The Atlantic: Purveyor of Claptrap

[silversliver]

My letter to the editor of The Atlantic

While reading Lori Gottleib's article "Marry Him!", I was disturbed by her advice to women to settle for someone they still had to care for, and her buy-in to the "freshness date" perspective of marriageability. More unsettling still is that she is offering this advice from her own experience of being over

Comments

[jehanna]

Been seeing that article making the rounds of the sites I read. It's full of ick.

I do wonder whether I'd feel any of that if I was interested in breeding....there's a certain element of "must find someone to help raise the kid"-ness going on there that might make having ANY help seem like a good thing...not that this situation is in and of itself at all a good thing.

[chaostheory635]

I'm a little disgusted by that. Ick.
And a little upset, as someone of the childfree persuasion, that the idea of not having children wasn't even considered.

[otana]

Ugh, that leaves a really bad taste in my mouth. When I was 19, I'd been dating a guy for three years. We were young, but very close and had discussed marriage. If we hadn't been so responsible and agreeing to wait a few years we might have gone ahead, and then found out that we had huge differences that would have ruined a marriage (I don't want kids and he did, I wanted to move to Cali and he didn't, etc).

We probably would have been happy to a certain degree, but not completely, and who's to say we wouldn't have added to the divorce rate within ten years of tying the knot?

There seem to be so many women for whom the husband and 2.4 kids, SUV, suburban home and homemaker lifestyle are their only goals in life. If it's what they genuinely want and are making an empowered choice to do that then great, but it seems to me that many of them only do that because it's all they can imagine achieving and because they think it's what they should be aiming for.

[ellixis]

Yuck. What a nasty, cynical, desperate little article.

[hugelaurie]

I SHOULD PROBABLY HAVE READ ALL 4 PAGES OF THE ARTICLE BUT I JUST COULDN'T TAKE ANY MORE OF THAT BITTER, SELF-DEFEATING CRAP ANYMORE. SHE SOUNDS LIKE THAT ODIOUS WELL-MEANING OLDER AUNT WHO ALWAYS CORNERS YOU AT FAMILY REUNIONS ASKING WHEN YOU'RE GONNA GET MARRIED AND START CRANKING OUT BABIES. GTFO, LADY. THIS IS HORRIBLE ADVICE. THAT'S NOT EVEN TAKING ACCOUNT OF THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE HUSBAND, WHO WOULD FIND OUT HIS WIFE MARRIED HIM BC HE WAS "BETTER THAN NOTHING" AND WOULD ALLOW HER TO TAKE NAPS DURING THE DAY. UGH.