The onslaught of megaselling relationship books like Elizabeth Gilbert's "Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage," which sits at No. 9 on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list for the week of Feb 19, and Lori Gottlieb's "Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough," which is at No. 18, might lead you to believe that female commitment-phobes and uberpicky daters are the modern obstacles to relationships and marriage.

Yet a 2007 poll by Meredith, a research and marketing company, found that 73% of women born between 1977 and 1989 place a high priority on marriage. That sounds right to me. It's an attitude that surfaced again and again in the interviews I conducted with young women for a book project on the long-term unmarried relationship. Unlike our boomer and hippie mothers who broke the rules of the '50s, my generation is marriage-minded. But society's messages to young women are so mixed that the path to that goal has been obscured and, at times, blocked. Those of us in our 20s and 30s know that dating—and getting into a relationship that leads to marriage—is at turns ambiguous, arduous, perplexing and often heartbreaking.

So why are "Marry Him" and "Committed" flying off the shelves? Because they do what all popular books on the subject have done over the years, decades and even centuries: They lay out rules, treating love, romance and relationships as if they are quantifiable and controllable. To be a young, single woman looking to settle down today is to be in the Wild West of dating history. Daters are ravenous for advice to order the chaos, even if it comes from a book, like "Marry Him," that berates them or, like "Committed," claims that marriage is a terrible institution for women (though the author gets hitched by her memoir's end).

"People are desperately looking for order out there because they want to be in committed relationships," says Jessica Massa, 26, who is developing WTFIsUpWithMyLoveLife.com, an interactive forum to help young people make sense of their relationships or absence thereof. "But the lack of signposts and guidance is making it very hard to get to the point where you end up in one."

You live together, but only until one of you gets a great job offer in London. You go out to dinner and a movie, but aren't even sure if it was an actual date. There is no longer that social urgency that pushes couples to the next stage.

The more pressing dating issue for young women today is not that they are skeptical about marriage or too choosy, but that their potential spouses are in less of a hurry to tie the knot than they are. A 2005 poll, "Coming of Age in America," which surveyed 18- to 24-year-olds, found that women had the edge on eagerness: 55% said they would like to be married in the next five years, compared with only 42% of men.

Adam Rich, 29, editor of Thrillist, a daily email blast targeting young men, says all this ambiguity is obscuring the traditional march to marriage and giving guys more leeway when it comes to casual dating. "This whole set of cliché indicators—call a girl to ask her out for drinks, then later a dinner date—are becoming less the dating norm. What if he Facebook messages her to meet at a wine bar where they share small plates? Where does that put them on the roadmap to the altar?"

Beth Bailey, the author of "From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America," thinks this might be an unprecedented time in the history of dating and courtship. "The lack of rules and structure in dating means it's become more difficult than it's ever been to get to the place where marriage seems like the obvious next step," she says.

Ms. Massa says that the many books on relationships that she has read "don't give me the lay of the land." Notes Mr. Rich: "If marriage is the destination, it's now increasingly unclear how one should put one foot in front of the other."

Just don't fault my generation for a lack of trying. Fault Ms. Gilbert, Ms. Gottlieb and their ilk—those who project their own neuroses on to the rest of us.