Last year’s Why Smart Men Marry Smart Women makes the most blatant case for settling: if women were more willing to “think outside the box,” as one of the book’s married sources advises, many of them would be married. The author then trots out tales of professional, accomplished women happily dating a plumber, a park ranger, and an Army helicopter nurse.

I am a university professor. My husband is a computer tech who used to work in a chip shop, barely finished high school and worked his way up from the very bottom to get where he is now. He is the sweetest, kindest, most generous, sexiest, loveliest man I have ever met, and he’s smart to boot. We are madly in love with each other. I cannot even describe the extent to which I am not settling. I got the biggest prize there is.

Not that it’s a damn competition.

Seriously, this is one of the things that made me angriest about this. When I wrote my own ramble on my blog about it, I kept picturing this one girl who I used to be friends with. She can not imagine being alone and has put up with no end of trouble from one man because he, for a few moments, made her happy. She doesn’t seem to understand that happiness isn’t a limited commodity and that no one can really give it to you if you don’t have it already.

Also? On a more personal note? I fucking love living/being alone. I know from living with someone you aren’t really into and…yep, I’ll take being alone every single time.

//By 40, if you get a cold shiver down your spine at the thought of embracing a certain guy, but you enjoy his company more than anyone else’s, is that settling or making an adult compromise?//

That sounds to me like she thinks a marriage to someone you find sexually repulsive is an ‘adult compromise’ to be seriously considered.

I hear ya. My comment up thread (and I realize you weren’t necessarily responding to me) about canceling my subscription wasn’t a “this is the last straw!” cry of outrage, but more of a “to hell with tiny pants” moment with my magazine subscriptions. I’ve not liked what I’ve read in many issues, and I just now realized I stupidly keep spending money and time waiting for something that I personally like to be published, and it’s a bit of a wasted effort on my part.

Well…I’m not sure about that, because a majority of the husbands I know didn’t have that privilege. They were mostly too busy eking out a living in this world where that isn’t exactly easy to do, in order to provide the necessities of life to their wives and children. They had to haul their butts off to those blue-collar jobs even when they were sick or hurt, because losing a day’s pay might mean being short on the electric bill, or having to stretch an already too-tight grocery budget, and skipping some genuinely needed food, or medicine for a sick child, etc. For the women who did end up with overgrown children (and in my personal life I haven’t encountered too many of them – maybe because everyone was struggling just to pay the regular bills and put food on the table) I certainly listened to their complaints and support them. Also to those who have husbands who were flat-out abusive, mean, etc. Then I ended up sick for many years and could do literally nothing around the house, so he not only had to support us all on insufficient pay, but also to do all the housework, etc. He had always shared in the childcare, even after a 12 hour day on the job (of not easy physical labor.) I don’t know where I’m going with this, but while I suppose some men are privileged in that sense, I also meet women who are privileged to be able to go shopping for fun things like jewelry and nice clothes and furniture and redecorating stuff, regularly with the money their (obviously much higher paid than us) husbands while not having to go to work themselves. Of course they were in a different class than we were, though. For us, neither of us are privileged; we have struggled with poverty and sickness and so forth throughout our years. But it’s nice to have someone to share it all with and go through it together. (For me.) I do kind of react when I hear that men (as in all men) are just so privileged in comparison to women, and I don’t see it. Of course I’m one person in a big world. YMMV.

I can’t imagine how terrible my life could have been if I’d read an article like that a couple years ago and taken it to heart and carried on dating one of the amiable but personality-less men I met then.

But then, I always knew that I was the type to stay alone forever rather than marry the wrong person.

I know it’ can be a terrible place to be in, to think that you’re missing out on your chance to have a child (if you want children), to be living alone instead of in a partnership, if that’s what you want… but to imagine that settling for someone who physically repulses you or you find boring… I know someone who did that. She had an ex-boyfriend who convinced her nobody would want her, for various reasons, so the next guy to show an interest, she married. She was very religious, and so was he, and despite the fact that she was stunningly beautiful and he really was one of the homeliest people I’d ever met, I figured – well, she sees his other qualities, and she’s such a lovely person that doesn’t surprise me. But they hardly knew each other, and after the fact I discovered she’d almost been hoping her friends would stop her, and on her wedding day she knew she was doing the wrong thing and she wasn’t attracted to him… and a year later *he* walked out. There’s a happy ending – at least there were no kids, and they got divorced, and they’re both remarried and she is now with a much more suitable guy and has 3 kids… but honestly, she was the vulnerable person who would have read that article and taken it to heart… and lived to regret it.

I’m not sure how you can teach people to stop looking for Prince Charming. I also have a friend who is still single and has such specific requirements for who she’ll date that I do think it’s her being ‘too choosy’ even though when that accusation was flung at me I knew it wasn’t true. But heck, I’ve always been attracted to broad, slightly overweight guys. Didn’t matter how tall they were, but they couldn’t be too thin. And my husband is a shade under 6 foot 2, and 154 pounds – stick thin. And I absolutely adore him, even though my one concern when we first started dating was whether I was attracted to him enough or not.

/ramble

Why the heck didn’t they move in with each other instead of looking for random slackarse goobers to hang like stones around their necks?