Monday, March 1, 2010

Settling revisited

Last week I said that if you want to get married and you make it to thirty without doing so, that is a good sign you are on track to fail not just at getting married but also that in some sense you are on track to fail as a man or as a woman. Then I admitted that I had done just that myself.

That raises a pretty obvious question: What do I think I was doing that was so wrong? I think the big problem was that I was settling. I think that most of the time we fall in love we are settling.

Huh?

Well, think of what it was like to fall in love back in high school days. We get bombarded with songs, movies and books glorifying romantic love. And we have to wonder, will it ever happen to me? As a teen, the words of Lover Man as sung by Billie Holiday expressed everything I hoped for.

And then it actually starts to happen and it's wonderful. So wonderful that we don't stop and ask questions like, is this person really good enough? And you can keep doing that over and over again. I did.

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