says dating is like shopping. It just tells readers to lower their expectations. Fast.

By the end, Lori Gottlieb seems ready to marry literally anyone. She says she would take a man who made bad jokes or had bad breath. But—spoiler alert—after 260 pages, she is still alone. She says that the moral is that she should have settled earlier. But to me,
Marry Him
reads more like an allegory of the limitations of the self-help genre. It tells its readers to mold themselves and their desires into very particular forms to try to attain a kind of happiness that is unimaginative at best.

Are straight women really still doomed to choose between a foolish, futile quest for Mr. Right and a mad dash after the equally elusive Mr. Anyone at All?

*   *   *

Some religions describe desire as a blessing. Others label it a curse. But none deny that all humans long for others with whom to share our lives. Almost all individuals seem to feel a deep need to live lives that include close and caring relationships. Given how vitally important this is, and how challenging it can be, it makes sense that they turn to experts. The intense, almost religious feelings that self-help gurus like Oprah Winfrey inspire in their fans reflect a real need that those fans experience to do something to address their frustrations.

America has a long tradition of bestsellers that offer readers guidance about how to cultivate their inner lives and achieve professional success. Over the twentieth century, a string of male self-help authors became household names. Napoleon Hill's
Think and Grow Rich
and Dale Carnegie's
How to Win Friends & Influence People
sold well even during the Great Depression. Norman Vincent Peale's
Power of Positive Thinking
became a bible to Company Men of the Steady Era. In 1989, Stephen Covey instructed readers in
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
; he promised that learning to attend to your inner voice can make you a better person and a better manager all at once.

Each of these books encourages readers to look inside themselves and trust their instincts. They advise you that you must have the strength to buck received wisdom and challenge authority—including the authorities in psychiatry or sociology who usually say that the folksy wisdom of these books is bogus. Romantic self-help, however, tends to offer the opposite advice.

Where business self-help says to trust your gut, romantic self-help warns you to question every instinct. Where the managers hear that they should listen to their coworkers, the daters hear that they should never trust a partner to mean what he says. If you hope to find love, you will have to learn to read between the lines and plot your actions accordingly. These books promise that they can help.

*   *   *

Courtship did not always seem this mysterious. Popular books of romantic advice are older than dating. During the Calling Era, many publishers stayed in business by telling young people and their families how they should behave.

In
The Ladies' Home Journal
, an etiquette columnist who answered questions under the pen name the “Lady from Philadelphia” delivered firm instructions to female readers about how to manage their gentleman callers. The questions she answered showed that callers were just as capable of obsessing over the details of how to act as daters are today.

In July 1905, someone named Madge wrote asking how to react when a young man failed to show up after saying he would drop in. The Lady from Philadelphia advised her to “be charitable until you hear his explanation or apology,” but “if no apology is ever made and he never comes you should treat him as the merest acquaintance, recognizing him when you pass, but without cordiality.”

Sadie had the opposite problem. “What to do when a man persists in holding your hand in spite of all that you can say?” she pleaded.

The Lady from Philadelphia replied sternly that “no man, who is fit to be welcomed in your home, would refuse to release your hand if you asked him as if you meant it.”

Single men, too, were eager for tips on how to conduct themselves.
Putnam's Handbook of Etiquette
(1913), a manual aimed at men, devoted a section to “The Question of the Hat, Gloves, and Stick.”

“When a gentleman ventures a chance call upon women, and is asked by the servant to step into the drawing-room while she ascertains if the ladies are home, he retains his overcoat and gloves, and waits hat in hand,”
Putnam's
instructed. “If the answer to his request is propitious, he then removes his top-coat and leaves it in the hall. With the coat, hat, stick, and gloves may also be left.”

To the twenty-first-century reader, two things jump out about Calling Era advice. The first is the tone of voice in which it is dispensed. This tone is confident. It suggests that there are clear protocols for how people pair up to reproduce society. To find a mate, all you have to do is follow them. In addition, the ritual of calling reflected and reinforced a set of strong beliefs about gender roles and relations. A long tradition argued that a man should always be running after the woman he desired—that he could not, by definition, want something that he had.

Barriers built into the ritual of calling ensured that during courtship, young men and women followed this script. The custom of calling rendered women passive and immobile. The setup required men to act in order to express interest. A woman did not have to pretend that she had somehow overlooked a text message in order to strike her crush as desirable. The mere fact that he was talking to her meant that he had already waited for her appointed day “at home,” presented his calling card to her servant, and stood there fumbling with his hat, gloves, and stick.

*   *   *

The age of dating inherited its ideas about love and courtship from this earlier era. It held on to the idea that women were essentially passive and that men wanted to pursue them. But as women streamed into public workplaces and educational institutions, the real barriers that had made men into agents of desire and women into its objects were breaking down.

Men and women could now meet in many different settings; they might run into one another at work or on the street. A woman no longer had her family and her home to protect her against the embarrassing possibility of feeling attracted to a man who was not interested in her. Moreover, among the working-class pioneers of dating, men had the money that bought access to the spaces where courtship took place—bars or restaurants or dance halls. This meant that in order to have any fun, women had to chase men.

“The lure of the stage, of the movie, of the shop, and of the office make of it the definite El Dorado of the woman,” the sociologist Frances Donovan wrote in 1919. “Owing to present day conditions of city life, the man is the one pursued, the woman the pursuer.”

As more middle-class women with disposable income began dating, the idea that men paid remained the norm. This made men the hosts of courtship. In order to be wooed, women had to woo men—without ever giving away that they were doing it.

To many observers, this reversal of traditional gender roles seemed to pose a threat to romance. Therefore, early books of dating advice urged women that in order to make themselves desirable, they would have to create the illusion that they were still feminine. That meant, still as passive as they had been when they were homebound.

To save courtship, women had to cover up the fact that changes in the economy were changing gender roles and relations. To the extent that their work and their new mobility did empower them, they had to hide it. Otherwise they risked a fate that women had long been taught to fear: growing old without finding a husband.

*   *   *

Elinor Glyn, the writer who coined the term “It Girl,” published a popular manual of romantic advice in 1923.
The Philosophy of Love
included chapters aimed at both men and women. Glyn warned female readers that with the men they truly desired, they should make every effort not to show it. While the Lady from Philadelphia had told readers of
Ladies' Home Journal
how they should behave with men, Glyn emphasized all the things that a woman must
not
do.

“She cannot be altogether irresponsibly natural.”

She must not be “affected at all.”

“She must never show her eagerness.”

“She must never try to keep him one instant when he suggests leaving.”

“She must never show that she desires to hold him in any way.”

“She must not be vague.”

She “must not become peevish and complaining, selfish and demagnetised, and indifferent to her appearance…”

She must not be “wearing ‘any old thing'” when he comes over.

Glyn said that the point of all these prohibitions was to sustain the fiction that men were in control of courtship. “She must always make him feel that
he
must make the advance, and that she is something to be schemed for,” she concluded.

Doris Langley Moore agreed. The British socialite and fashion icon won the admiration of her friends by managing to keep men falling all over her, even after World War I wiped out a generation of eligible bachelors. In 1928, Moore anonymously published a dating advice manual that divulged the secrets of her romantic success,
The Technique of the Love Affair
. “A woman has not made a conquest until she finds herself pursued,” Moore advised.

When Dorothy Parker reviewed the book for
The New Yorker
, she expressed dismay at her own ignorance about the laws of dating. “From this book I have learned that not once have I been right,” she wrote. “Not one little time.”

The short stories that Parker was publishing around 1930 suggested otherwise. Again and again, Parker chronicled how hard ordinary women tried to win love from men by keeping them in pursuit.

“A Telephone Call” consists of a two-thousand-word prayer. A Shopgirl begs God for strength as she waits to hear from a man she has been seeing.