Mr Good Enough: The case for choosing a Real Man over holding out for Mr Perfect

knew this person was the right person when we’d been dating for six months and she had to go away for a week, and when she was gone, I missed her so much. I thought that I felt happier when she was around. I realized how important she was.’

And that’s because many people, I think, have an inability to believe that other people work differently. We don’t realize that you have to learn someone in the way that you learn a subject. You can’t do it only by feeling. You actually have to listen to them and believe them when they tell you how they work. That’s a very counterintuitive thing to

So one of the things I tell young couples is that they need to be open to the fact that they will work differently from each other and from the families they grew up in, and that they have to respect that, and listen to that. In dating, people break up over these things and they miss the opportunity to really get to know the other person. They dism

The funny thing is, most of us aren’t single because of how we look or what we weigh, our level of education or job description, or whether we asked the guy out first or waited three days to return his call. We’re single because we have this underlying belief that we need to be completely in synch with our mates, and if we’re not, we should find so

Amato found that these adult children had a low tolerance for problems in a relationship. They grew up believing that if the flame was going out, the solution wasn’t to rekindle it, but to find another spark.

Instead the successful couples learn how to manage the disagreements and live life ‘around’ them—to love in spite of their areas of difference… . If we switch partners, we’ll just get ten new areas of disagreement.”

“Most good enough marriages have the potential to become stronger and better with time, effort, and commitment,”

The good enough marriages were good enough for the kids, because kids don’t care if their parents are being self-actualized. They had stability and ready access to both parents, and they were happy. The fact that their parents were having an existential crisis didn’t matter to them.” In adulthood, though, these kids from good enough marriage famili

successful couple has approximately ten areas of ‘incompatibility’ or disagreement that they will never resolve.