DATING BASED ON YOUR CIRCUMSTANCES: THE REAL REASONS WHY WE SOMETIMES SETTLE

Moving back to my hometown to kick-start my career in television has been a humbling experience, but it has been even more humbling for my dating life. I moved from Washington D.C. after a 10-year stay, to a city in Tennessee with a population that doesn’t equate to even a small portion of D.C.’s metropolitan area. In addition to that, the selection of single, educated men that don’t have a handful of kids narrows the pool of candidates down even more. So what’s a single girl to do? Well, shamefully, for the past few months I’ve settled. And it’s not until recently that I realized it and finally decided that enough was enough.

I’m not an avid checklist girl. I don’t walk around with a mental checklist crossing men off every time they mispronounce a word that I know is wrong or wear a pair of shoes that I think are equally wrong. Still, I have standards, and I’m usually careful about who I give my time to. After all, I have a full-time job and several other responsibilities. I have goals, obligations, and ambitions, but judging by the way I’ve acted as of late, you would think I had way too much free time on my hands. In the past, I usually kept it all together…business first and if a man comes, he comes. That was my way of thinking. That changed once I moved to Tennessee, partly because the single’s culture here is different. In D.C. you’re just another single girl. In Tennessee, you’re a late bloomer who must be ‘crazy’ because you’re not married and over the age of 30.

I went from a thriving social life in D.C., to one that consisted of going to my mama’s house to watch Tyler Perry movies on BET. While I enjoy family time, I prefer to do it by choice and not because I don’t have any other options.

So imagine my excitement when I met a guy who was single and educated with no kids. The icing on the cake? We had immediate chemistry.  Fast forward to a few months of dating and struggling to see eye-to-eye. We still haven’t made things official, although we’ve spent nearly every day together for months.

Because I was socially bored, I tried several times to keep the bond that we had going. I accepted being tolerated by a man as opposed to being wanted by him after a few months, simply because I enjoyed his company and knew that in my temporary new residence, encounters like this would be few and far between. Slowly, though, I realized what I was doing. I was decreasing my value.

Sure, the eligible bachelors in Tennessee weren’t as prevalent as the ones in the other cities I’ve resided in, but that didn’t mean they didn’t exist. And even if they didn’t, since when did I, Erica Williams the overachiever, start settling?

Why am I telling my story of romance gone wrong? Well, because it carries the same theme of so many relationships that women encounter. Sometimes we allow our temporary circumstances to dictate what we tolerate while dating.

You’ve put on a few pounds, so you settle for a man that you can barely stand to look at, simply because you don’t think you’ll find anyone else, anytime soon. Or, you lost your job, but you’ve worked hard in your career to establish yourself and in reality, you will probably find another gig soon. Still, you think you can’t bring anything to the table, so you accept a man who can’t bring anything to the table either–but the difference between the two of you is that he isn’t even trying. He’s content with being mediocre. The old you cringed just thinking about a mediocre man.

Another common settling scenario: You just got out of a long-term relationship and subconsciously you’ve become accustomed to companionship. So you accept the first “Joe Shmoe” that wants to wine and dine you. These instances of settling only wreak havoc on your self-worth in the long run.

In my experience, as a result of settling, my internal value decreased. I forgot that I could actually attract men that are worth having a conversation with, simply because I was so fixated on being comfortable with what I thought was the only option at that time. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed dating the man I told you about. In the beginning, he treated me like I was a queen and we had a lot of fun. In the beginning, he would initiate most of our dating encounters, and for months, we were inseparable.  In the beginning, our chemistry was undeniable.

But that was in the beginning.

In the end, after doing a lot of self-reflecting, I realized that I accepted a lot of things that I normally wouldn’t, simply because the dating scene around me looked grim.

Sometimes we settle based on our circumstances without even realizing that we’re doing it. I certainly didn’t notice for a while. It took months of disappointment and repeated heartbreak, but now I do. It’s been the first time I’ve let something like this drag out this long, and I’m going to try my hardest to be more aware so that it will be the last.

I don’t care what any dating expert says, settling never ends well. You owe it to yourself to have the relationship that you want, despite your temporary circumstances.