When I questioned a friend about why she was marrying a guy whom she found only mildly attractive, didn’t enjoy having sex with and wasn’t in love with, she told me this: “Marriage isn’t about love, it’s about finding the person who gets on your nerves the least.”

I recall being both horrified and saddened by her cynicism. But as I pondered it further, I wondered if she might have a point. I was single at the time. A long-term relationship had gone bust a few years earlier and after a hyper-extended mourning period I’d been dating a seemingly non-stop parade of utterly unsuitable suitors.

After five years of hard-core monogamy, my best friend recently put herself back on the dating market. Did she fall out of love? No. Did her (now ex) boyfriend cheat on her? Not quite. Was she afraid of commitment? Not at all. She simply wanted to “see what else was out there.” My gal-pal is a young 23, and this five-year relationship was her first. The problem was, she wasn’t quite sure she wanted it to be her last. It seems to me that we have become more and more wary of sticking to that first love, in fear that the urge to experiment with others will always be in the back of our minds. As my parents’ failed marriage proved to me, happy high school (or college, or grad-school) sweethearts don’t always end up happy life partners. Maybe it's good to do some soul-searching, or spouse-searching, before we settle down. But here’s a perfect example of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t." If we throw away what we have now in hopes that something better—something we haven’t yet experienced—will come along, we might end up regretting it. But if we stay in our first-love comfort zone, we might always wonder. So the question is, should you/would you give up your first love to test the waters? Or in doing so are you throwing something quite valuable, possibly irreplaceable, away?

The other day I was reading an article about the 8 ways to trick your brain into spending less (sadly, booze didn’t make the list) and one of the tips was to “satisfice yourself.” Thinking that might require batteries or something, I sailed on over to Wikipedia for a definition and discovered that satisfice is basically a made up a word, blended from the words “satisfy” and “suffice.” The author of the article explained, “When you satisfice, you don’t let an impossible quest for the perfect option destroy your enjoyment of the merely OK.” Hmm, I thought, is that sort of like just accepting that your boyfriend prefers watching, like, 15 hours of baseball every week instead of “The Real Housewives of New York City” marathons?

To clarify, satisficing isn’t the same thing as settling. Settling is accepting the merely OK despite a very a real possibility of finding and achieving better. Satisficing is understanding when that possibility is pretty much, well, nil…like meeting a straight guy who’d rather watch reality TV than sports. After the jump, ten other scenarios when you just have to satisfice for the sake of your relationship and dating life because your quest is pretty impossible…

There is that scene in Bridget Jones’ Diary, where, Bridge (as she’s called) lies on her couch, pajama-clad, bottle of vodka clutched tightly in hand bemoaning the fate of an untimely death for a single person. She worries that if she were to die, alone in her apartment, it is likely that someone may find her decomposing body three weeks later half-eaten by an Alsatian. 

I too fear the fate of an untimely “single” death. I imagine my distraught mother, overcome with grief, forced to go through my things. Her sadness only magnified as she discovers the true, mind-blowing total of my credit card debt, and then the small stash of “emergency” illicit prescription drugs in my bedside table. I can see her coming to the realization that I’m not the daughter she imagined, but her image of me will truly be shattered when she opens the drawer that I use to store both my vibrators and my financial statements.  I can just see the horror pass over her face, as she realizes that her daughter was not only a bit too sexually adventurous, but also was unfamiliar with exactly what a 401K is.