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A while back, my roommate and I stumbled upon an article about settling when it comes to guys, and we both had a minor panic attack.  We wanted to be condescending about the author of the article and tell her where she can shove her outdated ideas, but the more we read, the more we solemnly nodded and looked bleakly into our future.

The idea, boiled down, is that the fairy-tale, fall-in-love, be-perfect-for-each-other romance that every girl imagines (that romantic comedies drill into our pretty little skulls) might not be the ideal.  It seems that the most passionate of beginnings tend to lead to the most painful endings, and that if what we really want is a stable home and a family, we should settle.

Our immediate reaction was to reluctantly cede that the point was valid, but then justify our continued “refusal to settle” by saying that we’re not ready for our idyllic stable home quite yet, and that maybe our hypothetical eventual rom-com perfect romance will be the exception.

As we got deeper into the discussion, I realized that I was already settling. Instead of holding out, being single for a bit until I found a new boy, I had once again fallen into a dysfunctional relationship with my ex because nights alone were getting old.

The conclusion we finally drew, after a few hours of concerned and cyclical discussion, was that when we get married, eventually, we want it to be a one-time deal.  But for what I was looking for at the time, being that I was headed out of the country, falling back in with my ex was pretty much exactly what I needed: a warm body that knew me well enough to give me my space when I needed it. And that maybe the point is that the love stories we’ve spent so much time absorbing are more like manic-depressives, and we should be searching for just a hint of sanity.

Probably not the worst call.

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