Expanding on a provocative article she wrote for The Atlantic Monthly in 2008, and interviewing, among many others, therapists, members of the clergy, and both single and married people, Gottlieb makes a case that many women today end up alone because they hold men to insanely high standards. The feminist ideal of having it all, on our own terms, she argues, “is exactly how many of us empowered ourselves out of a good mate.”

Image Lori Gottlieb Credit... Leigh Manacher

The author treads good-naturedly over taboos, asking whether the “Go, girl!” ethos has run amok and our hard-won professional identities have become lonely traps. While she believes the workplace can be a fertile hunting ground, she also notes that men are often less impressed than we expect by our brilliant careers.

Gottlieb’s triumph of experience over hope is not as depressing as it sounds. She skewers herself and her post-­feminist peers so accurately and disarmingly that we wish we knew an unattached man to fix her up with. She convinces us that we women are simply too fussy, entitled and downright delusional about our own worth in the mating marketplace. We overanalyze and seek undiluted sexual and intellectual fulfillment, thus setting men up for failure.

Gottlieb’s female subjects complain: He “brought me flowers, but cheesy ones.” “He was too optimistic.” He “loved me too much.” One whines about a boyfriend’s onerous demands for sex, even while reporting that it was the best sex she’d ever had. Another confides that “boring guys aren’t funny, but they think you’re funny.” Gottlieb’s own checklist, now discarded, included the following specs: “talented but humble,” “creative but not an artist,” “over 5-10 but under 6 feet.” But her male subjects add jarring perspective. Women may hold the cards when they’re in their 20s, one 35-year-old man says, but by the time they’re in their 30s, “it’s the opposite.”

A psychologist tells Gottlieb he is seeing in women “a heightened sense of entitlement that previous generations didn’t have,” adding that our mothers didn’t expect to be thrilled and charmed at all times by their husbands. Today’s woman, by contrast, often “sees herself as too good for an ordinary relationship.”