There comes a time in someone’s life where reality hits you over the head with a cast iron skillet.
For me, that time has arrived, albeit perhaps temporarily. Even though I’m 25, I’m realizing that constant dating is full of unrewarding drama and has been nightmarishly disappointing to say the least.
It’s no wonder women and men tend to settle for someone that they think is the ‘best that they can get’. Modern dating has become too complicated…so many strings attached. People aren’t meeting organically anymore, like at a grocery store or church. Nowadays, people are dating other people that they meet on social networks, whether its Twitter, Facebook or Match.com.
Which brings me to the topic at hand: The “Art” of Settling. As a matter of fact, I have settled a couple of times in my past for a number of different reasons. So it comes as no surprise that an acquaintance of mine forwarded an article from the Huffington Post to me entitled:
“Why So Many of Us Marry The Wrong Person”
The author of the article, Jennifer Gauvain, explains the main reasons why people tend to stay in unsavory relationships:
1. We’ve dated for so long I don’t want to waste all the time we have invested in the relationship.
2. I don’t want to be alone.
3. He’ll change after we get married.
4. It is too late, too embarrassing and/or too expensive to call off the wedding
5. He is a really nice guy; I don’t want to hurt his feelings.
I’ll agree with every single reason except #3 and #4 because, well…we never got married even though we were together for 8 freaking years; but that’s a whole other story.
Every time I wanted to leave my ex, I always thought about one thing: ‘My grandmother would have never left her man. She would stick by him through thick and thin, deal with his negative aspects and be resilient. After all, love is unconditional. Gotta stick this through.’
That very thought was what kept me in a flavorless relationship for so long. I always had known I was settling…I could have easily found someone more compatible with me; someone more acclimated to my hobbies, my interests and my tastes. But I was too scared of being alone…of losing everything that we had worked so hard to build together. The house, the car, the jobs.
What made me stop the cycle of settling? Realizing that life is too short to be unhappy with someone. If the person you are with doesn’t fulfill you completely, stop lying to yourself. They are not going to change, you aren’t going to force them to change.
You deserve exactly what you want. I used to think that my standards were too high…but then I wrote my standards down and realized that they weren’t that demanding at all:
- Must like kids.
- Have an education, be working on a degree or have a major goal in life.
- Be agnostic, atheist or be completely accepting of New Age
- Be well versed; have knowledge in literature, science, history etc.
- Looks aren’t a priority but should be tolerable at least.
- High libido.
Related articles
- Jennifer Gauvain: Why So Many Of Us Marry The Wrong Person (huffingtonpost.com)
- Don’t Settle – Steve Jobs (retromacosdemo.wordpress.com)
- Morning Conversations: Settle Down vs Settling (eboneeyes.wordpress.com)
What I’ve noticed is that the issue tends to be that people don’t really know what they want, they let life happen on life’s terms, or they set themselves up with so many demands no one is ever going to make them happy.
Love is a dance that we as people often suck at.
Also, I’ve come to recognize that most people don’t know when they are settling, it always feels like the right thing at the time, I saw that in my own experience.
I went through something similar to you, when I separated I tried to figure out what I really wanted and what my marriage was lacking. My list was reasonable, and once I knew what I wanted I got much better at finding what I was looking for.