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Sparkle (1)
The dream, like that of our mothers and their mothers from time immemorial, was to fall in love, get married, and live happily ever after. Of course, we'd be loath to admit it in this day and age, but ask any soul-baring 40-year-old single heterosexual woman what she most longs for in life, and she probably won’t tell you it's a better career or a smaller waistline or a bigger apartment. Most likely, she’ll say that what she really wants is a husband (and, by extension, a child).
That quote comes from Lori Gottlieb's 2008 essay for the Atlantic, Marry Him!, which has now been expanded into the book, Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough
Gottlieb had plenty of suitors in her 20s and early 30s but rejected them all because they did not meet her notion of a great love. Waiting for the right man, in her case, resulted in becoming a successful career woman. Now in her 40s, she is a single mother to a child she conceived via sperm donor.
The couples my friend and I saw at the park that summer were enviable but not because they seemed so in love -- they were enviable because the husbands played with the kids for 20 minutes so their wives could eat lunch. In practice, my married friends with kids don't spend that much time with their husbands anyway (between work and child care), and in many cases, their biggest complaint seems to be that they never see each other. So if you rarely see your husband—but he's a decent guy who takes out the trash and sets up the baby gear, and he provides a second income that allows you to spend time with your child instead of working 60 hours a week to support a family on your own—how much does it matter whether the guy you marry is The One?
It's not that I've become jaded to the point that I don't believe in, or even crave, romantic connection. It's that my understanding of it has changed. In my formative years, romance was John Cusack and Ione Skye in Say Anything. But when I think about marriage nowadays, my role models are the television characters Will and Grace, who, though Will was gay and his relationship with Grace was platonic, were one of the most romantic couples I can think of. What I long for in a marriage is that sense of having a partner in crime. Someone who knows your day-to-day trivia. Someone who both calls you on your bullshit and puts up with your quirks. So what if Will and Grace weren’t having sex with each other? How many long-married couples are having much sex anyway?
I was married once upon a time. My ex-husband wasn't my "type" and I knew it: My type were men who were as much in their heads as I was. Pensive intellectuals, abstract creatives, battling wordsmiths –- if they spent as much (or more) time thinking as they did anything else, I was there.
As a result, I was in a lot of relationships that happened entirely in my head -– and the heads of the men I dated. We were not people, but concepts. Everything worked famously in theory, but theory and life are different things.
Then I met my ex-husband, who is only in his head long enough to figure out how to make something work. He is everything I'm not: outgoing, uncomplicated, warm but not overly emotional, a man who never spends more time than required in his head, and who certainly never considers anything that holds no practical value to him.
One time we were driving across the country –- Texas, to be specific –- and there were a lot of billboards about God and burning in hell, and I asked him whether he believed in an afterlife. He didn't say he didn't know the way an agnostic –- or someone who questions this –- might. He said he didn't know and then, after a brief pause, noted, "I've never really thought about it."
I remember asking him to think about it a little bit and he responded with some consternation, "Why?"
That's my ex-husband. If it doesn't have a purpose, why think about it?
Gottlieb is right about one thing: You don't need to be with someone who shares interests to run a household. Running a household and all the tasks that are involved in this require only a proper division of tasks and
