Today, “Marry Him!,” an article by Lori Gottlieb in the
March Atlantic Monthly, was emailed to me for the third time by a single, female
friend. Since the article became available online recently, it has been
circulating like crazy amongst single women in their twenties and thirties,
generating either rage, resigned sighs of agreement, or panic. As a single
mother of a child she conceived with donor sperm, Gottlieb argues that the
idealistic search for a soul mate—oh so important in one’s twenties—seems like a
massive mistake when one is living alone at 35, trying to pay the bills and get
the diapers changed. Look past his flaws, Gottlieb urges. Passion? Romance? Good
conversation? Hot sex? They all pale in comparison to having someone—practically
anyone, so long as he’s steady, sane, and able-bodied—to share the bills and
child care with.
As a 25-year-old woman who has always wanted to have children and who has zero
prospects of making that happen anytime in the near-ish future (at least in the
two-happy-parents-who-are-not-on-welfare sort of way), I was Gottlieb’s ideal
audience.
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