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Marry Mr Good-Enough

11 February 2010

The sad reality often turns out to be that this ideal man never makes an appearance. In the meantime, the women could in fact be missing out on men who would make perfectly good husbands, possibly even better than the mythical ones they dream about.

American author Lori Gottlieb has some good advice for women in their thirties who are waiting to meet ‘Mr Right’, a husband who will embody all their hopes in regard to personality, looks and financial stability: ‘Mr Good-Enough might be equally stable, especially if you’re looking for a reliable life companion.’

She believes that many single girls fall into the illusory trap set for them from childhood stories of princesses finding their predestined princes, to the modern depiction of ‘true romances’ in novels, films and plays. She argues that a woman who insists on waiting for the Right One to come along while discounting men she already knows who might make acceptable husbands can find herself unhappy and alone at the end of many years of fruitless searching.

In her book, ‘Marry Him:  the Case for Settling for Mr Good-Enough’, Lori,  a single mother aged 40, draws on her own experience of life to offer advice to others. ‘My dream, like that of my mother and her mother, was to fall in love, get married and live happily ever after,’ she says. ‘We grew up idealising marriage, but if we’d had a more realistic understanding of its cold, hard benefits we might have done things differently. So we walked away from uninspiring relationships that might have made us happy.’

Pointing out that marriage is not a ‘passion-fest’, she describes it rather as ‘a partnership formed to run a very small, mundane and often boring non-profit business’. Moreover, in the comparatively rare cases where Mr Right does actually appear and marriage takes place in a flurry of romantic excitement, the subsequent inevitability of having to come down to earth and cope with ordinary daily life again all too frequently means that one or both will be thinking of divorce.
Mr Good-Enough may never be the kind to sweep his partner off her feet and carry her off to a future filled with romance, like the heroes in Barbara Cartland’s books, but solidity and dependability are the qualities which help to make a marriage last, qualities which are more likely to be found in a Second Best.

And who knows, he might turn out to be Mr Right after all.  

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