Lori Gottlieb is a 43-year-old single parent who desperately wants to be married. And she's not ashamed to say so. She first aired her existential angst in an inflammatory 2007 essay for the Atlantic magazine called Marry Him! The Case For Settling For Mr Good Enough, in which she wrote, "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."

That may have been a fate worse than death in 1950, but to put forward the same argument in 2007 seemed bizarre. Yet Gottlieb did her best to help her fellow singletons out of this hole. "My advice is this: settle! That's right. Don't worry about passion or intense connection. Don't nix a guy based on his annoying habit of yelling 'Bravo!' in movie theatres. Overlook his halitosis or abysmal sense of aesthetics. Because if you want to have the infrastructure in place to have a family, settling is the way to go." Whether it was a fixable problem like bad dress sense or the ­arguably more problematic absence of chemistry, she was uncompromising about compromising.

Her point was essentially an ancient bromide (don't wait for perfection because you'll be ­waiting for ever) dressed up as provocative 21st-century polemic. Even so, the article caused a sensation. In the weeks after publication, ­Gottlieb ­received more than 3,000 emails. While some married ­couples were grateful to be ­portrayed for once as hard-headed realists rather than dopey romantics, many more c­orrespondents called her "pathetic", "desperate" and "sad".

It's hard to imagine how this funny, self-­deprecating woman could have provoked such outrage, but Gottlieb has a theory. "In our culture, we never want to admit how badly we want to be in a ­relationship because it makes us sound needy or weak," she says. Although she is anything but ­repentant; indeed, she has now expanded her original thesis into a whole book that looks set to turn her into a hate figure all over again.

The hullabaloo that followed the original piece gave her profile a nice­ ­upswing (­actor Tobey Maguire bought the film rights), but resentment bubbled away in the blogosphere. It's not hard to see why. Anti­cipating that some women wouldn't buy into her apocalyptic scenario, Gottlieb had written, "If you say you're not worried, either you're in denial or you're lying. 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."

"What's Lori Gottlieb smoking?" Moe Tkacik wrote on the website Jezebel. "She has a kid with an anonymous sperm donor and is 40 and really fucking lonely. Her looks have faded and the men she broke up with in her 30s because they were short/boring/rude to waiters/physically ­unattractive are looking 'real' good around now." And feministing.com called the article anti-­feminist porn. "It's pure crap, mixed in with a little sour grapes," wrote one blogger. "I'm betting it makes Gottlieb – who is so clearly dissatisfied with her life – just nuts that there are all these 'disingenuously' happy single women out there."

The vehemence of the backlash impelled ­Gottlieb to make a deeper investigation. The ­result is her book, an anxiety-provoking 322 pages filled with personal anecdotes about the ones who got away and, in the case of some of her friends, the ones who wound up "good enough" to marry, ­interwoven with interviews with ­relationship ­experts – academics, professional matchmakers, dating coaches, even a rabbi.

So does settling mean lowering expec­tations? "I don't think people should lower their expectations at all," Gottlieb says. "People need to look for qualities that are important, like shared values, kindness, responsibility. A lot of us instead get hung up on the fact that somebody has red hair."

She's not kidding. In the book, Gottlieb recounts dozens of times she dissed a man because he wasn't intellectual enough, or "cool enough", or wore a bow tie, or liked sports ("A turn-off") or had a nerdy name like Sheldon. "People get pickier and pickier about trivial things, and lose sight of the really important things that people who are long married will tell you have kept them together."

When her essay was published, few could see why Gottlieb – who had a successful career and was mother to a young son – felt such a frantic need to get married at all, but it was the realities of single parenting that had brought home to her the ­practical advantages of marriage. Gottlieb was raised by a ­"traditional" mother and stockbroker father in Beverly Hills. Her parents have been "happily married" for more than 45 years, but she does not regard them as ­exemplary, because "most of us want an egali­tarian marriage when it comes to gender roles."

It sounds sensible. And yet Gottlieb wrote in her original essay, "To the ­outside world, we still call ourselves feminists and insist that we're independent and self-sufficient and don't believe in that damsel-in-distress stuff, but in ­reality, we aren't fish who can do without a bicycle, we're women who want a traditional family."

The betrayal many women felt at hearing a highly educated, sophisticated woman say she was unhappy at being unmarried reverberated throughout the media. "I felt misunderstood," Gottlieb says of the backlash. "There was something very vulnerable about me saying I really would have done my life differently; and to be ­attacked for that honesty was hurtful."

In the book, Gottlieb refers to the statistic that started it all: it came from a 1986 Newsweek ­article, The Marriage Crunch, that infamously ­reported that a 40-year-old single woman was "more likely to be killed by a terrorist" than get married. Though the study turned out to be wrong (when Newsweek revisited the story 20 years later, "new data" showed that a 40-year-old woman had a 40% chance of getting married), Gottlieb still hammers home the point: "Less than half of women over 40 will ever marry." Then she serves up a few more choice statistics: that there are 28 million single women over 35 in the US, and 18 million men; that this forms a ­"reverse power curve" (read: men have options, women become desperate); that men want to (and can) marry younger women; that older men are more jaded and have more baggage; and that "the longer you wait, the less likely you are to find someone better than you've already met".

Some have accused her of promoting ageism. "I always found it offensive that men had this thing about dating younger women," she says. "It wasn't until I had my kid that I realised younger people tend to be more appealing – they're more optimistic, they don't have 15 years of bad dates behind them, they're less eager to get married." Oh, and they're still fertile.

If this sounds like fear-mongering, that's because it is. Gottlieb wants to issue a wake-up call to women everywhere to find a man, any man, and "put the infrastructure in place" to start a family as soon as possible. And she knows that many women will find her message hard to stomach. "I had so much trouble even at my age accepting it, but I came to realise that I'd rather look at the data and know what the situation is, so I can make more informed choices. Knowledge can be scary, but knowledge can also be power."

Chapter three of her book is titled How Feminism Fucked Up My Love Life. "Feminism as a social movement is a great thing," she says, "but unfortunately a lot of women grew up thinking the 'we can have it all' mentality was feminism." The way she sees it, this version of feminism has hurt women by inflating their egos and giving them a false sense of what they deserve. "Part of it comes from the media and the movies. Everything we see is always women telling each other how ­fabulous they are and that they deserve the best. It happens in real life, too. Your friend will say, 'Don't you think I can do better?' and we say, 'You go, girl; go for the best!' even though we know maybe this guy is the best she can get." And, she adds, neither are we honest with ourselves: "We think, 'Oh, I'm so unique and special' and in our romantic fantasies we think that some guy is going to see us for how uniquely special we are, when most of us are pretty ordinary."

Gottlieb admits that in her essay she was ­"venting" in the way she might with friends and that much of it was "hyperbolic". Now she says, "You absolutely have to fall in love with the person and be attracted to them – this is not about giving up romance – but you have to have some flexibility of what that romance is going to be like. We're not all going to end up with Johnny Depp." Some of us might have to settle for the guy in the bow tie.

Rather than the perfect 10, Gottlieb says we should be looking for the perfect 8. "I wish that in my 20s I had looked for that 80%. I would ­probably have been in a happy marriage now."

She came pretty close. His name was Sheldon, a widower, and he had a son. Gottlieb dated him for two months before he moved to Chicago to be near his parents. She is still searching for a husband with whom to share her life and that of her four-year-old son. The way she puts it, Mr Good Enough has ­become her ultimate romantic dream.

But would she settle for a Mr Good Enough who didn't want to get married? "I'd want to know why," she says. "I'd want to explore it more: do we have the same idea of what marriage means? Because if we do, and I want to get married and he doesn't, then we can't be together."

• Mr Good Enough: The Case For Choosing A Real Man Over Holding Out For Mr Perfect, by Lori Gottlieb, is published in April by Collins for £7.99. To order a copy with free UK p&p, go to theguardian.com/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846.