Marriage is like running a small, boring non-profit

This morning, MSFAM sent me the below article:
Marry Him! by Lori Gottlieb.

Incredibly long but funny and interesting treatise on how single women should settle instead of holding out for Mr. Right. When I laughed out loud twice, my co-workers insisted I forward them whatever what helping me to procrastinate.

I guess being a 30-something single, this kind of stuff really gets my dander up. I don't need someone to tell me to settle. And I really don't need anyone to tell me I'm being picky...we've already talked about the men I've dated. I don't think I'm that picky. And personally, I think my mother or best friends would have murdered me due to pity had I settled for one of the self-absorbed, criminally insane, drug addled Mama's boys of days past.

I can't say I don't believe in settling. For the better part of a year my new dating philosophy resembles the author's "marriage is a boring non-profit" stance. Like, I'm not looking for passion. I'm looking for someone who, despite his treacherous mother and inability to put dirty clothes in a hamper, would still be worth hugging and cooking dinner for. Someone that I could be pissed at but still be pleased to be spending my life with. That sounds like settling to me. I just try not to think of it as settling.

The author makes a lovely point, though, and one I've thought about alot. "The man of your dreams doesn't exist. Precisely because you dreamed him up." By this logic every married woman has settled. Right?

I think I have a pretty "settling minded" brain when it comes to marriage. I remember a married friend telling me a story about how her husband is so good because he cleans the floor. She then went on to verbally lambaste him for not doing alot of other stuff to help with their house and baby, to which I replied, "Dude, you love him AND HE CLEANS THE FLOOR!"

Compared to some other husband stories I've heard, that seemed pretty awesome to me. Plus, no one cleans my floor but me. I'd let any stupid, ugly guy hang out at my house at least for a few days if he promised to clean the floor. Never mind love, honor and obey.

The thing that really bothered me about this article though was that it seemed so black and white in terms of age and the need to settle. Like Ms. Gottlieb really believed she would have had better chances finding a less horrible guy in her younger years that she does now as a 30-something single mom. She describes the older men who her older single friends took up with, as:
"a recovering alcoholic who doesn’t always go to his meetings; a trying-to-make-it-in-his-40s actor; a widower who has three nightmarish kids and who’s still actively grieving for his dead wife; and a socially awkward engineer (so socially awkward that he declined to attend his wife’s book party)."

To which I respond: these men were young and single once, and on the market. Someone even married that one with the nightmarish kids...and then she divorced him. Marriage and settling isn't a permanent state of coma/limbo/eternal predictability. You can get married or settle or whatever you want to call it at any age. The reality is the person you settle for is a HUMAN BEING. They grow, change, make mistakes, do stupid things, and will, inevitably, disappoint you. The young ones eventually turn into the old ones. With the problems described above. And us being adults, we should be able to accept that that's part of the deal.

What Liz seems to fail to see is that the story doesn't stop after marriage. It's not a fairy tale. Lots of things happen during "and they live happily ever after." Like adjustable rate mortgages and crushes on people who aren't your spouse and nasty in-laws and kids with colds, and disagreements on where to take the family vacation. And all those things, along with the good things, made it into the qualifier "happy." Happy is a state of mind.

But the whole article just seemed so fixated on marriage as some kind of end goal over which there is so much competition with her married friends. Relax, Liz Gottlieb. You seem like a complainer anyways. If you got married you'd just complain about that, too.