Soulmate, schmoulmate? FOBG Lori Gottlieb has created a bit of a stir with her piece in the current Atlantic Monthly, wherein she urges women who want to get married to consider taking their lofty lovey lerfy lurvy expectations down a notch or five. In other words, ladies, she’s saying you should settle. Yes, SETTLE.

Okay, now you settle down. The real issue with the piece is that according to Gottlieb, women who want to get married are … all women. If you say that’s not you, she says you’re in denial. “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,” she writes. (“I took Gottlieb’s advice, and my face does look silly. But that’s just because I’m making gagging faces and pantomiming a stabbing motion to my throat,” Broadsheet’s Sarah Hepola responded, adding, “Maybe I swallowed my panic and desperation. Though it tasted, for all the world, like a delicious cheese blintz.”)

Because people’s heads exploded when they saw that part, they were unable to read further. Which is too bad, because Gottlieb, a single mother by choice — not her first choice, mind you — goes on to make a thoughtful, if rueful, case for not ruling out the guy who shouts “Bravo!” at the movie screen or has an “unfortunate nose,” even if he doesn’t leave you walking on air. It’s the feet on the ground that matter, she says — and the helping hands.

“The couples my friend and I saw at the park that day were enviable but not because they seemed so in love — they were enviable because the husbands played with the kids for 20 minutes so their wives could eat lunch,” she writes.All of which mitigates, in large part, that truly unnecessary you-know-you-want-a-ring business at the beginning. Because she’s not talking about the ring, after all, or “needing” a man to “feel complete” or any of that hooey. Nor the stuff of Land! A! Man! (Any! Man!) self-help. She is talking about finding — as Tristisimo put it so eloquently — someone to share the driving. Focus less on The One, she’s saying; the point is for there to be two of you. You don’t have to agree with it, but it’s a much less glib, more nuanced argument than you might expect from the opening salvo.

That’s BG’s $0.02. Yours? Are you shouting Bravo at the screen, or Boo? (No fair commenting until you’ve read the whole article!)