Settlement Agreements

I can't really pretend to know what goes on inside the female mind. I've had plenty of experience with women, and with female friends, and with sisters, but there's a limit to what I can figure out.

Today on Opinionistas (which, despite being very irregularly updated these days, is a great read), we get a fiery opposition to the latest in self-help for women.

I started reading the source material, and as I often do, formed my own opinion on the topic. In brief, this chick says you ladies need to settle a.s.a.p. and stop looking for a "deeper connection" or a "soul mate". Marry the first idiot to come along that doesn't deeply offend you, just so you can have babies and not be alone.

While I agree whole-heartedly with Ms. Lafsky, in that there is little merit to people who think that the uninspired path they have chosen should be the path for everyone, I would add this:

Please do not "settle" for me. There is a quote from one guy in the original article where he says that his dream girl is now 35 and he expects to be engaged/married by the time she is 37. Why? Because although she's dumped him multiple times, with the excuse that she doesn't seem them having a future together, her good sense will be ultimately overridden by her biological and social clocks.

This guy is a doofus. "It's not settling to me, I get to marry my dream girl!" is a sad, sad lot in life.

A friend of mine (hey Amy!) has a theory that the best relationships (hetero, anyhow) are the ones where the guy is just a little bit more in love with the girl than the reverse. We've discussed the theory at length, and I have come to believe it is a good one, and has been proven accurate in numerous anecdotal situations. However, we also agreed that this disparity is supposed to be fairly small; it is not "break up 4 times and then settle" sized. If you could quantify it, it'd be somewhere around 5% difference or less.

This is extraordinarily hard to find, unless you are ready and willing to recognize when you are most assuredly NOT in that kind of relationship. Because it can be very close, or comfortable, or any of a number of things that give you pause to consider commitment.

If I end up alone in my 50s or 60s and haven't yet met that "special someone", that's fine. I will (hopefully) have lived a good life and enjoyed trying to find her, and I have more respect for that than I do for the person who settles at 39 because of fear.