Mr Good Enough: The case for choosing a Real Man over holding out for Mr Perfect. Lori Gottlieb

professional context and enjoyed those conversations, but once she looked up his photo in a directory (and wasn’t impressed), she ruled him out as a romantic prospect. It was only on meeting him at a party and getting to know him that she started to find him cute—and more.

      “When I was looking and single,” she said, “I wanted everything! I wanted tall, good-looking, smart, funny. I was so specific, I even wanted curly hair.” And while she got some (but not all) of what she wanted, she’s quick to point out that none of that has to do with her happiness in her marriage.

      “When I was dating, two qualities that never occurred to me as important but that turned out to be critical in our marriage were selflessness and humility,” she explained. “A ton of times on a daily basis in marriage, you have to decide whether to maximize your happiness or the other person’s, and my husband has proved so often to maximize my happiness. In courtship, we mistake romance for selflessness, but it’s not at all the same thing. Romantic gestures like sending flowers aren’t the same thing as waking up in the middle of the night and taking care of the baby so I can sleep.”

      “Also,” she continued, “humility is key—the ability to say it doesn’t really matter who’s right or wrong, and it’s okay to have different opinions about things. So I ask people, where on your list do you rank selflessness and humility when you’re rejecting a guy based on his age or height?”

      In fact, John Gottman, a well-known marriage researcher at the University of Washington and author of the bestseller The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, has shown that he can predict marital success with 91 percent accuracy by looking at basic qualities like compromise, tolerance, and communication style.

      Greenwald isn’t discounting the desires many of us have. She’s saying, instead, that while we’d like “everything” in a guy, we should reexamine our standards—and early on—if we want to find the right partner before it becomes increasingly harder to find him.

      When she meets women over 35 and takes their romantic histories, she told me, it’s often some variation on I was in this failed relationship for three years, another for five years.