Settle? No Way!

by VJ Park

(Sept 30, 2008)

Once again an online chatter has shown the mental acuity and insight of a paper bag, spouting: "I've read articles lately saying that women should just settle on a good guy rather than someone who gives us 'butterflies' and 'sparks'. With the divorce rate as high as it is, I understand this theory."

Huurrrrk.... barrrrffff.... glluck.... blecchhh.... Oops, I spit up again.

With the divorce rate as high as it is, I understand the theory that a lot of stupid people have stupidly gone into stupid marriages for stupid reasons. And some stupid women have come up with even stupider solutions.

(I like words such as "jejune", "ludicrous, "vapid", "simpleton", etc., but somehow it has more punch with the repetition than with the variety.) Such is the article so well lampooned in the HBI blog and its links.

And I understand the good sense in being single and living one's life, without the obsession with matrimania and babynalia. (I'm going to be a good Scout and leave butterflies and sparks untouched.)

The twisted blind acceptor of women's place who started the new "settling" movement intended women to be the ones who settle. (No surprise there!) However, any man or woman who "settles" is stacking more odds in favor of being unhappy later. What, after all, is the definition of "settling", but taking action to pursue something that is not what you really want, and is not what makes you happy?

THIS is going to help solve the high divorce rate?

The notion that "settling" is an answer to the high divorce rate, and the mindless oblivion to the possibility that it is a *cause* of it, and the silly-girl foolishness of prescribing more marrying - instead of less of it - to solve a high divorce rate, is breathtakingly jejune, ludicrous, and vapid. It is the notion of a simpleton. (Got to spend those words I saved, heh.)

Yeah, our forefathers who were the early settlers probably got along by settling in marriage as well as in a new land - and our foremothers probably settled for even less happiness! Why people glorify a hard agricultural, slum, and sweat-shop life in which mere mean survival, illnesses, early deaths, and poverty necessarily took priority over seeking happiness in marriage, has always puzzled me. Keep in mind that divorce was less accepted then, but wife-beating and abuse was accepted and kept private as a family matter. If that's what you settlers want, go for it all the way; don't do it only half-assed. If you're divorced, you've already blown it. You should have settled like the real settlers did!

Apparently the "new settlers" are divorced women with children who want a stable man to be a father to the children they now have from a previous unhappy marriage. They must be living in a fact-free environment. Didn't they get where they are by "settling" before? How will doing it again solve their problems?

Sometimes there is beauty in simplicity. Here is a sensible example of wasting no pity on the common pity-pot on which many women sit. (It's often sat on by groups, so it must be a lot bigger than a two-holer.)

It's what my (divorced) mother said: "She should have thought of that before she got married."