The March Atlantic is now fully online and chock full of great stuff. Particularly relevant to the issues frequently blogged about here are James Fallows on China's surprisingly successful efforts to regulate the internet, and Christopher Leinberger on exurbs as the slums of the future though obviously Lori Gottlieb is going to attract more attention than anything else.
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March Atlantic
23 Feb 2008 11:18 am
Comments (22)
Phew, that Gottlieb article is at least five times as long as it needed to be to make this point:
It’s like musical chairs—when do you take a seat, any seat, just so you’re not left standing alone?
Re: Slums of the future
Reminds me of a scene in Islands of the Net by Bruce Sterling published back in the '80s. While driving through suburban slums in 2023, the main character is subjected to a lecture about the destructive short-sightedness of her generation from her daughter.
Re: Slums of the Future
Washington DC has a budget surplus? I suspect the City Council could probably dream up a few useful things to spend the money on if they tried really hard.
If this article is correct, US cities will begin to resemble their european counterparts. Thriving, affluent urban centers surrounded by poorer ring cities.
I think the Gottlieb article is spot on. As someone with 2 children under 3, I can vouch for the fact that your social life comes the an abrupt end once you have children. There is no break from parenthood once begun. I can't understand why women are choosing to try it alone. Something like 37% of babies in the US are born to single mothers even with teen-aged pregnancy at it's lowest level since the 50's. That's a lot of women. Especially considering that demographically we're currently experiencing a baby "boomlet".
When I got my issue of the March Atlantic in the mail, I spent a long time trying to puzzle out why on earth the Gottlieb article even saw the light of day. Then I decided the editorial staff must just enjoy trolling its own readership. And Karl-- if the article was just about how hard it is to be a single parent, I'd agree with yhou, but it's not. It's about suddenly discovering it's hard, and deciding that the answer is to snooker some unsuspecting man whose very physical touch creeps you out into being your free nanny. To which I say, good luck with that.
The weird thing about the Lori Gottlieb article is that it is doing the exact same thing that it claims not to be doing.
The 2nd central message of the article is "a woman has to have a child to be happy". Not only is this an astonishingly ecologically destructive thing to be saying (by a woman who I imagine, from the rest of the article, spends her time telling everyone around her to recycle and think of the baby seals), it's an astonishingly personally destructive thing to be saying.
All the research in this field shows exactly the same thing
- marriage is the most important thing for happiness
- children do nothing positive for happiness, and (because of the resultant financial problems, time problems and so on) do an awful lot that is destructive.
Gottlieb's response to these facts is to conclude have the kid, and settle for a less than perfect marriage. Huh? Wouldn't the sane advice be to go for a better class of marriage and ditch the kid?
Speaking as a 40 yr old man who was recently single, I can tell you that nothing would make me less interested in a woman than the fact that she had a kid while single. Apart from the practical issues this raises (less quality time with her etc), it points to a singularly narcissistic view of the world which certainly doesn't seem to imply much for the subsequent partnership.
After the awfulness of the earlier Gottleib article about how she was too fancy to involve any potentially flawed real man in her reproduction, I feel a certain schadenfreude in her subsequent disappointment.
But it's a real issue in game theory. Assuming you have a valuable asset declining in value that must be committed to use, how should you manage it in your long term interest? Take the best deal you can find right now, or keep searching? Get short term payments or invest in a long term contract?
The most valuable asset most women will ever have is their fertility and it is in decline from the very beginning of their womanhood and gone once they are past 40. Such big decisions to make at such a young age are bound to lead to regret and heartbreak. Hamlet style indecisiveness like Gottleib's is a giant mistake, though. As she rightly understands after the fact.
Really, a wonderful editorial choice.
The Gottlieb piece is, in many ways, the flipside of what many married couples go through once they discovery that, contrary to what they thought, they did not marry their soul mate. Then begins the painful assessment of whether he/she is a good enough parent/provider and partner in the family business of raising kids such that you can tolerate him/her for the next 20 years?
"But it's a real issue in game theory. Assuming you have a valuable asset declining in value that must be committed to use, how should you manage it in your long term interest? Take the best deal you can find right now, or keep searching?"
Once again Science(TM) has a solution. I forget the exact details, but I seem to remember it was something like you keep going until you've met 12 people that are at least borderline acceptable, then choose the first one that is better than those 12. There was some justification for this algorithm and why it makes sense, but, as I say, I forget the details. Maybe another reader can remember?
I felt the article was brutally and selfishly honest. She understands that her baby makes her even less attractive to a prospective partner now. And while nolo has a point about wanting a free nanny, I don't find the notion of a woman snookering a man into marriage all that shocking. I think Gottlieb's friend Gabe is a genius. Men are the true romantics.
You know, I hate to weigh in on this Gottlieb thing and I agree it was poorly edited and should have been half the length. But it seems to me we can't really judge or assess her choices in any way without actually knowing what her options here -- meaning, what kind of men she was meeting and so on.
What I dislike about her article and about the discussion of it is that it tries to shoehorn everyone's personal lives into a neat little box where one can choose between solitude and a less-than-perfect mate. Some people have a talent for meeting people of the opposite sex and some are just lucky. It isn't all about who's picky and who settles and so on, and to phrase it all in such terms is ultimately dehumanizing.
That's what I found most depressing about the article: it lacked any real humanity. The notion that she or anyone she knew might have actually met someone they wanted to spend more time with for the sheer enjoyment of it -- as opposed to the person's quantifiable value -- is completely absent from the article.
Lance Mannion did a brilliant take-down on Gottlieb's article two weeks ago. (It was online.)
I enjoyed the Gottlieb article, and e-mailed a copy of it to my still-single sisters, to light fires under their asses. Gottlieb does seem somewhat self-absorbed though, which is probably why she wasn't able to marry a man who could be both someone she could love and someone she could rely on to help with child-rearing. To pretend that this is an unrealistic combination to find in one mate is a sad case of projection: people fall in love, get married, and have kids all the time. Maybe the reason Gottlieb couldn't is that no one else is anywhere near as interesting to her as herself.
Still, my favorite article in the current mag is Sandra Tsing Loh's take down of Jonathan Kozol, a Jewish lefty public education zealot, who she apparently used to admire: Tales Out of School.
With regard to Gottlieb's point is that it's a lot harder for a woman to find a husband after she becomes a single mother than before: Isn't that bloody obvious?
Kenneth Almquist,
"With regard to Gottlieb's point is that it's a lot harder for a woman to find a husband after she becomes a single mother than before: Isn't that bloody obvious?"
There's a lot in that essay that would seem to be "bloody obvious" to most folks, but not, perhaps, to liberal urban intellectuals like Gottlieb.
I don't find the notion of a woman snookering a man into marriage all that shocking.
Call me a romantic, but I find such tactics utterly repugnant.
I'd like to see the flip side of this article from a 30/40 something single man who wants a family. I imagine that there are plenty of men who have or are willing settle for women that don't match the perfect vision we may have of a soul mate.
Clogged Arteries (Atlantic, March, pp.38-39) seems to think that tax dollars are a free resource. It seems to advocate taking tax dollars from people in flyover country and spend it trying to get people more quickly from the United Nations to New York City or from JFK to Queens (same error: JFK is in Queens).
Clogged Arteries (Atlantic, March, pp.38-39) seems to think that tax dollars are a free resource. It seems to advocate taking tax dollars from people in flyover country and spend it trying to get people more quickly from the United Nations to New York City or from JFK to Queens (same error: JFK is in Queens).
The "u" (underscore) HTML tag doesn't work - "Clogged Arteries" in the above posting was supposed to be u-n-d-e-r-s-c-o-r-e-d. As you can see, BOLD and iTalics work.
Three cheers for Lori Gottlieb!
(Has anyone else pointed out what Lori is undoubtedly quite keenly aware of? That her name means "got love"?)
The obsession of American women with finding The One True "Soul Mate" is, in my utterly unsupported opinion, the primary reason that marriage rates are so low, and--especially--divorce rates are so high.
I know, I know--it's genetically encoded, and there are very sensible explanations of why evolution would have resulted in that encoding. But:
1) If there's anything that makes us "civilized" and truly human, it's our ability to overcome the predilections of our genes--predilections whose only true "purpose" is to further the propagation of said genes. (viz: overcoming the predilection to eradicate neighboring tribes and take their women as "wives.")
2) That predilection has been amplified x-fold by A) the rise of dewy-eyed romanticism starting in the 1700s, in response to the failure of religion to provide sufficiently satisfying self-delusion; B) the brief postwar period of male-breadwinner nuclear-family-ism's hegemony (which still leads many to believe that that model is the "traditional" one); C) Hollywood romantic comedies; and D) "you-deserve-it"-style self-help writing, especially the sticky-gooey womens-magazine variety.
Men and women want pretty much the same things in a partner, with two exceptions.
Good-natured.
Good-looking/sexy.
Interesting.
Reliable/trustworthy.
Good parenting type.
Rich/good provider (almost uniformly a girl thing)
Funny
Feel free to add to the list. We all want all of these things--some more, some less. Guys care inordinately (but not uniquely!) about looks, and girls care inordinately about rich and funny. (If I read one more personal ad that says--or is titled, as is frequently the case--"Make me laugh!", I might commit intellectual suicide by reading The Kite Runner, whose title is second only to "make me laugh" in frequency of appearance in women's personal ads.)
But there's one other thing that girls are looking for that guys don't delude themselves about: they want "Soul Mates." "The One." "My best friend, lover, and eternal life companion." Phew--they don't expect much, do they? Add "will support me," and the explanation for today's relationship dynamic is pretty clear.
Isn't it about time for sensible women to make like Lori and put aside these misty, relationship-destroying (and -preventing) expectations, and instead consider all the other (truly meaningful) items on the list, figure out which ones are really important to them, and do what guys do--settle for a decent mix of those?
If Gottlieb doesn't convince you, read Stephanie Koontz's A History of Marriage. She's brilliant, killer knowledgeable, and a card-carrying feminist out of Evergreen State College. (When NPR wants to interview someone about marriage, she's it.) She makes quite clear that the kind of practical, feet-on-the-ground-rather-than-head-in-the-clouds marriages that Gottlieb talks about are exactly the kind of marriages that have prevailed throughout history--except for that brief period in the U.S., from WW II into the sixties--the place and time when today's marriage-destroying expectations really got their legs, and their teeth.
Oh, and just to answer the obvious question about whether this whole post is or is not sour grapes.
Is: I'm a man who is single at the moment, and doesn't want to be. I attribute this to the difficulty of finding (okay, younger) women who are as clear-eyed as Lori Gottlieb about what really makes a good relationship.
Isn't: I was married for fifteen years and have two spectacular teenage daughters who are as crazy about me as I am about them. I do spend, and have always spent, a large portion of my time with them. I continue to date women even after I've gotten the feeling that they don't really excite me, because I think things might develop into something that works for both of us, given good-natured companionship and a little time.
Since nobody else seems to have asked--at least here (what is *wrong* with these guys?):
Lori, will you marry me?
Comments closed March 08, 2008.
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Heads in the Sand
The Lori Gottlieb article is parody, right? Right?
Posted by Jude | February 23, 2008 12:15 PM