(slate) In Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough, Lori Gottlieb argues that if a hypereducated, ambitious woman is still single after age 35, it's because she's too picky. According to Gottlieb, these aging go-getters are sans man because they have "unconscious husband-shopping" checklists a mile long. When they were younger, these women rejected men for having red hair or saying the word awesome too much. Now they are paying for their excessive youthful pride: Their marital prospects—and their eggs—have dried up. To avoid this trap, she posits, women in their late 20s and early 30s should settle for the "8," instead of waiting around for the "10." Gottlieb spends more than 300 pages trying to convince us that there is an unhappy army of spinsters just like her—lady lawyers, doctors, and graphic designers regretting their fussiness. And this army, she argues, is responsible for our national marriage crisis: Is this "why the percentages of never-married women in every age group studied by the U.S. Census Bureau (from 25-44) more than doubled between 1970 and 2006?" she asks. Well, not really. Like many people who write about the marriage predicament of a narrow slice of America, Gottlieb is conflating her statistics. It's true that the percentage of married women has been declining since the '70s. But that decline has nothing to do with those unhappy lawyers and graphic designers. In fact, college-educated women—and Gottlieb's book is filthy with attorneys and screenwriters and executives—are still getting married at extremely high rates. And these days they are far more likely to stay married than they were 40 years ago. Marriage, in fact, has never been kinder to the professional woman. So while there may be a few holdouts, it hardly amounts to a crisis. It's a tiny problem for the very privileged picky few.

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