UPFRONT:SO LOOKIT. It's Valentine's Day tomorrow and you might be spending it alone. Maybe because that's what you choose to do. Maybe you think Valentine's Day is an invention of a nefarious triumvirate of card companies, red-rose peddlers and chocolatiers, and you have no particular wish to follow their edicts and line their pockets. Maybe you live under a rock without an internet connection and the whole sorry red-hued racket has passed you by.
If I were you, I’d stay there. Because all the petal-sprinkled tablecloths and love-heart candy come-ons have an irksome way of suggesting to single people – single women especially – that they’re missing out. And maybe, like US journalist and author Lori Gottlieb, you’ve decided that what would make you happiest in your life is a companion, a life partner. If, like Gottlieb, you’re a straight woman, that means a man.
When I first read Gottlieb's article, "Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr Good Enough" in the Atlantic Monthlyback in 2008, I was instantly incensed, particularly by lines such as, "every woman I know . . . feels panic, occasionally coupled with desperation, if she hits 30 and finds herself unmarried". At the time of reading, I was 34, unmarried, and unconvinced I ever wanted that status to change, let alone panicking about it. Given that most of my friends had also made it to 30 unmarried, I didn't feel like an anomaly either.
Well, 30 ain’t nothing, says Gottlieb, whose argument appears to be that we should stop being so damn picky or we’ll all end up on the shelf: “By 40, if you get a cold shiver down your spine at the thought of embracing a certain guy, but you enjoy his company more than anyone else’s, is that settling or making an adult compromise?” Settling! No wait, it’s an adult compromise! Look, whatever you call it, it’s a really, really, bad idea. Was she really advising women to hitch up with guys that they found physically repulsive just to have someone to help with the housework? Apparently so. Now she’s making a further case for settling in a new book on the same theme. And who’s to blame for the fact that Gottlieb’s still single? Duh, the feminists.
It turns out it was feminism that led her to believe she should wait for the right guy to come along before yoking her entire life to him. And look where that got her? Now she’s 43 and alone. Well, strictly speaking, she’s not alone – she has a child who was conceived from donor sperm, a desire-made-real that owes an unacknowledged debt to the feminist movement – but she won’t spend V day in a crowded restaurant going Dutch with some man who makes her skin crawl, because feminism told her she might be better off at home with her feet up and a decent film. Cursed women’s movement.
I’m not denying that most of us – men and women – hope to find, if not a soulmate, then at least a teammate with whom to face the slings and arrows. Nor that being without such a mate, particularly as you watch all your friends file two-by-two into the Noah’s ark of lifetime commitment, can be really, achingly hard.
There were times when I, too, second-guessed relationships ended or offers rescinded as a single girl returning to an empty double bed. But worse still was the loneliness, the sweat-beading, physical discomfort of remaining in a relationship that was making me unhappy. I know for many of you I’m stating the obvious here, but to be clear: in my experience, being alone is a whole lot better than being with somebody you know is wrong for you.
Especially, Ms Gottlieb, when their physical presence sends shivers down your spine. Nobody’s saying single parenthood is fun, but when you recommend that a woman chains her life to a man who makes her skin crawl, you might want to remember that even if that woman has already hit 40, that’s a possible four decades of physical revulsion and bad sex you’re sentencing her to – or indeed no sex at all.
The truth is that being with the wrong partner can make you miserable, torpedo your self-esteem and lead you to question your own judgment. And so do articles that tell you to stick with him.
Gottlieb has been on the interview circuit to promote the book, and if I'm hearing her right, it's a numbers game. "In our culture, anything less than a 10 is considered settling," she explains in an interview on the Atlantic Monthlywebsite. Right. Because reducing men to numbers isn't at all offensive and reductive. If the roles were reversed and she were a male author pegging women to a points system, we'd be rightly enraged. "Women in their 30s pass up all these eights, going for that 10, the perfect guy, and they basically gave up the eight to hold out for the 10, and now they're 40 and they can only get a five."
Somebody get me a calculator. Or a cudgel. I’m not saying this because I’m a smug married person now: after all, by Gottlieb’s calculations, the fact that I married my husband at 35 means he’s probably an eight at best. Granted, he could even be a four that I see as a 10 because my biological clock is ticking too loudly for me to rate him properly. But before I met him, I left some relationships and some relationships left me: others I stayed in longer than I should have, and all I can do is thank my times tables that I didn’t settle for those ones.
In all that time, playing the other numbers game – my dating philosophy being that you have to buy a lot of scratch cards to be in with a chance for the jackpot – the best Valentine’s Day I ever had was spent with my school friend Norah, drinking Martini Red, watching the top 40 love songs of all time on telly and bellowing out the words to Total Eclipse of the Heart. We were single. It was February 14th. It was cracking fun. Frankly, I would have settled for that.