Choice Mom Lori Gottlieb wonders if she chose wrong

For this Valentine's Day month, Lori Gottlieb pondered whether she actually was too picky, as critics like to suggest when women in their 30s cannot find a partner before it's time to raise kids.

You can read her views in Atlantic Monthly and hear her perspective on NPR.

When her essay link was posted on the Choice Mom discussion board, women quickly stepped up to disagree with her notion that settling for a business partner in household management and childrearing was the route to take. Of course, Lori herself is a romantic who does still want to fall deeply in love. And many thinkers who are afraid that becoming a mother first will preclude them from being a wife - or silent Choice Moms who might agree with Lori today that settling might have been the greener side of the pasture - will find her thoughts very interesting.

In 2005, also in the pages of Atlantic Monthly, Lori wrote about why settling for somebody isn't always better than nobody. But now, with the challenges of dating while parenting a toddler, she looks at her married friends and realizes that, "Marriage isn't a passion-fest. It's more like a partnership formed to run a very small, mundane, and often boring nonprofit business."

And as many of us know, couples with kids don't spend that much time together anyway.

"So if you rarely see your husband," she writes, "but he's a decent guy who takes out the trash and sets up the baby gear, and he provides a second income that allows you to spend time with your child instead of working 60 hours a week to support a family on your own-how much does it matter whether the guy you marry is The One?"

We're not yet set up on this website to allow for direct comments, and The Atlantic's forum page is temporarily out of commission, but you can offer your views on Lori's comments at the Choice Mom blog, where this Hot Topic is brought up in more detail.

For more on Lori and her thoughts behind this essay, see Sara Lipka's interview with her on the Atlantic Monthly website here.

We also hope to have a Choice Chat podcast with her soon on this website.