Let's Call the Whole Thing Off by Sandra Tsing Loh, in The Atlantic. Ms. Loh confesses to an infidelity that led to divorce. She makes a strong argument for doing away with marriage, but, as in the case of Against Love, the problem is what you do -- especially with children -- without marriage? There's the proverbial rub. Ms. Loh attempts to offer a sort of modest proposal at the end, but it's an obvious rush job with no practical value at all. At least not now. Not yet. It's a fun read, though. I laughed at this paragraph:

Rachel sees herself as a failed mother, and is depressed and chronically overworked at her $120,000-a-year job (which she must cling to for the benefits because Ian freelances). At night, horny and sleepless, she paces the exquisite kitchen, gobbling mini Dove bars. The main breadwinner, Rachel is really the Traditional Dad, but instead of being handed her pipe and slippers at six, she appears to be marooned in a sexless remodeling project with a passive-aggressive Competitive Wife.

Marry Him! By Lori Gottlieb, also in The Atlantic. A video in the attached depicts the editor of the magazine who says that this essay caused more letters to the editor than anything printed in the magazine in the last decade. The One Year Monk has a pretty different reaction to this piece than most others. The question isn't whether or not Gottlieb has it "right" or "wrong" at all. What are people so threatened by? She's offering her perspective for younger women.

In the video, she says it really well. She says, looking back on her 20s and 30s, she passed up on some guys who were definite 8s, when she's come to doubt that the 10 even exists. It's a compelling argument.

Anyway, The One Year Monk, you might imagine, has gotten some pretty harsh reactions when he has questioned the notion of having children or getting married. Saying things like that really threatens people. Folks, step off. We all have a right to live our lives the way we want. We also have a right to offer a bit of advice based on our own perspectives and life histories without you getting all up in our Kool-Aid about it.Especially if we offer it in the pages of a magazine that you can choose to read or not read.

Gottlieb had a funny paragraph, too. Here you go:

Take, for instance, books like Men Are Like Fish: What Every Woman Needs to Know About Catching a Man or Find a Husband After 35 Using What I Learned at Harvard Business School, whose titles alone make it clear that today’s supposedly progressive bachelorettes aren’t waiting for old-fashioned true love to strike before they can get married. Instead, they’re buying dozens of proactive coaching manuals to learn how to strategically land a man. The actual man in question, though, seems so irrelevant that, to my mind, these women might as well grab a well-dressed guy off the street, drag him into the nearest bar, buy him a drink, and ask him to marry her. (Or, to retain her “power,” she should manipulate him into asking her.)

Anyway, let's hear from the other side before we give Gottlieb too many props.

For our first try in the counter-Gottlieb set, I went to Liesl Schillinger at The Daily Beast, who wrote Give up on Mr. Perfect? Executive summary: FAIL. Schillinger's vitriol here is transparent. She doesn't like that Gottlieb questioned feminism. She buys into the whole gospel. No critique is welcome. Fuck you very much, Gottlieb, she says. It's a silly little essay that falls prey to the same fallacy as most romantic advice writing: she generalizes.

Most of page 2 is devoted to the notion that there are some older single women out there that are living it up and happy to be solo. She thinks this is some kind of gotcha. Please. I guarantee you I know what Gottlieb would say about that, because she didn't write the book for them. She wrote the book for women who want to be married. I mean, in fairness, Gottlieb posits in her original essay that any single woman over 35 is getting anxious. I suspect they are, but some are also anxious and not-anxious at the same time. Some have chosen to ignore the anxiety and live it up. Good for them. That's how The One Year Monk hopes to go out, too. He is also anxious. He is also trying to ignore it.

But just because Gottlieb advises women who want to get married to think about Mr. Pretty-Great over Mr. Perfect does not make her a Feminine Benedict Arnold. Sigh. No funny paragraph in this one.

Jessica Grose in Slate is a whole other story. Her piece, What Lori Gottlieb's Marry Him got wrong about single women, is considerably more compelling. She focuses on the statistical data to see if Gottlieb is making much ado about nothing. She points out that college-eduated women are seeing diminishing divorce rates, that women who marry later get divorced less and that women who are married and have been get depressed more often. All interesting.

I don't think it helps if you are one person in this sea. You're not a statistic. You're lonely. You want to be married. Again, The One Year Monk argues that you'd be more content if you didn't fall back on love for your fulfillment. You don't have to live that way.

That said, I think Grose's piece shows the most sensitivity (even more than Gottlieb) to the notion that different people need different things from life. Compound our inherent American individuality, then, with the facts of our condition in life. It's a bit of hash. Anyway, Grose's last sentence is good for a laugh, so give it a skim if you're curious but read every word of the last paragraph. Nice payoff.

All of the four pieces really come down to this question: how can we construct society so that we'll all be less sad. It's not: how can we be happy. It's: how can we ease off the misery-acceleration-pedal? The One Year Monk, but he thinks that all four pieces assume that the answer lies somewhere in how we construct the arena of Love.

The One Year Monk doubts we'll find the answer therein.