What Exactly Constitutes Settling?

It hit me that in pushing back on the narrative of “single women over 35 need to take what we can get”, we don’t actually define what “refusal to settle” really means

There’s this whole Single Women Shaming Industrial Complex that’s hellbent on selling us products — be they books, classes, skincare regimens, dating apps — and also telling us that we better lock it down with the first guy who says “hello.”

It says that women over 35 in particular “lose their value,” which is a complete crock. Apparently, we’re going to be so horribly alone. (Which honestly, is the prospect of being single really THAT bad?)

So if we say that we refuse to settle, we’re often shot back with how we shouldn’t demand this laundry list of things we do and don’t want in a partner (usually, a man). You know, because we’re so old and decrepit, the very sight of us will cause his penis to disintegrate, and how dare we want companionship, happiness, and all stuff without being treated like a maid, punching bag, or roommate he occasionally has sex with.

Maybe it’s time to set the record on what “don’t settle” actually means.

No One Ever Gets Everything on the Grocery List — We Know Our Totally Ideal Partner Likely Doesn’t Exist

So everyone’s got that list of things they want in a partner.

Lists aren’t absolutes. It’s a matter of what you are flexible on, and what is an ABSOLUTE deal-breaker? And, how have these things changed over time? I can definitely tell you that what I was open to at 20 is a far cry from 35.

My list? Here we go: I’d love an entrepreneurial type who also doesn’t want kids and has got enough acumen to not need a day job but has strong enough leftist values to not be hopelessly devoted to his career. (I care about my career too, a LOT, but I care about me and my own far more.) Good sense of humor a must. Total bonus if he’s into obscure hardcore and metal bands and also has toad and lizard husbandry skills.

So I’d prefer another entrepreneurial type because it really is a lifestyle thing. I didn’t used to think about this until I became job-free in mid-2014, then never looked back. I’ve had bad experiences dating men who’ve had W-2 jobs all their lives and have zero understanding or respect for what my career type entails. They’ve been mad disrespectful of my time. Mocked me in bad months just to get jealous when I made two or three times their monthly pay in one deal. But I know that respectful ones are out there, plus I’d also be all too happy to guide the right guy who hates his job and wants his own ship. Those experiences, plus the actual mental and financial turmoil, made me glad I went through both the worst and most triumphant parts of my journey [to date] while single. Now that I’m in my mid-thirties and know what’s what? Let’s just say this attribute is on a case-by-case basis, but my preference skews towards men with similar career types.

But he has to be okay with toads. Because there will be at least one in the household. Giant lizards, I don’t mind living vicariously through Kamp Kenan and visiting dino puppies at the reptile co-op. I’m also flexible to bringing other pets into the home too!

Just so long as there’s no kids or expectation of me having any. That would be a total dealbreaker. He may be a perfectly wonderful person otherwise, but we’re just not going to work as a couple if he wants kids.

My other dealbreaker is that I’m a city girl who has no desire to buy a house in the suburbs or move to a rural area. If we can’t make it work without a car, I don’t want to live there. I’m a condo life kind of gal who needs a huge megalopolis to bask in like a monitor lizard. I’ll visit his parents in the far reaches of North Carolina or stay in that cottage along Lake Michigan for the summer, but I don’t want to live there permanently.

Notice how I didn’t put any physical attributes on that list? Or age, background, anything like that? Because that’s all things we have very little control over. Values and lifestyles, we have more say in and I’d prefer someone who has those things in common, even if everything else is utterly different from me. I’m now attracted to all kinds of men I wouldn’t have considered in the past, and in turn, more would consider an alternative woman compared to 20 years ago. Ultimately, I’d prefer someone within 5 years of my age, but I won’t completely rule out a younger or older partner if we have chemistry.

Whatever you got on your laundry list, regardless of gender, you probably know you’re not getting everything on it. There’s aspects you find desirable vs. the ones you find crucial or various lifestyle things where you know you won’t work. Just because you have a relationship with someone who doesn’t meet all those attributes doesn’t necessarily mean you’re settling.

What would constitute settling would be that you have a major, unresolvable or unworkable difference with them. For instance, political differences are one that’s become more important to people in recent years. I’m a leftist, not a liberal, and this is not an area where I’d “agree to disagree” like our opinions on movies and music. At one time, I let it slide when the guys I dated and hung with in the scene said they “just weren’t that political” but now I simply can’t.

But if you can let that difference go or it’s not that important to you, then no, you’re not settling.

When I Say I Refuse to Settle, It Means I Won’t Settle For Shabby Treatment and Partners Who Don’t Make Us Feel Loved and Appreciated

This is probably the hugest one and what women really mean when we say that we refuse to settle.

We don’t want to go through what we’ve seen countless friends, relatives, co-workers, and sundry endure in their relationships where they utterly settled for partners who simply treat them like shit.

Treating someone like shit could encompass several things, but being talked over and talked down to come to mind. When your hobbies and interests are mocked and treated like they’re stupid and unimportant. In my experience, being treated like you’re not worth his time and that you’re just this inconvenience while he disrespects your time was how I knew I was settling. While I’ve seen enough truly happy relationships to know they’re out there, I’ve also seen prime examples of settling and one, in particular, stands out to me.

I knew a woman who I used to go to shows with who ultimately settled because she thought she wouldn’t do any better. That it would be impossible to trawl those horrendous apps AGAIN and get back out there at her age when most of the men we knew in the scene were taken (or had a VERY good reason why they weren’t). I hated the way her partner treated her. It was pretty obvious to anyone with eyes and ears that they were straight-up miserable together and only toughing it out just so they could say they were partnered.

She’d tell me that she often didn’t feel loved or appreciated, but she didn’t want to leave him because she’d been with him so many years and was in too deep now, there was no turning back. I suspected there was an element of financial dependence as well, as wages haven’t kept pace with living costs and she was constantly dueling the draconian job market we now face.

While she couldn’t help the latter, the “sunk cost fallacy” drove the former to the point that she wound up marrying him. I couldn’t bring myself to celebrate, knowing that they only stuck together just so they wouldn’t be alone.

Now look, I get that romantic love isn’t all excited texts, dinner dates, honeymoon sex, and plastering Instagram with your photos of holding hands at brunch. Plus, not all couples express affection the same way and while I treasure my space, I do want a guy where I don’t have to fucking beg for affection like a cat who’s been home alone all day. But I don’t think that was the case here: this couple was in this soul-deadeningly awful situation that was so saddening. It really made me cherish being single.

I knew I didn’t want to settle for a man who’d basically treat me like a roommate he occasionally has sex with and wouldn’t make me feel loved at all. If your relationship is making you sad, angry, resentful, or feeling just as alone as when you were single? SCREW THAT. This is what we meant when we said we wouldn’t settle.

My old friend here stayed with him because she thought it was easier than putting herself back out there. (And trust, this is even harder if you’re fat, disabled, queer, etc.) I knew I wanted to make my own life even better flying solo so that when and if I did meet the right one, he’d have to offer more than just splitting the bills and giving me the ability to say, “Okay, I have a boyfriend now, stop asking me about it!”

It Also Means We Won’t Settle For Relationship TYPES That Aren’t What We Actually Want

And of course, this can be subject to change as you get older. What does your relationship actually entail? Do you want kids and your partner doesn’t? Do you only want something casual at this juncture, looking to lock it down, or are you single but open?

You or your partner might decide you want something different down the line. Feelings and desires change. But if they want to give non-monogamy a try and you don’t, they go through with it and this makes you unhappy, then yes: that constitutes settling.

Some relationships involve more emotional labor than others. People have different “love languages” and communication styles. Personally, I don’t want to receive eight million “where are you” texts, but I also don’t want to keep chasing an emotionally unavailable guy who needs reminders I exist. I realized as I got older that I gravitated to them because of childhood trauma from overbearing parents, one who was abusive, and being under constant surveillance at school. And it took a WHILE to correct course on this.

So, you could be settling for a relationship type that really doesn’t gel with your ways if it goes beyond a simple occasional annoyance. Does it come down to “Is this something I can look past because the good parts outweigh it?” or “I can’t stand another minute of this, I miss being single!”

Then there’s the whole misaligned goals thing. My friend settled for a man who treated her like garbage, I settled for a shitty “situationship.” The Staten Island of relationships, if you will. In that I somehow managed to get the worst of both a long-term relationship and a FWB in the same package. (Keep in mind, I bought a home and THEN my entire community and life eroded instead of the other way around. I’ve gotten myself into some impossibly dumb situations, what can I say.)

This also goes for sex. Your sex lives and desires are subject to change, but if you have a significantly higher sex drive than your partner, this can cause a rift. If it compounds other issues, you could be settling for a sexless relationship — something else I observed and just said, “NOPE NOPE NOPE, not happening, so THAT’S why these judgmental asses slut-shamed me for years!” I swore I’d never subject myself to this treatment unless we weren’t having sex for a good reason, like the chronic illness that befell another friend’s husband.

Of course, it’s harder to say if you’re settling for a relationship type when you won’t know out of the gate how it’s going to go, plus there’s so many ways to meet someone. You can end up dating or sleeping together right away or know each other for years in this platonic or professional capacity first. You might feel uncomfortable expressing what you actually want for fear of scaring them off. This is especially true of women who date men. Men can have a hard time separating “I want to settle down for the long haul” or “I want to get married and have kids” from meaning we want it with them individually. We probably don’t know the latter yet til we spend enough time together!

But yes. If you want a solid long-term relationship but you’re in a “what the fuck even is this” situation where you feel like an unpaid therapist with subpar sex afterwards, you are settling because you didn’t think you could do better.

Hey, sexy dynamic thing reading this: YOU CAN DO BETTER. If you can’t right now, your own company is pretty damn swell.

Then in What’s Probably the Least Vicious Form of Settling: We Also Don’t Want To Be in Relationships With People We Just Don’t Have Any Feelings For

I’ve met men who were perfectly sweet to me and had these bobs and bits of courtship that didn’t really go anywhere because we weren’t able to say the quiet parts out loud yet: that we were two nice people but had utterly divergent personalities and/or life goals.

You might feel pressure to just settle down with a person who’s simply nice, pleasant to be around, even treats you well. But you don’t feel anything.

I’ve been chased by men who were far more into me than I was into them. I knew after one or two dates and some texting or DM-ing that we just didn’t spark at all. And the pressure to settle for a guy like that is enormous, especially if you’ve been frustrated with meeting anyone at all and are constantly told you don’t have many options. (Something I’ve mysteriously heard my ENTIRE life, yet my experience has been the contrary.) Sure, it was nice to know I didn’t have to agonize over whether he actually liked me, but I knew if I went ahead with a serious relationship that I’d just be going through the motions instead of actually being happy and in love.

So it’s a form of settling, a seemingly more benevolent form where you’re not being used and treated like raw sewage by the man in question. But it’s still settling because going through the motions with someone you’re just not that into is seen as easier than putting yourself back out there and trying again.

As someone who’s been single most of my adult life by choice, then not by choice, and who refuses to engage in dating app hell, I guess I just have a different perspective on this.

I think what’s actually easier than settling is to build a life you can love the shit out of by yourself, and make it as epic as you can with your circumstances and available resources. And then you’ll find that attraction isn’t dictated by algorithms or the other bullshit we’re constantly sold. Your joy and badassery will bring the right people into your life. Or something incredibly stupid will happen, like you lose your glasses at a Behemoth show and then it turns out the person who found them has the same scrip and you end up talking all night at the bar, and one thing leads to another.

But that’s what refusing to settle really means: that we’re not going to stay in a situation totally devoid of passion at best, or at worst, being treated like a doormat by someone who’s essentially a roommate you file taxes with, all to say that we’re “not alone”.