To think that most married couples settle?

[RedSetterBlues]

Not actually my AIBU but more my male best friend’s. He believes that most married couples have settled for each other. I’m clearly a romantic fool who still believes in true love. Who is BU? Do most couples settle for each other?

It’s truly heartwarming reading all the tales of people who fell in love and don’t feel like they settled for a simply ‘good enough’ relationship.

I think of 'settling' as knowing you are not in love, but marrying anyway because someone is offering a life that you want. If you think you are in love when you get married, that's not settling imo.
Of course the settling bit can come later, when a person might realise that while they feel affection and caring, it isn't real love, but leaving means upheaval for the kids and will cause more hassle than it's worth. The couple rub along nicely, have a good lifestyle, so stay together.

My ex husband settled for me. I loved him deeply, but I think he was just fond of me, found me physically attractive and felt he wanted to have children.

15 years later he fell in love and left me

There’s compromise and settling I think. There may be things that piss You off about your partner but you accept them and say well I love them enough to put up with it. That’s compromise. Settling is when you don’t really love them and think you could do ‘better’. Lots of people compromise. Settling is sad.

I think people who say that kind of thing are just sad they haven't found the right match. There are plenty of very happily married couples in the world!

I didn't settle - I love and fancy my husband more and more each day. He's amazing

@IAmNotAWitch I love the way you described real love! And I agree.

A thread like this here on MN is not going to reveal the proportion of people who settle. Someone else has asked why that is. They wondered why would a person would be more likely to rush on to gush about their relationship than rush on to admit it if they felt they'd settled. It's not rocket science. Settling is a negative thing in most people's eyes (You can tell that just from all the horrified denials) Settling isn't something you look forward to for years, or strive for, or hope for for your children. It could be seen by some as an unkind thing as well - to be secretly putting up with a person who you don't love very much for years just because you can't face leaving. Of course everyone is more likely to post if they can talk about how the sun shines out of their spouses arse rather than any massive mistake they feel they made and are STILL ploughing ahead with.

And those saying settling is rare, or is actually a 'proper' relationship, or doesn't happen these days, or is just another way of saying you've grown up ... well ... i would disagree. I think you can probably only recognise real settling if you're personally doing it. Or have done it. Or someone very close to you is doing it.

I've done it. I did it for 14 years. I'm not proud of it. I left. Now i finally have a sunshine arsed relationship of my own which i can and will gush about now .... That 'unsustainable' strong sexual physical passion and the butterflies in the tummy is all just as fierce for us after 12 years of mad shagging. And yes that's along with the hard graft: the often mentioned hand holding in A&E, pregnancies, the losses, the new parenthood, the (now) aging parents, the teenagers and the finances and the cups of tea. Funnily enough i went through most of that last lot in the settled relationship as well. It's no particular measure of a relationship for me. You can actually go through all that with someone at the same time as NOT being particularly happy. Just like you can get up every day and go to work and do a job well even if you're not enjoying it

Anyway my point is - would i have been keen to post here 15 years ago and admit to my horrible settled state? No, probably not. I wouldn't have wanted to discuss it. Now i'm happy, yes, i can talk about it.

Big intense love can go badly wrong
Don’t think it’s settling more like growing up and realising they are not perfect they are not Prince Charming but real person with a past, problems and quirks , hopefully ones you can totally love and adore

@GoodPlaceJanet I feel some people are lucky enough to have that passion throughout their entire relationship (I'm not one of them but have witnessed it and have come across people I know I could have that with). Some people just don't know it exists or are happy to accept alternatives and there's nothing wrong with that either. But it does exist for some.

@Sizeofalentil for those of you that say that though, how do you know your husband didn't settle? I'm not saying that he did, but you don't know that.

@Fiveredbricks true true I'm sure that is the case for some. Perhaps passion wasn't the best word to use, people can still be sexually attecated to one another and still feel butterflies many years on as I do with my DH. But marriage and DC and demanding jobs meant this passion had to be tempered around responsibility and it would not have been physically possible to continue our relationship as we had in the first few months. I prefer what we have now though, we're tired and busy and don't have the time to rip each others clothes off all the time but we love each other on a deeper level.

@Nofunkingworriesmate
Well if they love and adore them
They’re not settling!!

Do people not understand what settling means

I totally agree with a PP who said for a long, happy marriage, you have to choose your partner well and then both work at it. There are all sorts of different kinds of love and one of the most powerful and rewarding is the love of someone with whom you have shared life's most profound experiences, such as raising children or travelling the world, or even bad stuff like surviving serious illness or bad fortune.
I feel sorry for people who think you find 'the one' and it stays at the height of romantic passion for decades, because most of them are disappointed and have a string of failed relationships because they want to perpetually be 'in love' instead to get on with loving someone over many years, growing with them and learning from them and building a life together.

Your friend OP seems like 2 male friends of mine who I would say didn't necessarily settle, but who both just 'went along' with the children and the wedding (in both cases the woman's idea) because it was easier than not doing; I know for a fact one of them was actually in love with someone else but didn't pursue that as that person was a different age and from a different social background (but did actually love him back). I would say both just saw their other friends entering marriages and thought they should probably be doing so too. Neither particularly happy now but unlikely to leave as believe in the vows.

Yeah me and DH settled! We hadn’t had many prev relationships but we had similar life goals and interests. We didn’t think we’d meet anyone better.

First couple of years of marriage were tough but our marriage strengthened as we became more sympathetic to each other. Love him v dearly and love spending time together.

I certainly didn't settle. I didn't think I would ever get married, didn't believe in it and all that crap, and then I met my husband and he rocked my world. Suddenly I understood why people got married.

Your friend sounds like he's trapped in a miserable relationship or single and lonely and just projecting into other people.

Been with DP 14 years. Not married and never will. He still gives me butterflies. He's incredible. I absolutely adore him and believe he feels the same.
We met when I was 22 so definitely no settling. I wasn't looking for anything necessarily permanent at the time. We went on one date and we were together from then on.

Absolutely no settling here. We've been through some horrendous times but we get through them.

I think he's just the best person I've ever met.

The emotional rush of "falling in love" is part of our pair bonding process. Sometimes it is successful, sometimes it is not, sometimes it goes right, sometimes it goes wrong.

What comes afterwards, if you are to stay together, will almost certainly become less glamorous and less emotionally immediate. You come to see them warts and all, watch them age/fatten up, and the whole thing can take some work, which is the opposite of how it starts out.

It will look like settling to someone outside the relationship who hasn't got past the unboxing video with any partner, or to someone who has failed to set aside the expectation of being "in love" with a life partner all the time, but really I think this undervalues the ongoing bonds internal to a good long term relationship. You feel the overwhelming urge to be with someone initially to kick things off, it changes to a slow burn when the bond is fixed.

30th anniversary this year. The first 6 years were mad shagging, extreme sports, parties, more mad shagging etc. Then DD came along, and most of it went out the window except for the mad shagging. That's gone too now due to various age related stuff.
But we stay together because we make each other laugh, we have shared some amazing things, and because our joint income keeps the heating on.

I do think your friend is wrong to say to people that he thinks most marriages are setting. It makes anyone he has this conversation with automatically assume he is referring to his own relationship, which is very unfair on his wife. She may love him dearly and hate the idea that he is portraying their marriage to others in this way. Even if she has settled too, it's still an intensely personal thing and a betrayal of trust to share that with others.

justarandomtricycle How perfectly put. I think many expect bodice ripping lust 24 hours a day or feel the relationship is doomed. That really does fail to recognise the ongoing love that replaces the initial lust.
I can’t imagine ‘settling’. I can’t imagine not living our lives together. I look at him asleep and still get a warm feeling. I used to look at sleeping children and see him. Actually, I’d look at arguing, laughing, chattering, cuddling children and see him in them. We are two parts of a whole. The whole is better than the sum of the individual parts.

Mine is my 1st and only (so far ) love, and I’m pretty sure I’m his, so I don’t feel that’s the case for me.

But some people have very unread ideas of long term relationships. The grass is always greener types are probably unhappy in many aspects of their lives.

*unrealistic