Settling for Strangers

On heartbreak, repose, the age of the internet, and the cultural fear of solitude.

The other day I stumbled upon a TikTok that essentially began like this: “If single people continue to refuse to settle, then the majority of men and women will live and die alone.” Now, aside from the fact that short-form video platforms regularly produce absolutely terrible and most often blatantly incorrect takes by virtue of their algorithmic, buzzword-oriented existence, there is a lot that we can unpack from this one sentence. It’s no secret that our view of ourselves, our relationships, and our community has been heavily damaged by the co-opting of very real psychological language to turn every interpersonal interaction into a minefield of potential toxicity. It’s just one of the phenomena addressed in Rayne Fisher-Quann’s excellent essay “No Good Alone”. But, while we are indeed no good alone, we are also no good in the codependent state of existence often produced by the modern dating world. With dating apps more popular than ever post-pandemic, nobody has an excuse to be single anymore. There’s someone out there for everyone, and if you haven’t found that person, you must be virtuous in your solitude, praised for working on yourself or else prey to the cloying sympathy of your peers over your singledom. I raise the question, what if there was a third option - not being a monk-like creature committed to healing in solitude nor a serial dater jumping from partner to partner, but rather an individual being who finds wholeness in both community and radical self-love? 

This TikTok that condemns “settling” runs into many errors in logic, the most prominent error being the assumption that our primary source of love in our lifetimes should come from a long-term, committed, monogamous relationship. Through this assumption, the TikTok in question raises other unjust points, insinuating that if we as humans want to love and be loved, we must compromise our principles to do so. The truth is, most of us won’t end up alone, in some way or another - even if we decide to choose nothing less than what is best for us. On the other hand, it is hard to believe this in a culture that encourages fast-paced, all-or-nothing decisions. Now more than ever, like Fisher-Quann explains, it is difficult to manage a day on social media without someone telling you to cut the toxic people out of your life, drop the people that aren’t serving you, or generally make assumptions about others’ behaviors and sever ties accordingly. There is a major difference between compromising one’s principles to stay in an expired relationship, and recognizing that other people’s actions towards us do not exist in a vacuum, but are rather amalgamations of upbringing, genetics, culture, previous relationships, and any number of daily external variables. Many people still hold onto the hope that when we find ‘the one’ for us, it will be an easy journey - we will fall in love at first sight and elope right to the honeymoon stage. This amorphous, nonexistent individual will understand all our needs instantly, and us theirs. We will not have to leave our comfort zone to communicate, understand the actions of another individual, or have complicated, at times difficult conversations.

When we are holding onto this belief, we may feel as though we are ‘settling’ for people who actually have the capacity to be incredibly beneficial to our emotional and spiritual well-being in the long run because we believe that to be loved is to be immediately understood. In actuality, love is best understood as an action - the consistent attempt to make ourselves and the world better for our loved ones. Instead, when things get difficult, we leave, believing all along that we compromised our values and were wrong about the person. The actual truth is that conflict is inevitable, even in the most nourishing and unbreakable bonds. Strangers on the internet will tell you one thing or another about what you should do when so-and-so does such-and-such. They will tell you that you are wrong for your forgiveness, for your second chances and your depth of perspective. More and more, we are taking these comments at face value, taking each Tweet and TikTok as a manifesto on living rather than the tiniest sample of one person’s personal principles. I encourage you to look at every relationship you enter - romantic or otherwise - with more nuance than 280 characters or one minute of fame can afford.

Another version of settling - that is, the version of settling where we authentically realize we could “do better” and yet refuse to search for such - stems from a place of fear, masqueraded further as impatience. The fear is that we will end up alone. As I have made clear, rarely is this the case. The universe contains an abundance of love in all forms, and we need only open our hearts to it to witness its power. When we settle, we are operating out of fear, attaching ourselves to the nearest available object rather than having faith that, with time, stillness and healing, we will find the romantic love we seek. It may not be as all-fulfilling as culture claims it is, but it can certainly be ours. This fear is so culturally pervasive that it operates quietly within romantic relationships, friendships, and even familial bonds. The societal stigma - and oftentimes, personal state of anxiousness - attached to being alone is so great that we would rather spend our time with someone who does not fulfill us - often someone who even hurts us! - than with our own selves. Not only does this neglect our need for deeper connection, but it also neglects our need for solitude, to spend time getting to know ourselves and understanding how to tend to our own needs. All of us will be faced with loneliness at some point or another in our lives. The less time we spend running from it, the better we get at working through it when it catches us off guard. In our modern age, where we can call a friend or witness a snapshot of a hundred different lives at the click of a button, being present in our solitude takes effort and courage. However, it must be done if we wish to grow and ultimately connect with the people who do serve us and will stick around.

Straight men do tend to fear the so-called ‘decline of settling’ more than women (the TikTok that inspired this article was created by a man). This stems from their own fear that the women they are attracted to are raising their standards. When men who do not treat the women in their life well are confronted with aforesaid women realizing their value and pulling back their time and energy, they will outsource their guilt on the matter at hand to avoid any self-actualization. In this case, the blame falls to single people who refuse to settle. If we were to take the term “settling” at face value, and also believe one man on the internet claiming it was in decline, this would be a good thing. It would mean that women who choose to date men are recognizing their worth and recognizing that they would rather sit back and wait for nourishing and fulfilling love, rather than abandon their needs for a romantic fantasy or a false sense of companionship. It would also mean that men who do not treat women properly are noticing this trend in behavior and are afraid of it - because deep down they recognize their role in the matter at hand. These statements are not untrue, though they also do not fully unpack the truth of settling with a nuanced eye.

In her manifesto Rest is Resistance, author and rest aficionado Tricia Hersey illuminates the concept that we, as a society, do not give ourselves time to grieve due to the constant emphasis on productivity as created by hustle culture (read: capitalism). Grief, in this context, is not exclusive to the death of a loved one, but can occur after heartbreak, after the end of a friendship, or even as a part of the long-term process of healing childhood wounds. Hersey describes grieving as a radical and deeply healing process of repose that allows us to reconnect with love through a crucial rest period. When we do not give ourselves the time to process our grief, we move through life jaded and burdened, with our heartache swept only inches under the rug. We have learned to shun heartbreak as an embarrassing thing, as a period of despair or laziness, typically portrayed on film as the sobbing woman eating ice cream straight from the carton in the bathtub in sweatpants with unwashed hair. In All About Love, bell hooks also confronts this reality. According to hooks, “grieving individuals are encouraged to let themselves go only in private, in appropriate settings away from the rest of us. Sustained grief is particularly disturbing in a culture that offers a quick fix for any pain”. When we exist from a capitalist mindset that hitches our worth to our productivity, we feel shame and guilt for these necessary periods of grief because they strip us of our ability to operate as cogs in a machine. This truth is just as applicable to heartbreak as it is to any other form of grief. Even in love, our culture fears inaction and stagnancy. The more we stigmatize post-relationship grief and loneliness, and proper recovery from these periods, the more we encourage unhealthy habits of serial dating, where individuals never process the love lost, only jumping from partner to partner to encounter the same high that was just brutally robbed from them. 

This is also where we encounter ‘settling’ yet again - by diving into relationships when we are not ready and feeling as though the other person was not built to meet our romantic needs, as we are unable to recognize that perhaps we are not in a place to have those needs met by another individual at all. I was never given more offers to be ‘set up’ with friends of friends than when I had just endured a particularly painful heartbreak.  My friends meant well, of course, but the truth was that I was not ready, and had any of their offers lead anywhere, I would have only been neglecting the wound left by my past, letting it remain open to the harsh elements of the world. It is hard for others to fathom an individual who accepts their heartache, who is willing to embrace it as a lesson, a moment of pause, and not just a counterproductive rut that must immediately be escaped. It was hard for me to fathom, too, that this was what I had to give myself. It was a conscious choice on my part to neglect the ‘revenge body’, the ‘rebounds’, the dating apps and bar crawls, and to rather acknowledge the weight of my pain so that it did not bowl me over at a later time. Through rejection of the aforementioned “quick fixes” that bell hooks witnesses in our society, I was able to give myself the proper time frame to heal.

In her memoir The Lonely Hunter, Aimee Lutkin begins by detailing her experience telling others she was single at a dinner party of (mostly) coupled friends. Although she presented this fact pragmatically, she was met with cloying sympathy, and words of encouragement that her person was out there and she would one day find them. There was no assumption that Lutkin was secure in her single status. To many people today, to be single is to be searching for someone, not unlike how to be hungry is to be thinking of the next meal. Solitude is, rather than a balm or even a neutral state of existence, a nagging sensation that must be done away with. It’s no wonder this is the case - in solitude, we are forced to face ourselves, whether we like it or not. We cannot masquerade our own pain in the drama or dreadfulness of another human being. And in a modern capitalist world where every product, device, app or otherwise marketed experience seems to be catered to this exact desire to escape into an instant rush of dopamine, it’s no wonder that we turn to other human beings to achieve the same end goal. This is not to say those seeking company as a means of escapism are unable to have nourishing and important bonds with the loved ones in their life. It simply means that these bonds are stemming from a place of lack, where the individual’s emotional needs are not met (or not even understood) before they focus on another individual. This can lead to a compromising of principles, impractical boundaries, and overall, a lack of the depth of connection that we receive when we love others from a place of internal wholeness.

In her memoir, Lutkin goes on to recount the story of the years following that dinner party, which she spent going on weekly Tinder dates for months at a time. Unsurprisingly, Lutkin’s experiment did not conclude with her finding the love of her life. Nor did it make her feel more fulfilled on a personal level. It did, however, lead to her falling in love and later on getting her heart broken. It is never truly a detriment to experience love and loss, no matter how gut-wrenching the grieving process may be. These experiences give us a greater understanding of our capacity for love, of our needs, our standards, our patterns, our desires, and simply tell us that, although it may not have worked out this time, we are capable of experiencing transcendental, reality-shifting love. When we settle - that is, approaching our love lives from a place of fear - we prevent ourselves from encountering these critical experiences by choosing people we know we cannot deeply connect with and severing ties with those with whom we do. “To love fully and deeply puts us at risk,” says bell hooks. Still, operating in tandem to the risk of heartbreak with every relationship is the possibility of life-changing and dizzyingly blissful love. Without conquering the fear of one, we will never know the deep joy of the other. 

Lutkin’s experience spending obscene amounts of time on dating apps are not unique, despite the experimental element that characterized her decision to do so. Dating apps are often the first place that lonely, single, and at times heartbroken individuals turn to ease their pain. Capitalism and the consequent fear of stillness has forced us to plow through every setback and heartache, believing that action, and not repose, is always the answer. As we develop under these narratives, we learn to fear ourselves at rest and in solitude. When we then inevitably end up in periods of so-called ‘lovelessness’, we are painfully overwhelmed with the urge to escape at any cost. Dating apps - that is, a slew of romantic options hand-delivered to us at the press of a button or two - provide the perfect fuel for this fire. Especially as we grow older and watch our peers form lifelong bonds, we experience the untrue sensation that to be without romantic love is to be in a deficit, and we experience the anxiety and sadness that comes with this lack mentality. This is a denial of the blatant abundance of the universe, of the ways in which love for nature, family, strangers, our community, ourselves and our friends have the deep spiritual power to sustain us more than the nuclear family or its monogamous prerequisites ever could. 

Rather than resting and trusting that love will find us organically - if indeed it is not already present in our lives in its multitude of forms - we end up with what we call “settling”, in which unhappy singles, codependent on a personal fantasy of romantic love for any number of escapist reasons, lower their standards in order to remain attached to someone other than themselves. Sometimes these individuals - though they are hardly individual in the grand scheme of this powerful cultural trend - believe that they can change the object of their affection with enough time and energy. Now, recall that communication of needs is a healthy part of any relationship. Continuing to stick around when it is blatantly obvious that this person cannot meet your needs, in the hopes that you can love them into changing for you - not so much. Yet again, we witness how settling only harms both parties in the long run. Like the majority of bad habits, it provides an escape from our deeper, more painful emotions but ultimately refuses to acknowledge the presence of these emotions, allowing them to fester and create more pain than we would have experienced had we examined, processed and learned from them. 

Rest and grief, as processes, go hand in hand. I will at this point define true rest in order to elucidate my point further. True rest is a ritual which a) releases us from the pressures of our interior and exterior world, and b) actively benefits our quality of life once we have exited the rest period. This second stipulation effectively rules out unhealthy coping mechanisms - including, but of course not limited to, what has come to be known as serial dating. As stated above, these behaviors do not benefit us following their cessation because they do not remotely contribute to the long-term healing of our grief. If we truly wish to recover from past pain (Tricia Hersey extrapolates upon these statements in Rest is Resistance, in beautiful and moving detail) we must act in opposition to a dominant, centuries-old culture of excessive labor and productivity above all else. It is radical to give ourselves the rest that we need to heal. But if we do not begin this process within ourselves, we will only continue to project our subsurface pain and suffering onto others, perpetuating popular - and at face value, true - narratives of an anxious, lonely, loveless generation.

I also recently saw a Tweet lamenting that the majority of people will, in fact, settle. The Tweet mentioned the idea that everyone has a “favorite ex” to whom they consistently return but often do not end up with. Now, I’m not one to pretend that social media is a representation of our real lives and the realities we confront when we live fully. The fact of the matter, however, is that this Tweet had millions of views, and whether or not it is emblematic of every single one of those individuals’ views is beside the point. We live in an easily swayed, pack-mentality generation more desperate to belong than ever before, and many people who run into these harsh and thoughtless statements framed as universal truths will take them at face value, and adopt it into their belief system. What’s more, social media caters to what we want to hear to keep us hooked, maintaining an echo chamber of our own existing values until they are repackaged and regurgitated to us daily as moral absolutes. The more that we accept these cynical blanket statements as true, the more we collectively live on edge, critical, without compassion for the nuanced behaviors of others. Social media ceases to be a dismissible microcosm when it has the power to lead to tangible cultural shifts such as this one.

In response to the Tweet in question, I again raise the point that this person’s belief stems from a place of fear, and a lack of faith in the natural processes of the universe. When anxiety rules us, we are overcome by the desire to have control at any cost. This includes mistrusting the experiences of both grief and love that are naturally brought to us. Oftentimes, when we are forced to separate from another individual - even an individual for whom we hold unconditional love - it can be hard to recognize that the relationship would not be beneficial to both parties and that it concluded for a reason. Grief and fear blind us from pragmatically recognizing our needs, and the endless possibilities in which other people will be able to meet them in the future. Unless we ignore our intuition and actively behave in ways we know do not serve our best interest, we can hardly be steered completely off the course meant for us. As a matter of fact, it is often when we make the hardest decisions - to leave behind expired, disadvantageous situations, for example - that we receive the greatest blessings in return because we have taken the courage to free ourselves from the easy route. “Settling” is an easy route. But, if we do not take the time to grieve and learn from past relationships, everything will feel like settling, and hence the Tweet arrives at its logic. Rather than trusting time, fate, and the universe, these people with so-called “favorite exes” let ego lead the way, believing that their reality is no more complex than what is seen by the naked eye, and that if sparks flew, they must be the one. No one else will measure up when this is the version of reality to which we cling. But, as I will continue to elucidate, ego and anxiety-driven responses to grief will never bring us to our deepest joy.

What’s more is that love as a sensation is not stagnant. Love can build, grow, slowly deteriorate or rapidly fall out from underneath us. Love can also be unconditional. When we are in the grieving process, reality can seem one-dimensional and unchanging. It can be hard to envision a future in which we open our hearts to someone new. And yet with time (provided we give this to ourselves) comes clarity, peace, healing and the courage to move forward. Love also does not mean ‘in a committed relationship’ or even seeking one with the object of our love. When we recognize that love is in abundance in the universe, we also recognize that it is in abundance within ourselves. We can hold love for so many people and yet recognize that they left our life for a reason. It can take a long time to let this recognition settle in, but ultimately it works wonders in terms of releasing resentment and finding future bonds that do nourish us. 

It always serves us to recall the abundance of love in our lives, and to find love in community and platonic bonds, whether or not we are in a period of healing from heartbreak. Volunteering is a great way to build and maintain a connection with community and develop your love for the world around you, but any activity that gets you out of the house and into the company of others will do. It is ironic that in a culture plagued, statistically, by crippling loneliness and social anxiety, we continue to fear solitude and the reflection that accompanies it. Our end goal should be to operate with the duality of these two experiences in harmony. Solitude is critical, but just as important is true, deep communal love that actively fosters our spiritual and emotional growth. We cannot have one without the other. We cannot experience peace in solitude without knowing the love of our fellow man, and we also cannot experience true love without knowing ourselves unadulterated and alone. When we “settle”, we are driven by a fear of the worst of both of these realities. We fear the darkness within ourselves that is illuminated by both solitary reflection as well as honest and pure love. Whether or not settling is in decline remains up for debate. Social media may have a vast influence over our current cultural reality, but it is not an absolute - it is not stagnant nor all-encompassing. The radical choice to remove ourselves from hustle culture and speed dating, tune into our emotions and needs, and grieve when grief is required is an individual choice as much as it is a collective one. As our collective consciousness shifts towards healing love, so do our personal actions, and vice versa. Do not think that it cannot start with you and your community. If anything, it must.

At the end of the day, I encourage you to settle - but not for another person, another relationship or anything less than what suits your needs. Settle into rest. Settle into your bed with a good book and a cup of tea. Settle into your best friend’s couch. Let the dust settle. Sit back after you have been wounded. Let your heartache be heartache, let your messiness be messiness. Settle into healing solitude and know that love will always find you when you need it. Settle into love and know that no matter what happens, that love has its beginning and end within you and you alone. Settle into the abundance of the universe, the abundance of energy, resources, love, light, and connection. Know that time is on your side.