I know you’ve heard it. “Be realistic about Love so you don’t get your heart broken.” It sounds an awful lot like settling doesn’t it? It rings of the don’t go for the gold so you can be happy with bronze speech. I am here to tell you that when it comes to Love you should go for gold every time. And, you should do it by being realistic about Love! Good news is, when you know what Love really is, you stop looking for the kind that will leave you doubled over. No more trying to recover only to fall into the same patterns. You will know being realistic about Love means never, ever settling.

Settling is not the right answer to the problem of not finding a partner in Love. Settling means you are lowering the bar of what Love should be. Sure, go ahead and take off hair color and height requirements, but leave the good stuff on the list. For instance, leave character, moral foundation and sense of humor. Settling isn’t the same as being realistic.

Being Realistic is Optimism

We consider settling to be pessimistic. As if we are forced to lower our standards to beat the time stamp; to get hitched before our clock runs out! Modern culture puts a lot of pressure on us to find the right person and start a family within a permissible time frame. That isn’t pressure we need to bend to. Did you hear that right? Above all else, you get to choose the kind of pressure you apply to your dreams. Someone else’s time frame is one you can simply reject.

We should never accept someone else’s blueprint for our own lives, but we can learn from what we see around us. A study below explains:

We demonstrate in the present research that fear of being single predicts the tendency to make decisions that seem to prioritize relationship status over relationship quality, which we colloquially refer to as “settling for less.” To better understand how a deep desire to be involved in a relationship may lead to lower quality mate selection, it is helpful to first understand normative desires for relationships.

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Samantha Joel, Diana Peragine, Amy Muise, & Emily A. Impett at the University of Toronto

Here we see that accepting someone else’s time table may force us to give up things that really matter. We need to be realistic about Love, not pessimistic. After all, If being realistic about Love means never settling, then what does it mean to settle?

Settling is Giving Up a Dream

But maybe it’s a bad dream anyway! The reason you don’t have to settle may just be that what you are looking for isn’t even real. We may need to give up or ‘settle’ when we don’t find anything in reality that meets the standard of Real Love. But, the real problem may have been in our definitions all along! If we confuse what healthy Love looks like, how can we expect to find it? Let’s stop and really consider what it means to settle?

Reasons People Settle:

• panic thinking time may run out
• don’t enjoy or value singleness
• get their heartbroken and stop looking
• give up hope
• stop believing good hearts even exist
• start questioning standards

When we look at why people settle, it’s not rocket science to figure out we should not be doing it. What we need to do is get real and look at what we are actually looking for. We do not need to lower our standards, we need to set some realistic ones that will actually take us to a Love that lasts. In Lies About Love and Relationship we covered in depth what we are believing about Love that is leaving us broken. We looked into the lies about Love we are buying. The social media and entertainment industry are weaving a fantasy world. Spinning fictional views of love that are leaving us lonely and wounded. We are not stuck with such shallow versions of Love. It’s not a choice between being alone or being in a fantasy world, reality is so much better.

At its core, being realistic about Love means never settling and let’s look at why.

Love is Realistic

Instead of finding the ONE. Maybe we should look for the right one. Instead of setting up expectations that only person is going to make us happy, let’s find the one who actually does! What can we look for instead of the fake kind of Love we see around us? The kind of Love that takes until the stock pile is dry, or uses until there are no more moving parts. If we want to shoot for the gold and never settle, here is what we look for:

Real Love Will:

• not fix all your problems, on the other hand it will add some
• bring you a perfect person, to clarify they will be human
• get bumpy and have serious challenges; count on it
• not be the perfect fit, but it will fit (even if you have to squeeze it)
• you won’t have to work hard, on other hand it might be fun work
• require all your energy and patience, in short, you’ll grow up
• challenge your moral convictions, certainly the biggest ones of all

Do you understand, you don’t need to settle. Not ever! But maybe, we all need to wake up and smell the coffee. To understand more about what builds a life and what actually matters. We need to chuck the fantasies and grasp onto something so much better. Real Love is built of real people, and with all the mess and all the pain there is this fortress that grows up. It reaches to the sky and raised walls that cannot be scaled. This is the kind of Love we need to celebrate.

Let’s celebrate the coming through for each other, The patience with another complicated soul. Real Love is what we look back on and recognize it was never the late night candle lit dinners or the smell of French perfume. It was the promise to work it through. To be there when no one else was. It encircled us for our whole lives and the fairy tale can’t even find language for that kind of beauty.

Being Realistic and Finding Love

Never settle, never let someone tell you that the good stuff isn’t worth waiting for. But, don’t be fooled into thinking it’s the 90 minute version of ‘modern Love’ that makes you happy. That is to say, Its best day pales to the kind of Love you build with a solid heart willing to work, willing to stay. Who will fight themselves to sacrifice for the , “We”.

We are building a set of resources to help people Love well and avoid abuse. All major shifts of culture began with a few determined voices! I hope you will join us!

Let’s Love well or not at all!