Why do we settle for less?

Life is filled with choices and the difference between the successful and unsuccessful people in the world is often based on those very choices we make. It's important to understand that there's no such thing as "not making a choice." We make good decisions and bad decisions but there's no such thing as making "no decision." If we decide not to act, it's simply a choice of omission rather than commission.

If we decide to get a job after high school graduation instead of going to college, that's a choice. If we choose to emphasize athletics over the educational opportunities presented to us, that's a choice. If we marry the first person that shows an interest in us, that's a choice and if we decide to stay with them, even though we're not in love with them, that's a choice too.

That's what I want to focus on in today's column; the obvious bad choices so many of us make that results in the highest divorce rate in the world. Things go wrong at the end of a relationship because things usually weren't right when the relationship began. In other words, we got married for the wrong reason. Whether the reason was an unplanned pregnancy or parental pressure or all your friends are married but you doesn't matter because these reasons are the wrong reasons. Our best chance for a long-term happy relationship is to marry the person we're in love with and the person that's in love with us.

I've written in this column before and in my book that falling in love ISN'T a choice. We can't make ourselves fall in love with someone, nor can we demand that someone fall in love with us. Falling in love is one of those wonderful metaphysical experiences that defies explanation or logic. That's why it's often so messy. When our friends and family ask us why we fell in love with this particular person, we don't have a substantive answer to give them because we don't usually know why either. We can say that they're good to us or good for us, or that we like the way they look or the way they treat us or a hundred other reasons that may, in fact, be true but falling in love is more than that. It doesn't fit a formula or a definition. It may be because of those things we mentioned but it's more than that too. Falling in love is truly greater than the sum of its parts and if that love is reciprocated, then that's our best chance to still be in love as our marriage grows and endures over time.

A collateral issue to not being able to make ourselves fall in love with someone is that we can't make ourselves NOT be in love either. We can hide our feelings, deny our feelings, and stick our heads in the sand, but we can't make ourselves stop loving someone else, no matter how hard we try. Because truly being in love is enduring and permanent. That's why the marriage vows are written as they are; filled with words like "forever" and "for as long as we both shall live" because the assumption is that the two people getting married are in love with each other. These vows of permanence we take only make sense if we are.

But so many of us settle for less and it's one of the great unexplained mysteries of life. Why would we waste these precious few years we have to be alive by spending them with someone we're not in love with? Why would anyone or how could anyone ever find satisfaction in that; knowing there is someone out there in the world who can make all their dreams and fantasies come true but not seeking them out, settling instead for something far less that what we could have had.

I know the answers people give. They say they know they made a mistake in marrying who they did but divorce is not tolerated in their family or they're staying together for the sake of the children, or they don't want to be criticized or second-guessed by their friends and a hundred other reasons. These are all rationalizations that, in the end, don't matter at all. All that matters is the end result and their result is much less than they hoped it would be.

Many people look at the American divorce rate, which has hovered above 50 percent for the past 40 years and talk about what a terrible thing it is. I think maybe it's not a terrible thing at all. If getting a divorce because you made a mistake or the love is gone and you want to give yourself one more chance at having it all, then I believe in the long run it's a good thing.

Because 10 years of absolute bliss with someone you're in love with trumps 40 years of mediocrity with someone you're not.