I’m getting tired of the Husband Store joke.
You know the one. Lori Gottlieb printed it in her 2010 book Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough. Every once in a while, it pops up again on social media. Haven’t you heard it? I’ll tell you a short version of it.
The Husband Store sells husbands. There are six floors, and the quality of the available men improves on every floor. But there’s a catch: you don’t know what’s on every floor until you get there, and you can only visit each floor once.
On the first floor, men are only nice. By the fifth floor, men are nice and handsome, make good money, have a great sense of humor, and are great with kids. But there are six floors in the store, so as a woman, how can you justify leaving with a fifth-floor man when there’s another level yet to be explored?
So you climb up the escalator one more time and when you get to the final floor, there’s a sign informing you there are no men left for you on this floor, and you’re visitor number 3 billion because women are, of course (eye-roll), impossible to please.
The other side of the joke is the Wife Store. There, men will visit the first floor and find a pretty woman. By the third floor, they will have found a pretty woman who’s intelligent and cooks his favorite meal every year on his birthday. No man has ever been beyond the third floor because men — get this — are decisive and know what they want.
The Husband Store joke might have been funny fourteen years ago, but in the current dating climate, it elicits, at best, a half-hearted ha-ha.
Because in the current dating climate men and women are riding that escalator all the way to the top and leaving the store empty-handed.
In the current dating climate, men and women are struggling with the same question that lies at the core of the Husband Store joke: how do I know I’m with the right person?