"Settle" - an article about marriage from the female perspective.

[Bill]

Also interesting - a 40's woman's perspective on marriage.

This author used donor sperm to have a baby at 40, and now pines for the guys she threw away in her 30s.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200803/single-marry

The case for settling for Mr. Good Enough

At their core, they pose one of the most complicated, painful, and pervasive dilemmas many single women are forced to grapple with nowadays: Is it better to be alone, or to settle?

My advice is this: 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.)

Obviously, I wasn’t always an advocate of settling. In fact, it took not settling to make me realize that settling is the better option, and even though settling is a rampant phenomenon, talking about it in a positive light makes people profoundly uncomfortable. Whenever I make the case for settling, people look at me with creased brows of disapproval or frowns of disappointment, the way a child might look at an older sibling who just informed her that Jerry’s Kids aren’t going to walk, even if you send them money. It’s not only politically incorrect to get behind settling, it’s downright un-American. Our culture tells us to keep our eyes on the prize (while our mothers, who know better, tell us not to be so picky), and the theme of holding out for true love (whatever that is—look at the divorce rate) permeates our collective mentality.

...

...It’s equally questionable whether Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw, who cheated on her kindhearted and generous boyfriend, Aidan, only to end up with the more exciting but self-absorbed Mr. Big, will be better off in the framework of marriage and family. (Some time after the breakup, when Carrie ran into Aidan on the street, he was carrying his infant in a Baby Björn. Can anyone imagine Mr. Big walking around with a Björn?)

...

What I didn’t realize when I decided, in my 30s, to break up with boyfriends I might otherwise have ended up marrying, is that while settling seems like an enormous act of resignation when you’re looking at it from the vantage point of a single person, once you take the plunge and do it, you’ll probably be relatively content. It sounds obvious now, but I didn’t fully appreciate back then 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.

I don’t mean to say that settling is ideal. I’m simply saying that it might have gotten an undeservedly bad rap. As the only single woman in my son’s mommy-and-me group, I used to listen each week to a litany of unrelenting complaints about people’s husbands and feel pretty good about my decision to hold out for the right guy, only to realize that these women wouldn’t trade places with me for a second, no matter how dull their marriages might be or how desperately they might long for a different husband. They, like me, would rather feel alone in a marriage than actually be alone, because they, like me, realize that marriage ultimately isn’t about cosmic connection—it’s about how having a teammate, even if he’s not the love of your life, is better than not having one at all.

The couples my friend and I saw at the park that summer were enviable but not because they seemed so in love—they were enviable because the husbands played with the kids for 20 minutes so their wives could eat lunch. In practice, my married friends with kids don’t spend that much time with their husbands anyway (between work and child care), and in many cases, their biggest complaint seems to be that they never see each other. So if you rarely see your husband—but he’s a decent guy who takes out the trash and sets up the baby gear, and he provides a second income that allows you to spend time with your child instead of working 60 hours a week to support a family on your own—how much does it matter whether the guy you marry is The One?

[Bill]

More from the conclusion of the article.

I'm always interested in how women think.

Settling is mostly a women’s game. Men settle far less often and, when they do, they don’t seem the least bit bothered by the fact that they’re settling.

My friend Alan, for instance, justified his choice of a “bland” wife who’s a good mom but with whom he shares little connection this way: “I think one-stop shopping is overrated. I get passion at my office with my work, or with my friends that I sometimes call or chat with—it’s not the same, and, boy, it would be exciting to have it with my spouse. But I spend more time with people at my office than I do with my spouse.”

Then there’s my friend Chris, a single 35-year-old marketing consultant who for three years dated someone he calls “the perfect woman”—a kind and beautiful surgeon. She broke off the relationship several times because, she told him with regret, she didn’t think she wanted to spend her life with him. Each time, Chris would persuade her to reconsider, until finally she called it off for good, saying that she just couldn’t marry somebody she wasn’t in love with. Chris was devastated, but now that his ex-girlfriend has reached 35, he’s suddenly hopeful about their future.

“By the time she turns 37,” Chris said confidently, “she’ll come back. And I’ll bet she’ll marry me then. I know she wants to have kids.” I asked Chris why he would want to be with a woman who wasn’t in love with him. Wouldn’t he be settling, too, by marrying someone who would be using him to have a family? Chris didn’t see it that way at all. “She’ll be settling,” Chris said cheerfully. “But not me. I get to marry the woman of my dreams. That’s not settling. That’s the fantasy.”

Chris believes that women are far too picky: everyone knows, he says, that a single middle-aged man still has appealing prospects; a single middle-aged woman likely doesn’t. And he’s right. Single women are painfully aware of this. I hear far more women than men talk about getting married as a goal to be met by a certain deadline. My friend Gabe points out that this allows men to be the true romantics; when a man breaks up with a perfectly acceptable woman because he’s “just not feeling it,” there’s none of the ambivalence a woman with a deadline feels. “Women are the least romantic,” Gabe said. “They think, ‘I can do that.’ For a lot of women, it becomes less about love and more about what they can live with.”

Not long ago, Gabe, who is 43, dated a woman he liked very much one-on-one, but he broke up with her because “she couldn’t be haimish”—comfortable—with his friends in a group setting. He has no regrets. A female friend who broke up with a guy because he “didn’t like to read” and who is now, too, a single mom (with, ironically, no time to read herself) similarly felt no regrets—at first. At the time, she couldn’t imagine settling, but here’s the Catch-22: “If I’d settled at 39,” she said, “I always would have had the fantasy that something better exists out there. Now I know better. Either way, I was screwed.”

The paradox, of course, is that the more it behooves a woman to settle, the less willing she is to settle; a woman in her mid- to late 30s is more discriminating than one in her 20s. She has friends who have known her since childhood, friends who will know her more intimately and understand her more viscerally than any man she meets in midlife. Her tastes and sense of self are more solidly formed. She says things like “He wants me to move downtown, but I love my home at the beach,” and, “But he’s just not curious,” and “Can I really spend my life with someone who’s allergic to dogs?”

I’ve been told that the reason so many women end up alone is that we have too many choices. I think it’s the opposite: we have no choice. If we could choose, we’d choose to be in a healthy marriage based on reciprocal passion and friendship. But the only choices on the table, it sometimes seems, are settle or risk being alone forever.That’s not a whole lot of choice.

Remember the movie Broadcast News? Holly Hunter’s dilemma—the choice between passion and friendship—is exactly the one many women over 30 are faced with. In the end, Holly Hunter’s character decides to wait for the right guy, but he (of course) never materializes. Meanwhile, her emotional soul mate, the Albert Brooks character, gets married (of course) and has children.

And no matter what women decide—settle or don’t settle—there’s a price to be paid, because there’s always going to be regret. Unless you meet the man of your dreams (who, by the way, doesn’t exist, precisely because you dreamed him up), there’s going to be a downside to getting married, but a possibly more profound downside to holding out for someone better.

My friend Jennifer summed it up this way: “When I used to hear women complaining bitterly about their husbands, I’d think, ‘How sad, they settled.’ Now it’s like, ‘God, that would be nice.’”

That’s why mothers tell their daughters to “keep an open mind” about the guy who spends his weekends playing Internet poker or touches your back for two minutes while watching ESPN and calls that “a massage.” The more-pertinent questions, to most concerned mothers of daughters in their 30s, have to do with whether the daughter’s boyfriend will make a good father; or, if he’s a workaholic, whether he can provide the environment for her to be a good mother. As my own mother once advised me, when I was dating a musician, “Everyone settles to some degree. You might as well settle pragmatically.”

I know all this now, and yet—here’s the problem—much as I’d like to settle, I can’t seem to do it. It’s not that I have to be dazzled by a guy anymore (though it would be nice). It’s not even that I have to think about him when he’s not around (though that would be nice, too). Nor is it that I’m unable to accept reality and make significant compromises because that’s what grown-ups do (I can and have—I had a baby on my own).

No, the problem is that the very nature of dating leaves women my age to wrestle with a completely different level of settling. It’s no longer a matter, as it was in my early 30s, of “just not feeling it,” of wanting to be in love. Consider the men whom older women I know have married in varying degrees of desperation over the past few years: a recovering alcoholic who doesn’t always go to his meetings; a trying-to-make-it-in-his-40s actor; a widower who has three nightmarish kids and who’s still actively grieving for his dead wife; and a socially awkward engineer (so socially awkward that he declined to attend his wife’s book party). It’s not that these women are crazy; it’s that the dating pool has dwindled dramatically and that, due to gender politics, the few available men tend to require far more of a concession than those who were single when we were younger. And while I have a much higher tolerance for settling than I did back then, now I have my son to consider. It’s one thing to settle for a subpar mate; it’s quite another to settle for a subpar father figure for my child. So while there’s more incentive to settle now, there’s less willingness to settle too much, because that would be a disservice to my son.

This doesn’t undermine my case for settling. Instead, it supports my argument to do it young, when settling involves constructing a family environment with a perfectly acceptable man who may not trip your romantic trigger—as opposed to doing it older, when settling involves selling your very soul in exchange for damaged goods.

[mwillman]

I agree that women tend to see time limits but they have good reason for it. A man can have children his whole life but women can only have children up to a certain age.

Personally I like women in there 30s and 40s and find women in there 20s to often be to inmature for me. I wont settle becuase I see no reason to. If I find a woman that I want to live my life with I will and If I dont then I wont. I dont feel any pressure to get married and have children.

[Bill]

Well, they say sperm degrades too, and older men are much more likely to father children with problems.

Schizophrenia, downs syndrome, and other genetic anomalies go up as the father ages.

But, it's not a huge increase - a few percentage points per decade.

[mwillman]

That is true in fact older men tend to have slightly more autistic children as well. But theres a big difference between that and knowing you cannot have children.

[Moby]

If I had a dollar for every time I heard a woman complain about settling.

I blame Disney for it. My 4 year old loves the stories involving Princesses and Princes. All of them are pretty much the same story.

Princess only wants true love to be happy.
Princess becomes helpless for some reason (usually an evil woman).
Prince comes and rescues princess.
Princess becomes truly happy. Not because she has a good partner, friends, her health, a good family, children, a career or even love. She's happy because she has true love WITH a prince.

[JCBoston11]

One of the great issues of our time: High Expectations, Settling for Marriage, Divorce. But I don't think anyone has mentioned that in the past Men have been allowed to date younger women and divorce their wives for younger women. Now with so many divorces, older women are finding new dates among younger men. So this theory of settling may be good for 30 year old women, but they they have the option of dating younger if those marriages fail.
But with greater career opportunities, women can have a financially successful life single. The women that get married early or settle are often more concerned about their financial security.

[LadyMod at scam.com]

One of the great issues of our time: High Expectations, Settling for Marriage, Divorce. But I don't think anyone has mentioned that in the past Men have been allowed to date younger women and divorce their wives for younger women. Now with so many divorces, older women are finding new dates among younger men. So this theory of settling may be good for 30 year old women, but they they have the option of dating younger if those marriages fail.
But with greater career opportunities, women can have a financially successful life single. The women that get married early or settle are often more concerned about their financial security.

This is true. When I married my husband at 18 (he is 5 years older than I am) I wasn't looking for Prince Charming but to spend the rest of my life with someone I liked (hey we started dating 2 years earlier) and to get out from under the thumb of a verbally abusive father with extremely strict rules. He made the offer, I accepted. It's now been 31 years this June.

But I wish I had followed college and a career path first. I don't regret getting married, young though I was, but I do regret not pursuing a career I loved first. I did pick a man with a future and who made very good money so I didn't have to work, which was a good thing since we rarely lived in cities large enough to have college options. But I liked keeping a nice home, liked raising children (which was a good thing since he wasn't home much, lol). But at almost 49 one should not be having to look at starting a career. The field is somewhat narrower than at 18, and I'm pickier now too.

So, now he's home all the time disabled and is not allowed to handle his money or any important decisions because of the damage to his memory and thinking capacity from the last stroke. And I am in a position that I now am taking care of a man who wouldn't take care of himself in the first place and now can't.

I'm not sure if Martyrdom suits me. It always looks much better than it feels. But as far as younger men goes. Why not? Most of them are less set in their ways, are pretty stable and surprisingly, they don't all want to father children or more children.

All the best advice to women is create enough income that you can live comfortably on your own first. Then find a mate your equal that you adore.

It's not bad advice, even if you do look in a younger gene pool for that mate.


Lady Mod

[JCBoston11]

I think the Financial consequences of a Divorce are also causing less marriages. People are living longer and there are many more options than being stuck in an unhappy marriage or to even just wanting to get with other people.

Obviously with the invention of the pill, women don't need to settle and fear getting pregnant and having to raise a kid alone. That's why men have always been able to have the mindset of not-settling or having many girlfriends, they were by nature unburdened with the fear of getting pregnant.

But even in today's age, most men would do the right thing and marry their pregnant girlfriends. In fact, I think that most marriages are a result of having kids or wanting kids, in addition to the financial security element.

Those who delay marriage or settling are less focused on having kids.