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the name of your best friend from high school, you wonder if you should try to find someone more mature or attentive. Instead of falling for a guy and discovering a seemingly insurmountable practical obstacle (like, there will be a civil war if you get together), we fall for a guy and then create our own seemingly insurmountable obstacles as to why we can’t be with him (isn’t funny enough, has a tendency to get stressed out during tax season). It used to be that lovers knew they wanted to be together but couldn’t. Now it’s that lovers can be together but aren’t sure they want to. And then we complain that we can’t find a suitable spouse.

      I was starting to realize that despite everything I believed on an intellectual level—despite the strong, sensible person I thought I was—deep down, I had a classic Cinderella complex. I expected that, as the famous song goes, someday my prince would come and “thrill me for ever more.” It never occurred to me to trade those impractical glass slippers for shoes I could actually wear.

       A SOLE SOUL MATE

      When I look back on the way I dated in my twenties and early thirties, it’s not surprising that I thought it was perfectly reasonable to stay single while holding out for my ideal man. After all, everyone else seemed to be doing that—in real life and every time I clicked the remote control. During my peak dating years, prime-time TV was packed with series featuring sexy, successful single women looking for love, surrounded by surrogate families of wise-cracking, lovelorn singles like themselves. Two notable exceptions were Everybody Loves Raymond, a show about a marriage that, ironically, seemed to be of little interest to young single women aspiring to marriage, and Mad About You, a hip, smart comedy about a young couple adjusting to married life, which did appeal to young single women until a baby was added to the show, at which point viewers stopped watching and the show went off the air. Was this perhaps too much reality for single women dreaming about happily ever after?

      On the single gal shows—Ally McBeal, Caroline in the City, Friends, Sex and the City, Grey’s Anatomy—viewers would tune in to watch a woman date a guy, only to talk endlessly with her girlfriends about why he’s not right for her, and why maybe she should look for someone better. There was always the assumption that she’d end up with her “true love” in the end—that there was a single soul mate and therefore a clear right choice when it came to a partner. These characters worried about making a mistake because there seemed to be only one chance at getting right, so they’d better be darn sure this guy was it. Nobody seemed to be saying there might be lots of “right” guys. In real life, of course, each partner has his pleasures and his drawbacks, but we rarely see real life played out onscreen.

       “REALITY” SHOWS

      The closest we get to “real life” are so-called reality shows like The Bachelor. It’s telling that the audience was horrified when Brad, one season’s bachelor, whittled his choices down to two women, picked DeAnna, then changed his mind before he was supposed to propose to her.

      The audience was incensed: What was wrong with DeAnna, they wanted to know. She was charming, family-oriented, smart, and attractive. Who did Brad think he was, letting her go?

      But Brad just wasn’t feeling it. If a woman turns down a perfectly acceptable partner because she just isn’t feeling it, we support her and tell her to go find “true love.” We say that she made an empowered decision. But if a man turns down a perfectly acceptable partner because he’s just not feeling it, he’s a villain. Brad was whipped on everything from talk shows to blogs because viewers wanted him to take this woman and grow into that big love if he didn’t feel it right from the start. They didn’t want him to hold out for something better.

      DeAnna, of course, got her own shot on The Bachelorette, but when she was down to her final two candidates, she choose the wacky snowboarder who wasn’t sure he was ready to get married and have babies over the single dad who doted on her and who already lived the domestic life she claimed to want so badly. Audiences supported her decision to pick romance over practicality. For a woman, viewers seemed to think, romance was more important. Never mind that DeAnna later broke off her engagement.

      The messages about love that we take away from the media are as contradictory as they are counterproductive. If the typical love story goes like this—Boy meets Girl. Boy and Girl hate each other. Boy and Girl exchange witty banter. Boy and Girl grudgingly realize they love each other. Boy and Girl live happily ever after (although we never see this part)—what message does that send? Should we look for the person who annoys us initially or who attracts us initially? And if love comes when we least expect it, does that mean if we actively seek love, it’s not true love? That we shouldn’t even try because true love will find us only when we aren’t looking? Should we go by the message “You can’t hurry love” or “Get out there and be proactive"?

      Of course, as confused as I was, I knew that I wasn’t still single just because I’d seen too many romantic comedies or watched too much reality TV. Earlier generations of women grew up on similar themes, but my generation and those after me have another set of conflicting messages to make sense of, too: What does it mean to be empowered and also want happily ever after? In other words, if feminism taught us that we don’t really need the White Knight, how do we reconcile that with the fact that many of us are women who want a husband and a family?

      If the fairy tale is to “have it all,” what does “having it all” even mean?

3 How Feminism Fucked Up My Love Life

      I know this is an unpopular thing to say, but feminism has completely fucked up my love life. To be fair, it’s not feminism, exactly—after all, “feminism” never published a dating manual—but what I considered to be “the feminist way of doing things” certainly didn’t help. It’s not that I would give back the gains of feminism for anything. Believe me, I wouldn’t. It’s just that I wish I hadn’t tried to apply what I believed to be “feminist ideals” to dating.

      Growing up, my friends and I thought feminism was fabulous. To us, feminism meant we had “freedom” and “choice” in all aspects of our lives. We could pursue professional careers, take time to “find ourselves” before getting married, decide not to get married at all, and have our sexual needs met whenever we felt like it. The fact that we didn’t need a man to have a fulfilling life felt empowering. After all, who wanted to do what our moms did—find a man, marry him, and have kids—all before most of us had gotten our first promotion?

      But then, in our late twenties and early thirties, as more of us moved from relationship to relationship, or went long periods with no meaningful relationship at all, we didn’t feel quite so empowered. The truth was, every one of my single friends wanted to be married, but none of us would admit how badly we craved it for fear of sounding weak or needy or, God forbid, antifeminist. We were the generation of women who were supposed to be independent and self-sufficient, but we didn’t have a clue how to navigate this modern terrain without sacrificing some core desires.

      We didn’t want yet another Sunday brunch with the girls. We wanted a lifetime with The Guy.

      Meanwhile, we were praised for our ambition out in the world, but at the same time told that our ambition would distract us from finding a husband. That never made sense to me. I don’t think that women are so caught up in their careers that they “forget” to focus on their personal lives. After all, 90 percent of conversations most women I know of dating age have, even those trying to make partner in a law firm or slogging through a medical residency, involve men: who the cute new doctor is at the hospital, whether to move in with a boyfriend, what it means that the guy stopped calling after five dates. In fact, working in environments where we’re likely to meet interesting men may actually be a dating advantage. Our long hours and high-minded aspirations weren’t the problem, but none of us could figure out what was.

      It wasn’t until I found myself still single in my late thirties that something hit me. Maybe the problem was this misconception: We thought that “having it all” equaled “happily ever after.”

      Except

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