The word “settling” makes a whooole lot of women crabby.

Just ask Lori Gottlieb, author of a new self-help book called “Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough.” She’s currently dealing with the backlash.

When I first read that title, I felt a bit cranky, too. It’s a feeling I remember well from a couple of years ago, when Gottlieb penned an article for The Atlantic about why women should give up looking for Mr. Right and just say, “OK, this guy is good enough.”

In particular, this paragraph irked:

And despite growing up in an era when the centuries-old mantra to get married young was finally (and, it seemed, refreshingly) replaced by encouragement to postpone that milestone in pursuit of high ideals (education! career! but also true love!), every woman I know-no matter how successful and ambitious, how financially and emotionally secure-feels panic, occasionally coupled with desperation, if she hits 30 and finds herself unmarried.

Well, clearly she’s got to expand her social circle, I thought. But then Gottlieb continued:

And all I can say is, if you say you’re not worried, either you’re in denial or you’re lying. In fact, take a good look in the mirror and try to convince yourself that you’re not worried, because you’ll see how silly your face looks when you’re being disingenuous.

Wow. WTF? Yeah, I know. To be fair, in the rest of the article, Gottlieb isn’t quite that presumptuous. The basic tenets of her argument are drawn from her own experience, and she’s at her most convincing when she’s not accusing other single women of lying about their own happiness (sour grapes, anyone?)

When she speaks from her own experience as a former super-picky dater and 42-year-old single mom who’s bursting with regrets about all of the merely adequate dudes whom she sent away, I can understand where Gottlieb is coming from. I think we all wish she’d just settled long ago.

Now, Gottlieb has turned the central thesis of that article into a full-length book.

She expands on the premise that younger single women (say, in their early 30s) who rule out life partners based on certain ultra-particular criteria (e.g. having the same taste in movies, being taller than them, not wearing bow ties) may be missing out on men who are less exciting/attractive but have the right qualities to be great life partners and fathers.

Gottlieb claims that the thrilling romantic obsessions of our 20s - hot sex, dating crazy artists, staying up all night enthralled with each other’s views on French New Wave cinema - tend to become less important over time. Now that she’s older, Gottlieb just wants someone to sit next to on the sofa and drive her to the doctor’s. You know, married stuff.

If only she hadn’t been so picky when she was younger….with this hard-won knowledge about how her requirements for happiness would change, Gottlieb urges her 30-year-old counterparts to settle! Settle for a guy who has some flaws, who possesses 80 percent of what they’re looking for. Settle for Mr. Good-Enough.

Understandably, Gottlieb’s new book is pissing off the same people that her Atlantic article did. But is her advice really setting women’s right back a couple of decades and insulting the intelligence of happily single women, not to mention all the men who would rather not think of themselves as “Mr. Good Enough?”

First of all: At some point or another, we’ve all know those women who are incredibly focused on finding “the one,” but who also have a list of deal-breakers long enough to rival the cast of Seinfeld’s. Often these same women are voracious consumers of gauzy romcoms starring Rene Zellweger or Katherine Heigl that sell the phony narrative of “happily ever after.”

This book is clearly for them. In fact, I’ve also known men who are constantly looking over the shoulder of their current girlfriend for something “better” - this book is also for them!

On the other hand: There’s settling, and then there’s settling. I think it’s sound advice to recommend that women pay more heed to nice-guy qualities such as basic compatibility and respect, which tend to matter in the long run far more than whether or not he has a PhD or a potbelly.

In interviews, Gottlieb espouses this opinion, telling the Today Show: “You have to have passion and chemistry and attraction and all of those things, but the characters issues [are more important]: Is this person kind? Do you have the same values? Do you want the same things out of life?

But in the Atlantic article, she urges women to consider a man with halitosis, one who sends “a cold shiver down your spine,” or one who is rude to waiters.

OK, I’m all for looking beyond a receding hairline, but assholism? Bad breath? Either option seems like a “settle” too far.

photo by comedy_nose