Tired of Looking For Love? Try Settiling!

"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."

Romance advice from the Atlantic:

“Ah, this is the dream,” I said, and we nodded in silence for a minute, then burst out laughing. In some ways, I meant it: we’d both dreamed of motherhood, and here we were, picnicking in the park with our children. But it was also decidedly not the dream. The dream, like that of our mothers and their mothers from time immemorial, was to fall in love, get married, and live happily ever after. Of course, we’d be loath to admit it in this day and age, but ask any soul-baring 40-year-old single heterosexual woman what she most longs for in life, and she probably won’t tell you it’s a better career or a smaller waistline or a bigger apartment. Most likely, she’ll say that what she really wants is a husband (and, by extension, a child).

Whether you acknowledge it or not, there’s good reason to worry. By the time 35th-birthday-brunch celebrations roll around for still-single women, serious, irreversible life issues masquerading as “jokes” creep into public conversation: Well, I don’t feel old, but my eggs sure do! or Maybe this year I’ll marry Todd. I’m not getting any younger! The birthday girl smiles a bit too widely as she delivers these lines, and everyone laughs a little too hard for a little too long, not because we find these sentiments funny, but because we’re awkwardly acknowledging how unfunny they are. 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?

Read the whole thing.

Eugene Volokh shares his thoughts:

I'm not sure the essay is right, I'm sure that it doesn't tell the whole story, and I am pretty sure that nothing in it is particularly original. But it strikes me as refreshingly candid as to one set of circumstances that are worth a good deal of thinking.

Tyler Cowen thinks settling is bad advice:

I am sympathetic to the idea of modest expectations but I don't favor cheerleading for settling.  If this article talks you into the prospect of settling, settling will start to seem pretty good to you.  If your expectations were too high in the first place you'll keep your old set of unrealistic expectations (personalities and pathologies don't change so quickly) and simply apply them to a new option, namely a marriage to a dullard.  "Settling" works best when you are stuck on a desert island and you do not expect so much from your surrender to the inevitable.  The AM article would do more good if it tried to convince people how terrible settling would be.  You just have to plant the idea in people's minds, as they'll make their own decisions anyway.

In other words, "have modest expectations -- it will be great for you!!!" can't really be winning advice.