Is settling for your spouse OK?
Dear Carolyn: Being totally in love is overrated. I have never felt that intensely about my husband and do not love him as much as I’ve loved exes. I certainly don’t get along with my husband as well as I did with one particular ex.
But you know what? The men I did love that way either lied to me, hurt me, “borrowed” money, stood me up, left me with wedding deposits I never got back, made promises they never kept. My husband has never done those things.
I don’t look at my marriage as a loss. I look at it as though the spouse I really wanted simply doesn’t exist.
I think the temptation to take advantage of a partner’s strong feelings and trust is a pull too hard for many people to resist. I dated A LOT. Any man I felt in love with or had strong feelings for did something terrible that involved taking advantage of my feelings.
I married the reliable man who isn’t going to swear he’ll attend my friend’s wedding and then no-show. Life isn’t a fairy tale. No, it isn’t.
But does your husband know this, or enough of it to know you weren’t swept away? If he doesn’t, then he’s essentially paying for the crimes of your more intense loves of the past. Which is not OK.
If he does know, especially if the feeling is mutual – that you represent calm affection and security versus the love of his life (whatever that means to you) then that’s a whole other thing, and mazel tov to you both.
If anyone’s thinking ignorance is bliss, then you need to factor in the way people respond to someone they love-love versus just like a lot (or barely tolerate). The person you love-love always gets more warmth, better listening, softer landings from missteps. Right?
So take these small emotional exchanges, and multiply them by a marriage’s worth of days. The result is a lifetime of less-than, which a secretly-settled-for spouse never got a chance to agree to – or walk away from. So profoundly unfair.
Re: Fairy tale: This made me think of “Sleepless in Seattle,” where Bill Pullman’s character replies to getting dumped: “I don’t want to be someone that you’re settling for. I don’t want to be someone that anyone settles for. Marriage is hard enough without bringing such low expectations into it, isn’t it?” I always thought that was classy, but I also thought he knew he was dodging a HUGE bullet. Yessss.
And Bill Pullman scenes, come on. That’s like getting a smiley sticker on my math test.
To: Fairy tale: You sound pretty angry still, and I wonder if that spills over into your relationship. It might be worth unpacking your feelings about these exes (which sound like excitement, infatuation, but not love). Who knows – if you do this, you might discover you do, indeed, love your husband. But if you don’t, think about whether you’d want to be with someone who wrote about you as if you were a dependable piece of furniture.