I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Thursday Thinker, I share a smart idea or theory.
I’ve been thinking about the concept of settling in a relationship. Its a truism of modern dating that you should not settle. To do so would be to fail to be the best you can be:
I see it all around me, people settling. It’s an epidemic. Whether it’s a job, or a partner, it seems like too many people are saying “I’ve tried enough, I’ll just stick with this.” No STRIVING. Nobody saying “Is this the best I can be? Is this the best thing for me?” People get in their comfort zones and remain there. The comfort zone is where dreams go to DIE.
With this, he makes settling for a relationship or a particular partner like failing to hustle enough in your career. This is Byung-Chul Han’s achievement society in action, where you must always be better, always be striving for more, never feeling satisfied with what you have.
I’m thinking about how you get out of that particular framing. What if asking if you should settle is the wrong question to ask, because it puts you into an analyzing, calculating, optimizing attitude?
I detect in the question of whether you are settling or not the question of whether someone is good enough for you. Am I settling? is asking “are they good enough? or shall I keep searching?” Then when you can say: “I’m not settling,” you’re saying, “this person, this relationship is good enough for me.” It’s making you into the measure of that person.
What if the search for love needs to take a different perspective on it? The perspective of how in seeking romance you are looking not for some commodified person-as-product, but instead looking for another self, another subject, another mystery like you.
What if you treat the possibility of love as an act of meeting someone in their mystery and wholeness rather than an act of putting your qualities up against another person’s? What if instead of referring to yourself as the source of whether someone should be loved, you refer to and seek to understand and see them instead?
From “The Sublime and the Good,” originally published in the Chicago Review in 1959, by novelist and philosophical thinker Iris Murdoch:
The enemies of art and of morals, the enemies that is of love, are the same: social convention and neurosis. One may fail to see the individual… because we are ourselves sunk in a social whole which we allow uncritically to determine our reactions, or because we see each other exclusively as so determined. Or we may fail to see the individual because we are completely enclosed in a fantasy world of our own into which we try to draw things from outside, not grasping their reality and independence, making them into dream objects of our own. Fantasy, the enemy of art, is the enemy of true imagination: Love, an exercise of the imagination… The exercise of overcoming one’s self, of the expulsion of fantasy and convention… is indeed exhilarating. It is also, if we perform it properly which we hardly ever do, painful.
To Murdoch, to love requires seeing another person as real, independent and particular. The language of settling traps you in what Murdoch calls fantasy: a self-referential vision of what love and happiness should look like, populated by dream figures that serve your ego’s story. When you ask, “Am I settling?” you are in that fantasy world. You measure someone up against your own self-generated images of a partner who would complete or elevate you.
Love, in Murdoch’s conception, is the opposite of fantasy. It comes from the moral effort of attention, the slow work of seeing another as they are. To love is to overcome social convention and neurosis, to see beyond convention’s scripts and beyond one’s own self-centered daydreams.
For Murdoch, fantasy and imagination are distinct activities. Fantasy is self-enclosed; it is imagination turned inward, serving the ego’s needs and stories. It projects your desires, fears, and ideals onto the world. It makes other people into characters in your drama, dream figures. It prevents genuine perception or moral growth.
Imagination, in Murdoch’s sense, is outward-facing and disciplined. It’s a moral faculty that allows you to see beyond yourself. In relationship, it asks what is this person really like, apart from my desires and fears? It’s a creative effort to apprehend reality truthfully. It’s what she sometimes calls attention or unselfing, the deliberate sometimes painful act of clearing away illusion so another being can appear in their full particularity.
Love, to Murdoch, is the exercise of imagination rather than fantasy because it demands that you imagine the real interiority of another person in all their complexity, their freedom, and their strangeness, without subsuming it into your self-referential fantasy.
The exhortation “don’t settle” arrives from a place of fantasy in which you hold out for an fantasized partner generated based on who you are. Murdoch’s imaginative love would ask you instead to look, really look, at the person before you.