I hope you enjoy this brief excerpt from my new book: OTHERHOOD: Modern Women Finding a New Kind of Happiness from a chapter entitled: Where Are the Suitable Men? PART 2.  To read PART 1, click here.


I take a deep breath. There is this blanket rule of blaming single women altogether for their circumstance. But the truth is, most men don’t want to settle down, at least not until they are in their late thirties or forties. And women are told to pretend they don’t want to be married because it will scare the men off. A woman is labeled “desperate” to be married if she admits she wants to be married until she meets a man who is ready to be married. It’s a rather disingenuous way to live for both genders.

It somehow became unnatural for a woman to want to be married and have children. Women are walking on eggshells with men, as if even this hint of marriage might deem her “crazy” or “desperate.” Even checking the box on an online dating site in your twenties or even early thirties saying you want to “get married” makes you seem as if you’re coming on too strong. And yet, before you know it, you’re deemed “too old” to marry.

I remember what it was like to be twenty-nine, unafraid of thirty. Not because I was courageous. But I wanted to fall in love and get married and so if it was thirty instead of twenty-nine, then that would be it. I remember saying aloud to a friend at my thirty-fourth birthday party, “This is it. I have one year to get married or I’ll never be married. Once you’re thirty-five, men turn the other way, like you’re old news, or just old.”

I no longer remember being eternally optimistic about love. Oh, I try. I get up and go out. And I ask friends and acquaintances, and total strangers, if they know someone for me. “I might,” he says. Or “I’ll keep you in mind!” she responds with enthusiasm that’s not believable. Or they are blunt: “I don’t know any men I would feel comfortable setting you up with,” says Ray, the married father of three I meet at a Silicon Alley golf outing. “The men I know don’t want to settle down. I don’t know when they plan to grow up, but when they do, I’ll keep you in mind.”

I’ve attended singles events so unevenly weighted with women it felt as though I was at a women’s empowerment group. One invitation-only event that specifically restricted the ratio of women to men had the same effect. Only two men actually showed up to meet twenty-five single women.

I’ve tried online dating until some of the men became abusive. “No wonder you’re thirty-four and single,” one man wrote after I did not respond to his message. “You’re ugly. And you’ll always be alone and you’ll never have children.” At least I knew that my intuition not to respond to his first message had been correct. Another man had “catfished” me—the term for when someone misrepresents themselves online. He was not a forty-year-old bachelor. He was a forty-year-old married man whose wife was expecting a baby. But mostly, once I was over thirty-eight, most of the men who were interested in meeting me online were about fifteen years older than me.

Online dating surely works for some; I even met a couple of men who are still friends of mine years later, although neither live in New York City. I tried alternative dating methods until they wore me down.

The challenge is that there are so many more single women than men in New York City. There are lots of women, including ambitious women who move to New York City to work, expecting to meet ambitious men. Only, the men don’t follow. And so there are literally tens of thousands more women than men here. But instead of expecting more of the men, women are told to be less selective. We’re not entitled to be so picky, I keep hearing. Most of the advice my friends and I hear begins with how women could stand to lower their expectations in order to be fulfilled.

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Excerpt from Otherhood: Modern Women Finding a New Kind of Happiness by Melanie Notkin. With permission from Seal Press, a member of the Perseus Books Group. Copyright © 2014.