Settle For To Settle Down

I am beginning to see a trend with your writing, idea. Let me start by saying I like your writing very much. It has cache! It has a certain style, it is funny, informed and interesting.

But in the end I usually want to yell at you and say that you really need to surround yourself with people that are much more, well.... stable. Really! Yes, marriages all have their ups and downs, but I do not look at my friends and see unhappy women who've changed in a life of fun for monotony and settling for less. Your friends all seem very maladjusted, and instead of only blaming the men, they might want to look inward too.

I used to be a fun party girl. I used to wear all the most stylish clothes and shoes and travel to exotic locales. Now my money mostly goes to my daughter, but I still know how to have a good time. My married girlfriends do too, for the most part. And my husband is still the guy I fell in love with and happily married. Might I want to wring his neck sometimes? Yes, and he mine. But that is the exception, and not the norm.

I think you are a very very smart woman, but I think you are jaded. Given what you have revealed about your past, I think that is probably to be expected. But really, leave a small gap in the door before you slam it shut. There really is a way to be in a committed relationship that is healthy and productive, you just have to want it.

*Nice light read; but a twinge of 'resignation' runs through your article.

@Ideasmith, what is your idea of 'someone special'?

@Smallsquirrel - "There really is a way to be in a committed relationship that is healthy and productive, you just have to want it."
*What if the fraction of people on the 'other side' who want a stable committed relationship are just too low?? What if you want it badly, but your better half does not care less how your relationship goes??

Truly happy couples are a really becoming a rarity these days.. maybe it's nature's insidious way of human population control.

Love and peace to all,
Ayan

ayan... you do what I did and wait until you are 36 to marry. I refused to marry until I found someone who shared my values and was willing to approach a relationship in the same way I was. I refused to settle. People who do settle only have themselves to blame, because you cannot expect the other to ever change. I am not saying my relationship is perfect, because God knows it is not... but I refused to lock myself into something than what was less than what I deserved.

And ever since I decided to surround myself with people who shared my values, I see things differently. When I was cynical, I was surrounded by cynics. When I changed, I found I saw more stability, I had stable friends in stable relationships.

Very often not finding someone is a result of obstacles we put in our OWN way, for one reason or another.

I like your article...always love the undertones of satire and tongue-in-cheek humor :) I think your article voices all the fears and speculations of single women. But your conclusions based on inadequate data do worry me a bit. As a woman I see other women settle for something/ someone less than what they deserve or not quite right for them just because they believe they have to. I did that once and know firsthand that it can turn your life into hell. There are some things much worse than not finding Mr.Right....like ending up with Mr.Terribly Wrong :)

There are plenty women out there who have resigned themselves to a life or a spouse less worthy. But come to think of it, we just have one life to life. Why do that to yourself when you have a choice?

"And ever since I decided to surround myself with people who shared my values, I see things differently. When I was cynical, I was surrounded by cynics. When I changed, I found I saw more stability, I had stable friends in stable relationships".

You are a truly smart woman.

@ smallsquirrel: Thank you. For the compliment but also for your last sentence. You have no idea just how much some of us need to hear that. I also have to say that your choice to not sell out to available options is a really brave one. I just don't know how many of us have it in us to do that.

@ Ayan Roy: That's a very good question. I don't have an answer yet, which may be why I'm single? I guess I'm looking for Mr.Right who we all know hasn't been born on this planet as yet.

@ Aditi N: That's true indeed. It's just that I wonder whether there are ANY good men at all worth waiting for or whether all of them are just going to be variations of the same rotten egg.

@ anon: It's profound as well, innit?

Ideasmith: "It's just that I wonder whether there are ANY good men at all worth waiting for or whether all of them are just going to be variations of the same rotten egg."

You got to take a hard look at yourself in the mirror, ma'am. Sometimes the fault lies not in others, but in ourselves.

There is a Japanese saying- before marriage keep both eyes open. After marriage close one.

I bet men too have lot to bitch about us wives:) Marriages aren't easy. There are good days and then there are bad days.

For the bad days there should be some ground rules. Ground rules do get broken but love tends to tide things over.

To stick it out for the kids is a lame excuse.

The only reason why one should remain in a marriage is because one cannot imagine living without that person.


For me that works.

but Idea, dear dear girl... it is NOT brave to hold out. it is self preservation. it is what I deserved. it means loving yourself enough to know that like Aditi said, it is way better to be alone than with the wrong man (or woman for that matter).

I think it takes way more guts to try to make a go with the wrong person, frankly. that is way more work! I think everyone has it in them. You have to be honest with yourself. You have to be willing to make mistakes, to be alone sometimes, to not wallow in self-pity. but if we cannot love ourselves, no one else will love us either. someone told me once that we teach others how to treat us. so when we put up with shit, we are teaching the other person that it is OK to dish it out.

I do not think my marriage was some kind of cosmic reward, by the way. I think in the end I found the right person through hard work.

There *are* good men out there. You have to really know what you want and then think about other things long and hard. I used to think I wanted a uncomfortably good looking man. Then I had a few of them and it's not all it is chalked up to be. When I met my husband, I did not think of him romantically at all. I thought of him as a friend and more like a little brother actually!!! But as time went on and the friendship deepened, we fell in love. We realized that even though we were not what we might have pictured as our spouse, that we were in fact wonderful together.

You just have to be open.

For all our idealizations of superman and superwoman, life is all about making lemonade out lemons, making the best out of cards we have, and looking at the world as glass half full rather than glass half empty. I have not seen SRK's Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi, but I assume it deals with a similar theme.

I remember my brother's quest for a bride. He met over 50 prospective brides and kept rejecting everyone he saw. He had a composite picture of an ideal woman(probably Hema malini, Rekha, Rakhi, Helen and mom rolled into one)in his mind and none of the earthlings could compare. He would like a,b,c in a girl but not fancy x,y,z in her. In every girl, he would like few things and not other things. He would compare features of one girl against another girl, and end up rejecting both. More girls he met, more complex became his composite picture of 'ideal' girl and more confused and chaotic he became as to what he really wanted. Finally, he ended up picking a dorky girl who was lot less ideal by his own standards of evaluation than many he had rejected before and it took him several years to adjust to his choice and finally be happy.

It is hard to find all qualities we like in one person. That would be the most unfair of our expectations from our mates and often the source of many fall outs. Its like wanting to have everything we like to eat in a single dinner plate. It is simply not possible. Everything can't fit in one plate. So we have to enjoy what we have, rather than wallow in pity or anger for things we do not have. Many people choose to be in love and be happy with what they have - because they both are essentially state of mind, subject to mental conditioning. I have seen most ugly looking couples love each other and be happy - I often wonder what attractions they see in each other. But majority of people are not Brad Pitts or Aish Rai. Love and happiness are state of mind, and those who know how to condition their mind, can find them in any human being - because humans are inherently lovable and capable of loving any other human being. If a person sets his/her mind to love something in spite of all its perfections and imperfections, it can happen. It is such resolve and conditioning that is commonly known as 'commitment'. It is a foundation of all human relationships.

Kerty: " often wonder what attractions they see in each other. But majority of people are not Brad Pitts or Aish Rai"

Long term relationships are not really just about beauty or standards. Pregnancies, body changes, sickness, health, age etc all these factors add the special challenge to this concept of "forever" in a relationship when it comes to physical appearances. So going in with expectations of Rekha/Rakhi will eventually set you up for disappointment.

But there are far bigger issues that could complicate one's life. Values, principles, personality types are the danger zones. I know male-friends whose wives were the sweetest, nicest, preetiest people you would've known and post-marriage we found out that the guy was not "allowed" to keep in touch his set of female friends coz it made his sweet, pretty wife insecure.

Values, religious beliefs etc come into picture when one is raising kids. Disagreements there can be devastating.

There are SO many things that could go terribly wrong in a relationship and resignation in those situations is basically living a soul-less existence through the span of relationship.

In India, I saw a lot of marriages where the woman just put up w/ a man's eccentricities because she had to, was financially dependent or at the time divorce was a cuss-word. In case of independent women for whom marriage is not the ultimate end-all, a choice is very relevant.

People speak of compromise in a relationship and I think compromise is just another word for sacrifice. When human beings make sacrifices they do resent making them at some level. And if people don't have a basic compatibility in terms of values then those resentments can get bigger and much worse.

I just don't seem to understand why people speak of all these "adjustments". If you love somebody and you know that makes you happy then its fine. But this whole idea of adjusting just for the sake of holding together a marriage when its making both people terribly unhappy is bleak and depressing.

Aditi

"People speak of compromise in a relationship and I think compromise is just another word for sacrifice. When human beings make sacrifices they do resent making them at some level."

To view something as a sacrifice too is a mental outlook. People in love or in committed relationships do not look at it that way - at least those who value their relationship above the trivia of life. If one so chooses, one can blow anything out of proportion, a trivial into be a deal breaker, or seemingly big deal into a trivial. That is what art of loving and living is all about. Abusive and extreme relationships do happen but to look at all relationships thru their prism is not wise.

Humans are too imperfect. One can find zillion flaws in any human being if one so chooses. If we make human perfections as precondition for holding out love or falling out of love, than humanity has no hope. One can always find zillion reasons not to love any given person. Test of one's humanity lies in still finding reasons to love that person. Spousal couplings are accorded near sacred status because that is where these values are manufactured and tested.