You know that scenario you hold in your head about The One? One day, you'll be walking into your local grocery store to buy a mango, and there he will be, squeezing them too, ready to seduce you with an opening gambit about, say, ripeness.
Well, it's a dream, and that makes you a fantasist.
Such is the new thinking from the front lines of modern dating. Forget about finding Mr. Right. You should settle for Mr. Good Enough. Heck, go for Mr. Just Okay. Don't expect a head-spinning courtship. You should not even want love. In fact, you'd be wise to borrow a few pointers from arranged marriages.
Last month in London's Sunday Times, Lori Gottlieb caused a stir by writing a piece about her longing to be married. At 40, she laments the decisions in her 30s to break up with certain boyfriends. Looking back, she figures she should have married one. A single mother, she conceived her child through donor sperm because she had not met Mr. Right.
Her advice to women is to settle before they panic about feeling they might never have a family. “Don't worry about passion or intense connection,” she writes.
Marriage is “more like a partnership formed to run a small, mundane and often boring not-for-profit business. And I mean this in a good way.”
Reva Seth agrees. Born in Canada to South Asian parents, she has written a book, First Comes Marriage, Modern Relationship Advice from the Wisdom of Arranged Marriages, based on her discussions with more than 300 women in arranged marriages. Does she think modern women are fantasists? “Very much,” she says in an interview. “Our expectations have become so high in terms of what we are looking for. … Even the idea of a soulmate is a list [of attributes] in our head that keeps changing.”
Women should seek the inverse of what Hollywood and the culture in general dictate they should expect, she says. Don't look for connection or expect to feel something the minute you lock eyes. That's sexual chemistry, which fades over time. Look for shared values, even if that comes in a guy who is 5 foot 4 and suffers from halitosis, she says.
Depend on marriage to make love grow, she says.
Ms. Seth, whose professional experience includes journalism, public relations and the practice of law, readily acknowledges that her research is not conclusive. She began conducting interviews with women in arranged marriages out of curiosity. Her parents had one, and were happy. As a young girl, she observed their friends, many of whom were in arranged marriages, too. “I could never really tell the difference between the odd love marriage in the group and the arranged marriage. There was no difference. And that really bothered me.”
She recognizes that the women she spoke to were probably self-selecting – only those who had generally happy experiences in their arranged marriage were willing to come forward.
Ms. Seth is not advocating arranged marriage. It is the principle of being strategic about selecting a husband that she upholds. Husbands don't need to be the centre of your life, she says. It shouldn't matter that they don't like to do all the things you like to do.
Her advice is to make a list of marriage musts – basic core values, not superficial attributes. That's what she did on New Year's Day, 2003. Then 28, she had been in a five-year relationship that ended and “was dating around the city” of Toronto. She found herself drifting into relationships, without a plan or clear idea of what she wanted. “We end up marrying the men we date,” she warns.
