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a lot of women, the older I got, the more things I wanted in a guy, because while life experience taught me what I didn’t want in a relationship, it also gave me a better sense of what I did want. So the thinking would go: The last guy wasn’t X, so next time I want X … plus all the things I had on my list before. Basically, my Husband Store went from a six-story building to the world’s tallest skyscraper. And I didn’t think I was alone.

      Could this be one reason that in 1975, almost 90 percent of women in the United States were married by age 30 but in 2004, only a little more than half were? Or why the percentages of never-married women in every age group studied by the U.S. Census Bureau (from 25 to 44) more than doubled between 1970 and 2006?

      I wanted to find out.

       A DIFFERENT KIND OF LOVE STORY

      This book is a love story. It’s not mine, exactly, but it could be yours.

      It all started with a dinner I had with my editor at the Atlantic. I was 39 years old, a journalist and single mother with a toddler, and I was grumbling about a date I’d had the night before with a lisping 45-year-old lawyer who chewed with his mouth open and talked nonstop for three hours about his ex-wife but failed to ask a single question about me. I didn’t know if I had it in me to go on another date. Ever. I was so tired of having to talk to strangers over plates of pasta when all I wanted was to hang out in sweatpants with my husband on a Saturday night, like my married friends did.

      How had this become my life?

      Just two years earlier, I’d written “The XY Files” for the Atlantic, where I told the story of my decision, at age 37, to have a baby on my own. Obviously, this wasn’t my childhood dream, but neither was marrying someone who wasn’t The One—and so far I didn’t think I’d found him. I wanted to have a baby while I still could, so instead of signing up with another online dating site, I registered with an online sperm donor site. Soon I found myself pregnant and still hopeful that I’d meet Mr. Right. My plan was to have a baby first, find “true love” later. At the time, I felt empowered and even wrote in the pages of the magazine that what I was doing seemed somewhat romantic.

      Well … hahahahahahaha!

      Now, at dinner with my editor, I couldn’t stop laughing. Of course, I was ecstatically in love with my child, but let’s face it: Things weren’t so romantic over in the Gottlieb household. Like my married friends with small children, I was sleep-deprived, cranky, and overwhelmed, but unlike them, I was doing it all alone. Sure, sometimes they complained about their husbands and, at first, I felt proud of my decision not to end up like them—in what seemed like less-than-ideal marriages, with less-than-ideal spouses. But it didn’t take long before I realized that none of them would trade places with me for a second. In fact, despite their complaints, they actually were really happy—and in many cases, happier than they’d ever been. All those things that seemed so important when they were dating now had little relevance to their lives. Instead, the idea of choosing to run a household together—as unglamorous and challenging and mundane as that was—seemed to be the ultimate act of “true love.” Why hadn’t I looked at marriage that way five years ago?

      “If I knew then what I know now,” I told my editor, “I would have approached dating differently.” But how could I have known?

      As a single 42-year-old friend put it, for many women it’s a Catch-22. “If I’d settled at thirty-nine,” she said, “I always would have had the fantasy that something better exists out there. Now I know better. Either way, I was screwed.”

      I remember being surprised that my friend, a smart and attractive producer, was basically saying she should have settled. But she explained that I had it all wrong. She didn’t mean resigning herself to a life of quiet misery with a man she cared little about. She meant opening herself up to a fulfilling life with a great guy who might not have possessed every quality on her checklist. In her thirties, she told me, she used to consider “settling” to mean anything less than her ideal guy, but now, in her forties, she’d come to realize that she’d been confusing “settling” with “compromising.”

      I’d come to the same conclusion, and I started asking myself some important questions. What’s the difference between settling and compromising? When it comes to marriage, what can we live with, and what can we live without? How long does it make sense to hold out for someone better—who we may never find, and who may not exist or be available to us even if he did—when we could be happy with the person right in front of us?

      I brought up these questions with my editor that night, and neither of us had the answers. For the next two hours, he talked about his marriage and I talked about the dating world, and when the check came, he thought I should explore these issues in an article.

      Over the following weeks, as I spoke with friends and acquaintances about their relationships, something surprised me. Whether or not these people went into marriage head-over-heels in love, there seemed to be little difference in how happy they were now. Both kinds of marriages seemed to be working or not working equally well or poorly. Meanwhile, the women I spoke to who were single—and unhappy about their single state—were still nixing guys who were “obsessed with sports” or “too short,” because they figured that if they married the short guy who didn’t read novels, they’d be unsatisfied in that marriage. Yet the women who had done just that weren’t.

      When “Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough” appeared in the Valentine’s Day issue of the Atlantic, I pored over e-mails from complete strangers—men and women, married and single, ranging in age from 18 to 78. The notes were incredibly personal, and most people admitted that they’d struggled with these same questions in their own lives. Some had resolved them happily and felt grateful to be with a more realistic Mr. Right. Others regretted letting a great guy go for what now seemed like trivial reasons. Still others said that marrying for “fireworks” left them feeling like they were settling once the pilot light went out because once they could see each other clearly, they realized they weren’t that compatible after all. Some—including priests, rabbis, matchmakers, and marriage therapists—felt that adjusting our expectations in a healthy way would help members of their congregations, clients, friends, or family members find real romantic fulfillment.

      But where did that leave me? Out in the dating world, I was doing exactly what I’d suggested in the Atlantic article. I was trying to be more open-minded and realistic, and focus on what was going to be important in a long-term marriage instead of a short-term romance, but somehow that didn’t seem to be working. I was still drawn to guys who were my “type,” and when I dated guys who weren’t, I just wasn’t feeling “it.” I wasn’t looking for instant butterflies anymore, but there had to be some “it” there, right? And if so, how much “it” was enough?

       WHAT IF I WANT A DIFFERENT 8?

      Then I got an e-mail from a single woman who wrote that she wasn’t looking for the perfect 10 in a mate—an 8 would be great. She was even dating an 8. But there was just one problem, she said: “What if I want a different 8?”

      That, I realized, was exactly my problem—and so many other women’s, too. She agreed that we should be looking for Mr. Good Enough (who exists) instead of Prince Charming (who doesn’t), but she didn’t know how to make it work in practice. Neither did I. In fact, when readers wrote in saying that they’d decided to get engaged because of my article, I worried that five years later, I’d get a slew of e-mails saying that they were getting divorced because of my article, since nobody knew what being more realistic actually meant. How much compromise is too much compromise? How do you know if you’re being too picky or if you’re really not right for each other? If being with Mr. Good Enough means sharing both passion and connection, but also having more reasonable expectations, how do you balance those things?

      In order to find out, I decided that I’d have to become a dating guinea pig. I’d go out there and get some answers—then apply them to my life in the real world.

      I started by talking to cutting-edge marriage researchers, behavioral economists, sociologists, psychologists,

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