All week long I've regretted the choice, as I've been constantly terrified that someone I know will catch a glimpse of its large, bold-faced title and read it as a statement of my own romantic situation.
Now that I've actually finished reading the book, I regret the choice even more.
It turns out "Stupid About Men" (or "SAM," as Dunn likes to abbreviate it) is just as appropriate for me seasonally as it is personally. Although I've been a bad Catholic as of late and have let Lent slip me by, this is Holy Week, and Easter is quickly approaching. Dunn's main message, which is more than a little bit of a let-down after over 200 words of romantic advice, is that Jesus is the "prince" who awaits every girl.
As much as I may roll my eyes at Dunn's message, I appreciate some of her blunt pointers on the ways women need to get their acts together. In the face of the Oprah-inspired "love yourself first" movement in women's pop psychology, Dunn urges her readers to take some of the blame for their relationship problems and suggests positive action, rather than smugness or self-pity.
First, we need to assess our priorities. If financial stability is our number one goal, then we need to take steps to attain it for ourselves so that our search for love doesn't become a search for a sugar daddy. That's pretty standard advice, and arguably just plain common sense, but Dunn wraps this message in a Disney-derived gimmick to disguise that fact.
Dunn organizes her chapters around 10 myths from popular fairy tales, which she says have warped generations of young women and led them to common mistakes in their adult love lives. After she debunks each of these myths, Dunn, a relationship therapist by profession, provides examples from her former patients: the naughty "Tinkerbells" who control men with sex, the "Rapunzels" who get so lonely they let anyone into their lives, the "Sleeping Beauties" who sleep through the best years of their lives while they wait for Prince Charming.You get the picture.
While I tried to give Dunn a chance, her cutesie shtick gets old fast, and I take issue with the mixed messages presented in the book: Be a strong woman and don't wait around for the perfect man to sweep you off your feet, because girls who wait around never meet the good men, Dunn advises.
But, according to her, you shouldn't work too hard when you're single, either.
"What man wants to be around a woman who can do nothing but talk about her work, or who is tired and stressed out all the time?" Dunn writes. "If you soothe yourself with work while waiting for that good man, you risk missing him altogether!"
Shouldn't the "SAM" woman learn to love her independence because it feels good to be self-sufficient, and not because she'll catch a keeper with her sexy, independent new image? It's backward, dishonest and downright stupid for women to try to fool men and fool themselves this way, and it's certainly not right by Jesus to play manipulative tricks either.
My former suspicion that romantic self-help books aren't written by or for smart women stands confirmed. I'll keep on doing what I've always done, whether that makes me "SAM" or not: turning to the wisdom of good friends, rather than looking for a fairy godmother's spell in book form.
