by Louis Burns
When it comes to marriage, everyone settles.
Personally, I feel there are two very big misconceptions people carry with them regarding marriage.
They are:
1. That your spouse should meet most if not all of your emotional, physical, spiritual, etc. needs.
2. That the purpose of marriage is to spend your life monogamously with the perfect person for you (see point 1).
Truth is, our brains evolved from a time when were were just hunters/gatherers and might have only known 50–150 people in our whole lives.
In a tribe of this size you might have had less than 5 marriage options. With your family and tribe’s blessing then decision would have been easy and you would have few regrets.
Now we’re bombarded with literally thousands of perfectly good potential spouses and our communities aren’t what they used to be.
It’s perfectly natural to wonder if you could have done better.
No matter who you end up with there is always going to be a tradeoff between how compatible someone is and how long you spent looking for them. That’s why I say everyone settles.
But that’s not to devaluate marriage in any way.
If anything, take comfort in knowing that there can be many different possible loves in your life.
And more importantly, don’t expect your spouse to meet all your needs.
That’s not a healthy view of any kind of marriage. Most of your needs are going to originate from within and can only be resolved there.
Others will be met from extended family and friends, work, hobbies, etc. Love people without worrying about what they can give back (abuse excepted obviously).
Yes, we settle but you can find reasons to love anyone.
At some point if you want to be married then you have to pick someone. What you don’t do is become resigned to a situation that needs to change.
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Louis Burns is an Arts and Technology PhD student at UT Dallas, former real estate agent, Airborne Army medic, middle-school math teacher, tiny-house builder, freelance marketer, demographer and future urban designer, developer and investor.
