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Should You Marry Him?

St. Valentine was a Christian physician martyred by the Romans on Feb. 14, 270. In 496, Pope Gelasius I declared Feb. 14 St. Valentine's feast day. This happened to fall one day before the ancient Roman libidinal feast of Lupercalia, in which Romans dropped urgent love messages in urns to unmarried girls.

Women have been confused by Valentine's Day ever since.

If "sexual value" equals roughly the number of people who want to sleep with you, minus the number of people you'd be willing to sleep with, the sexual value of the typical American 18-year-old male is about minus 346. He has nowhere to go but up.

That the sexual value of men rises and that of women falls with age in a kind of inexorable natural egalitarian process is a truth that each generation -- apparently alas! -- must discover for itself anew and only after it's too late.

Or so one would conclude from reading Lori Gottlieb's paean to late-life sexual realism in the Atlantic Monthly, "Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough."

At 40, Lori embarked on the archetypical American story of female empowerment: Tired of waiting for "The One," she had a baby on her own by artificial insemination. You go, girl!

It's a brutally honest self-examination of what she has learned as a result -- what anyone who has ever been a college-educated upwardly mobile unwed mother (a small club, I know, but one to which I happen to belong) will recognize. Lori reflects on the difference between fantasy and reality, especially the fantasy of having it all: "'a baby now, my soul mate later!' Well ... ha! Hahahaha. And ha."

What all those single-mom-by-choice books don't tell you is that "once you have a baby alone, not only do you age 10 years in the first 10 months, but if you don't have time to shower, eat, urinate in a timely manner ... there's very little chance that a man -- much less The One -- is going to knock on your door and join that party."

It's not just women with husbands that can incite envy. To unwed mothers, even ex-husbands seem miraculous: What? Every other Saturday off and a child-support check?

So Lori has some advice for the next generation of 30-year-olds: If you want a family, find a nice guy and settle.

"Marriage isn't a passion-fest; it's more like a partnership formed to run a very small, mundane and often boring nonprofit business. And I mean this in a good way," she writes.

Anyone who has ever stayed married will have some sympathy, at least some of the time, for that point of view. But in the end, Lori, who has got her fingers on a big chunk of truth, has missed the most important point. Women shouldn't settle for less; we should appreciate more. A good family man is not a step down -- he's a step up.

Find a good man and love him. Do it not only because it's the best way to raise a family. Do it because spending your life actually loving a man, however imperfectly, is better than spending your time perpetually shopping for the right set of inner sensations in your brain (aka waiting for "The One"). Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.

Lori's married friends often tell her she's lucky that she doesn't have to deal with these impossible husbands. "Each time, I say 'OK, if you're so unhappy, and I'm so lucky, leave your husband! In fact, send him over here!'" she writes.

Not one wife has taken her up on her offer, yet.

So to all those good American family men with grumbly wives out there: Happy Valentine's Day. You deserve it. (But don't forget the flowers.)

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