Women, he said, might call ten of their friends and discuss, point by point, how a guy measures up on a whole host of attributes. Then, in the areas he falls short (he’s too messy, he’s not sensitive enough, he’s not making enough money), they think about whether they can “fix him” or “train him” to make him into what they want. Men, he believes, know that what you see is what you get—and accept it.
“When we decide to marry someone, we don’t think we’re going to fix our wives and we don’t try to change them,” he said. “We don’t get out the spreadsheet and break it down on a microscopic level the way women do. We either want to be with her, or we don’t.”
Another married friend, Henry, who’s 36, said that while some men are afraid of commitment, most aren’t. They want to get married as much as women do. Often, he said, it’s just a case of the guy not being into that woman, but also not wanting to give up the perks of the relationship.
“He knows he’s not going to marry her,” Henry said, “so he says, ‘I’m not looking for anything serious right now’ or ‘I’m not sure I want to have kids’ or ‘I’m focused on my career right now,’ which he thinks is telling her that if she wants this relationship to lead to marriage, she should look elsewhere. But women think the guy is confused and she can change him, when really the guy has made up his mind.
“Meanwhile,” Henry continued, “women can’t make up their minds. Every perceived flaw is dissected for months or years until a verdict comes down on whether they’ll marry him. Men know early on when they’ve met the person they want to marry. It’s a very visceral feeling. That’s why women are always flabbergasted when their ‘commitment-phobe’ boyfriend goes off and gets married a year later.”
For all their talk about romantic love, Henry said, women tend to analyze the situation too much. “They’re hypocritical,” he explained. “They say they want true love but you’d better be this tall and make this much money—and not have bad moods or be a real person, either.”
He’s probably right. Two months after my friend Julia broke up with her “uninspiring” boyfriend Greg, she started dating Adam, a sexy, ambitious surgeon. Adam was all the things that Greg, her nonprofit boyfriend, wasn’t. But the low-key, supportive nonprofit guy was all the things her new beau wasn’t. She was starting to miss Greg.
“I just don’t know which things I can live with,” she sighed, as she was about to fly to Hawaii for a romantic weekend with the surgeon.
But does it have to be this way? Isn’t there a middle ground between cold, hard analysis and intense passion?
WHAT SIXTY-SOMETHINGS SAY
When I asked half a dozen of my mother’s friends who had married in their twenties about this middle ground, they said the problem they’ve seen in their kids’ generation is that the middle ground doesn’t exist.
“I hear constantly from my daughter’s friends that they want men to have the same emotions they do, but men and women express emotion differently,” said Susan, who has two daughters in their thirties. “Young women expect men to be soft and caring and rich and gorgeous—they want everything.”
Connie shook her head. “You can wait for Prince Charming,” she said, “but even Prince Charming will have holes in his socks. You can marry the most perfect person in the world and you’ll still have problems to work through. But once young women see those holes, they’re no longer interested.”
“Our expectations were different,” said Melinda. “We expected to have disagreements. You didn’t go in thinking, ‘I’ll get married and if it doesn’t work out, we’ll get divorced.’ There’s a sense of being a team. You were committed to working it out. Today’s girls always think they’ll find something better.”
Of the group, none of the moms believed in the concept of your soul mate being the only person on the planet you were meant to be with. To them, a soul mate meant someone you have a deep connection with, someone who accepts you for who you are and vice versa, someone who is there for you at the end of the day.
“I think going through difficult times together makes you feel like soul mates,” said Kathryn. “Working through an illness, a financial issue, a parent’s death.”
“People don’t expect to work in relationships today,” June added. “There have been phases of our marriage when both of us needed things at the same time, and that could be very challenging. But I think a lot of women nowadays expect that they’ll always get every single one of their needs met and if they don’t, something’s wrong. Nothing’s wrong—that’s just the nature of two people being in a relationship.”
I asked them what women should give up if they want to find a good mate.
“I don’t know that you’d have to give up anything—don’t start off with the negative!” Diane said. “Women today start off with that mind-set—they have a long list of what they want and think they have to cross things off of it. Why not just look for someone you enjoy being with and see where it goes? Start off from a place of optimism instead of what the guy might be lacking.”
Kathryn agreed. “I have a very dear friend who has single girls,” she said. “I wanted one of them to meet a young attorney who’s smart and funny and donates time to kids. She Googled him, found a photo, and said he wasn’t good-looking enough. She wouldn’t even meet him. Girls today are stopping relationships from happening before they even have an opportunity to develop. There’s a romanticized expectation of being swept off your feet from the get-go and sustaining that level of excitement, but the way love happens is over time.”
That’s how it happened for Connie. “I didn’t even like my husband when I met him,” she said. “I was working in fashion and he was schlubby. He was sort of an oddball. He asked me out and I didn’t want to go out with him. But he was persistent and as I got to know him, he not only turned out to be a wonderful guy, but he turned out to be the love of my life.”
The more I spoke to people about relationships—younger single women, older single women, married women, single men, married men, and women from my mother’s generation—the more I found myself asking the same questions: How did the search for love get so confusing, and was this modern way of dating making women happy?
2 The Romantic Comedy That Predicted My Future
I was 20 years old when I first saw the movie Broadcast News, but little did I know that it would predict my future. Holly Hunter plays Jane, a single network news producer whose best friend is her talented and witty colleague Aaron, played by Albert Brooks. They talk on the phone late at night, finish each other’s sentences, laugh at the same things, and understand each other the way nobody else does. Aaron, who is smart, funny, and kind, is in love with Jane, but Jane falls for Tom, the handsome but shallow newscaster played by William Hurt. Tom, who’s all about style over substance, stands for everything Jane rails against. Jane is drawn to him anyway. In the end, she realizes that she can’t compromise her values enough to be with Tom—nor can she compromise enough to be with Aaron. She loves Aaron deeply, but she doesn’t feel any fireworks.
We’ve all been there, haven’t we?
Jane’s dilemma—the choice between fireworks and friendship— may seem age-old, but it’s not. The internal struggle might be, but the freedom for women to choose not just one or the other, but neither, is relatively new. Instead of picking Aaron or Tom, Jane decides to wait for Mr. Right, who, incidentally, never shows up. At the end of the movie, when we see these characters seven years later, Jane vaguely mentions that she’s dating a guy, but so what? What are the odds that this relationship will work out, given that she’s probably been in several relationships in the past seven years that seemed promising but didn’t pan out? Besides, who’s to say that this guy is better-suited for her than Aaron,