She wasn’t joking. All marriages, of course, involve compromise, but where is the cutoff? Take the date I went on last night. The guy was substantially older. He had a long history of depression and said, in reference to the movies he was writing, “I’m fascinated by comas” and “I have a strong interest in terrorists”. He had never been married. He was rude to the waiter. But he very much wanted a family, and he was successful, handsome and smart. I thought: “Yes, I’ll see him again. Maybe I can settle for that.” But my next thought was: “Maybe I can settle for better.” It’s like musical chairs – when do you take a seat, any seat, so you’re not left standing alone?


Back when I was still convinced I’d find my soul mate, many of the guys I dated lived up to my requirements – but, if one of them lacked kindness, another didn’t seem emotionally stable enough, and another’s values clashed with mine. Others were sweet, but so boring that I preferred to read during dinner.


Now I realise that, if I don’t want to be alone for the rest of my life, I’m at the age where I will probably need to settle for someone who is settling for me. What we forget is that we won’t always have the same appeal that we may have had in our twenties and early thirties. Having turned 40, I now have wrinkles, bags under my eyes and hair in places I didn’t know hair could grow on women. With my nonworking life consumed by thoughts of potty training and play dates, I have become a far less interesting person than the one who went on hiking adventures and performed at comedy clubs. Once you have a baby, you age about 10 years in the first 10 months, and if you don’t have time to shower, eat, go to the loo in a timely manner or even leave the house except for work, there is little chance that a man – much less The One – is going to knock on your door and join the party.


Then there is the cost of dating as a single mum: online dating, the baby-sitter and, most frustrating, hours spent away from your beloved child. Even women who settle but end up divorced might be in a better position, because many ex-wives get both child-support payments and a free night off when the kids go to their dad’s house. Mums in my position don’t get the night off. At the end of the evening, we rush home to pay the baby-sitter, make any house guest tiptoe around and speak in a hushed voice, then wake up at 6am at the first cries of “Mummy”. Try bringing a guy home to that.


Settling is mostly a women’s game. Men don’t seem the least bit bothered: my friend Chris, a single, 35-year-old marketing consultant, dated a kind and beautiful surgeon, whom he calls “the perfect woman”, for three years. She broke off the relationship several times because, she told him with regret, she didn’t think she wanted to spend the rest of her life with him. Each time, Chris would persuade her to reconsider, until, finally, she called it off for good, saying that she couldn’t marry somebody she wasn’t in love with.


At the time, he was devastated, but now his former girlfriend has reached 35, Chris is hopeful about their future. “By the time she turns 37, she’ll come back,” he said confidently. “And I’ll bet she’ll marry me then. I know she wants to have kids.” I asked him why he would want to be with a woman who wasn’t in love with him. He didn’t see it that way at all. “She’ll be settling,” he said, “but not me. I get to marry the woman of my dreams. That’s not settling. That’s the fantasy.”


Chris believes that women are far too picky: everyone knows that a single, middle-aged man still has appealing prospects, he says, whereas a single, middle-aged woman doesn’t. And he is right. Single women are painfully aware of this. I hear far more women than men talk about getting married as a deadline. My friend Gabe points out that this allows men to be true romantics; when a man breaks up with a perfectly acceptable woman because he’s “just not feeling it”, there is none of the ambivalence that a woman with a deadline feels.


The paradox is that the more it behoves a woman to settle, the less willing she is to do it; a woman in her mid- to late thirties is more discriminating than one in her twenties. Her tastes and sense of self are more solidly formed. She says things like “He wants me to move into town, but I love my home by the beach”, or “Can I really spend my life with someone who’s allergic to dogs?”. And, no matter what women decide, there is always going to be regret. Unless you meet the man of your dreams (who, by the way, doesn’t exist, precisely because you dreamt him up), there is going to be a downside to getting married, but a possibly more profound downside if you hold out for someone better.


Jennifer summed it up this way: “When I used to hear women complaining bitterly about their husbands, I’d think, ‘How sad, they settled.’ Now it’s, like, ‘God, that would be nice.’ ” That’s why mothers tell their daughters to “keep an open mind” about the guy who spends his weekends playing online poker or touches your back for two minutes while watching Sky Sports and calls it a massage. As my own mother once advised me, when I was dating a musician: “Everyone settles to some degree. You might as well settle pragmatically.”


I know all this now, yet here’s the problem: much as I’d like to settle, I can’t seem to do it. The very nature of dating leaves women my age to wrestle with a completely different level of settling. Consider the men older women I know have married in varying degrees of desperation over the past few years: a recovering alcoholic who doesn’t always go to his meetings; an actor still trying to make it in his forties; a widower with three nightmare kids who is still actively grieving for his dead wife; and a socially awkward engineer, so socially awkward that he declined to attend his wife’s book party.


It’s not that these women are crazy, it’s that the dating pool has dwindled dramatically and that, due to gender politics, the few available men tend to require far more of a concession than those who were single when I was younger. And, while I have a much higher tolerance for settling than I did back then, I now have a baby to consider. So while there’s more incentive to settle, there’s less willingness to settle too much, because that would be a disservice to my son.


This doesn’t undermine my case for settling. Instead, it supports my argument to do it young, when settling involves constructing a family environment with a perfectly acceptable man who may not pull your romantic trigger, as opposed to doing it later, when settling involves selling your very soul in exchange for damaged goods. Admittedly, it’s a dicey case to make. Like the divorced women I know who claim they wouldn’t have done anything differently, because then they wouldn’t have Biff and Buffy, I, too, can’t imagine life without my magical son. I also acknowledge the power of the idea that the grass is always greener and allow for the possibility that my life alone is better (if far more difficult) than the one I would have in a comfortable but tepid marriage.


Then my married friends say things like: “Oh, you’re so lucky, you don’t have to negotiate with your husband about the cost of piano lessons”. Or: “You’re so lucky, you don’t have anybody putting the kids in front of the TV, and you can raise your son the way you want.” I even hear things like: “You’re so lucky, you don’t have to have sex with someone you don’t want to.”


The lists go on, and, each time, I say: “Okay, if you’re so unhappy, and if I’m so lucky, leave your husband. In fact, send him over here.” Not one person has taken me up on this offer. -Laurie Gottlieb, Times Online