Compromising vs. "Settling"

Where do you draw the line between compromising -- something everyone has to do in any relationship -- and “settling,” or resigning yourself to a relationship that isn’t all you’d hoped for? On one hand, I’m a ton less hard on myself in my 30s than I was in my 20s, which has made me less critical and more forgiving of the faults of other people, including the people I date (difficult as it may be to believe from reading this blog ;). On the other hand, I also find myself thinking things like, “Well, I’ve waited this long to find someone – I might as well hold out for the perfect guy!”

Of course, the perfect guy, much like the perfect city or the perfect job, does not exist. But you can fall in love with someone, or something, in spite of its imperfections. For example, I moved to New York City in 2000 having lived in four different cities/towns in the previous five years (Roma, TX; Austin, TX; my hometown of Oakland, NJ; and Boston, MA), and I assumed that, like with the previous places I’d lived, I would stay for a year or two, then move on. I didn’t fall in love with New York at first sight. It took months to get the knack of pressing myself into a crowded subway car during rush hour without feeling like I’d faint from claustrophobia. Not being able to drive to a supermarket and load up on enough groceries to last a couple of weeks took some getting used to. My rent was high, and I wasn’t making that much money. But as I walked the streets of Manhattan during my lunch hour, I could feel the energy of the city pulsing around me, and after only a few months, I knew I had finally found the place I never wanted to leave -- and except for my year in the Jesuit Volunteer Corps a couple of years ago (when New York and I had a long-distance relationship), I never have.

Interestingly, I had the opposite experience when I’d moved to Boston the year before. After I got into Boston University’s creative writing program, I excitedly planned to fall in love with Boston and spend the rest of my life there. But then I arrived. I tried to like living in Boston, I really did. But I was always lost (Boston is NOT the place to live if you have no sense of direction), continually being disappointed by public transportation, and lonely. I’d been living there nine or ten months when I suddenly thought, why am I trying to force myself to like it here when my heart is just not in it? As soon as I got my master’s degree a couple months later, I fled to New York, only because I had three friends there and it was relatively close to my dad in NJ. It was never the city I expected to love – but that’s what ended up happening.

And so it is with dating. You can spend months, even years, with someone who is perfectly nice and who, on paper, has everything you’re looking for, yet you’re just not feeling it. Then someone who doesn’t match your vision of the ideal partner at all ambles into your life, and before you know it, you’re in love. It’s the furthest thing from an exact science.

What triggered all of this were several interesting essays on compromising vs. settling. First was an article on eHarmony’s web site titled “Do You Have Realistic Expectations?” It starts out with, “To date is to have standards. But expectations for your future flame must have compromising perimeters to allow for the unpredicted.” You can find the whole article at http://advice.eharmony.com/?page=articles/view&AID=1956&cid=2091&aid=41607 but it basically says that you shouldn’t rule out a good person who actually exists because you’re holding out for some impossible fantasy. However, the article doesn’t help you discern when you’ve crossed the line between “having standards” and being too choosy.

Intrigued, I then typed “is he the one or are you settling” into Google, which turned up this amazing article by Lori Gottlieb entitled “Marry Him! The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough,” which appeared in the March 2008 Atlantic Monthly. Go to http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200803/single-marry to read the whole article, which is unsettling, thought-provoking – and really, really funny. After years of search for Mr. Right, Gottlieb finally decided to have a baby on her own. Now she is the mother of a beautiful baby boy, still single, and her advice, as summed up in paragraph 6, is:

“Settle! That’s right. Don’t worry about passion or intense connection. Don’t nix a guy based on his annoying habit of yelling ‘Bravo!’ in movie theaters. Overlook his halitosis or abysmal sense of aesthetics. Because if you want to have the infrastructure in place to have a family, settling is the way to go. Based on my observations, in fact, settling will probably make you happier in the long run, since many of those who marry with great expectations become more disillusioned with each passing year. (It’s hard to maintain that level of zing when the conversation morphs into discussions about who’s changing the diapers or balancing the checkbook.)”

Trust her, she says – the man of your dreams is NOT out there, “because you dreamed him up.” Better to “settle” for someone who doesn’t completely rock your world than end up permanently single. The funniest part is paragraph 11, where Gottlieb points out that “what makes for a good marriage isn’t necessarily what makes for a good romantic relationship. Once you’re married, it’s not about whom you want to go on vacation with; it’s about whom you want to run a household with. Marriage isn’t a passion-fest; it’s more like a partnership formed to run a very small, mundane, and often boring nonprofit business. And I mean this in a good way.”

Marriage and family as a “very small, mundane, and often boring nonprofit business” – ha! I love it!

Her article, however, is definitely geared to thirty-something women who hear the incessant ticking of their biological clocks. She says once you and Mr. Good Enough start churning out babies, you’ll barely see each other anyway, so at that point, what difference did it make WHO you married? At least you can take turns watching the kids. And if, worst case scenario, you get divorced, at least you’ll get your weekends free when your kids are with their dad, plus child support – none of which you’ll get if you have a baby on your own. (She doesn’t take into account how extraordinarily expensive, time-consuming, and emotionally draining divorce can be, though – not to mention hard on the kids.) Since I don’t care if I ever have biological kids and I want to adopt older children, my situation is a little different – easier in some ways (much longer time frame to work with), harder in others (most guys either want to have biological kids or don’t want to have kids at all).

If you’d like to read single moms’ reactions to Gottlieb’s article, check out author and single mother Rachel Sarah’s blog at http://singlemomseeking.com/blog/2008/03/09/one-single-mom-says-that-you-should-settle-for-mr-good-enough/ Some of the comments noted that if Gottlieb had used “compromise” or some word other than “settle,” her article would have been a lot easier to agree with. Tellingly, some said that they were single moms precisely BECAUSE they had settled for their now ex-husbands – with whom they’d been miserable. As Barb (http://www.zenmothers.com/) noted in her comment, “It’s hard to do everything yourself and would love a break from being my kid’s short order cook and taxi driver every now and then, but I would rather be alone than pick a man just to have someone cover the husband duties.”

And finally, I also found an article by Joe Atkinson entitled “Are You Settling for Someone?” (http://www.revolutionhealth.com/healthy-living/womens-health/relationships/dating/settling) which quotes from a book by psychotherapist Mira Kirshenbaum called “Is He Mr. Right? Everything You Need to Know Before you Commit.” Kirshenbaum thinks that a healthy relationship needs to have the following five traits: “1) physical chemistry or affection; 2) real intimacy, or an ‘at-homeness’ with the other person; 3) fun, which she describes as ‘the glue of intimacy’; 4) safety, trust and security with the other person; and 5) mutual respect. To Kirshenbaum, settling is accepting a relationship in which one of these ‘five dimensions of chemistry’ is missing.”

What do you all think?