5 signs you may be settling in your relationship

Be patient, they say. Don’t settle, they say. Wait for God to send you the right man, they say. Focus on yourself and the right man will come along, they say. We’ve all heard these clichés a million times and see them constantly in our Facebook news feeds. We like and comment all day, but at the end of the day, do we really pay attention to the advice given to us? Do we really use that encouragement to take a hard look at our own unhappy relationships and take responsibility for our part in our own unhappiness? Probably not, because as they say, the truth hurts.

Holding ourselves accountable would be painful, so we avoided it. But the truth of the matter is that there are millions of women who go through life day in and day out miserable because they don’t get everything they want and need from their relationship. The reason they don’t get what they want and what they need is because they settle. They let the parameters of their relationships be defined by man and man alone. Now, I’m all for commitment, but letting the man control every aspect of the relationship will only cause more misery. Ask yourself, “Am I as happy as I can be in the relationship I’m in right now?” If the answer is “no”, examine your situation to see if you are guilty of any of the following scenarios:

1. You stay too long in it without requiring any kind of serious commitment. You’ve been in a relationship with someone for months or even years who’s perfectly content to keep saying you’re all just friends who are “kicking.” Let me tell you something ladies. If a man tells you that and that is how he defines your relationship, then he is not committed to you OR the relationship. That just means he’s not really ready to be tied down to a woman and while he may be hard to listen to, he’s probably at least open to being with someone else while he’s with you. By defining his relationship as just “kicking it,” he can justifiably say that if he’s ever caught with someone else, he’s single and not tied to anyone.

If you’ve been with this person for a while and your feelings are now very involved (which tends to happen when you’re intimate with someone for an extended period of time) and you want a real, solid, committed relationship with him and you know that’s not what HE wants, you need to break away from it. He is not the man for you at this point in your life. Even if he is very aware of your wants and needs regarding the relationship, don’t think that he will do the “noble” thing and let you go because he knows that he can’t give you what you want and need. No, he will continue to have his cake and eat it too as long as you let him. As long as you “settle” for something you know is less than what you want.

2. You make excuses to your friends and family. How many times have you found yourself defending him and his actions to your friends and family? How many times have you gone to family functions on holidays without him because he had other things to do? If the years have passed, what do you say to family and friends who ask you what your future plans are with him, that is, do you plan to get married one day? When we are in a relationship with someone we are in love with, we imagine a future with that person. We want him to become part of our circles of friends and family. We want to be able to brag about how well he treats us and how much he shows us his love. But when you’re dealing with someone who isn’t on the same page with you and doesn’t want the same fairy tale of a committed relationship that you do, it’s embarrassing to admit it to friends and family. Instead, vacations and functions become awkward because he’s not there or if a relationship issue comes up. Keeping making excuses is just a way of presenting to other people that your relationship is something that it is not. The fact that it’s embarrassing for you means that you really wish it was the way you describe it because that’s the life you want. Allowing yourself to continue experiencing this is settling down. Don’t waste your time on a relationship that is clearly not going in the same direction as you want. Let it go, because by holding on, you could be blocking the way for the next man, who may be the one willing to give you everything you want in a relationship.

3. You let him stay under your roof without a job. Nobody knows better than me that times are tough in this economy. I know that with job uncertainty and sudden unemployment, it can be very daunting to embark on a new job search. Looking for work is a full-time job in itself. But if you have a man at home who is out of work and has been out of work for over 6 months, but you are working and bringing home the bacon to take care of both of you, then you may need to take a closer look at your situation and ask yourself if she is really doing everything she can to find a job that allows her to contribute to the household. Basically, you’ll need to get out of your “love blinders” and determine whether or not your man is a bum. If you assess this situation and see that there are jobs he hasn’t applied for because he thinks “they don’t pay enough”, or “I’m not going to do that kind of work”, yet you come home to find him sitting on the couch playing video games and eating Doritos, then you’re dealing with a man who just doesn’t want to work. And why should he? You are allowing him to live the good life. Ask yourself for a minute, if he was one of his girlfriends or family members lying around his house all day and not contributing, how long would it be before he got nervous? How long would it be before you say something? Wouldn’t you give them a deadline to act together or leave? Yes you would, and you know you would. But because he is your man, and you are in love and have your “love blinders” on, you want to make excuses about him and choose to let him go on doing nothing while you struggle to make ends meet. This is not God’s thing of life for you. Just like you would give your girlfriend or family member a deadline to get off the couch and do something, you should do the same with that man. Especially with that man, as it is the responsibility of a man in a committed relationship to bear the brunt of taking on the financial responsibility of the household anyway. Stop settling for someone who isn’t willing to lift a finger to try and keep you. If supporting you isn’t a priority for him now, what makes you think he’d be a good provider if you were married?

4. You allow him to disrespect you by cheating. Why, why do some women allow men to continually disrespect them by cheating on them without any consequences for their actions? Probably because we fell in love and that makes it so easy to believe what he is telling us instead of what we see and feel in our guts, with the good instincts that God gave us. You find phone numbers. She says that she just took it because he didn’t want to be rude. you believe him You check his phone and find incriminating text messages. He says they were just messing around and nothing ever happened. you believe him You find condoms. He says that they are not his and that he was saving them for his son. you believe him Now, in the logical scheme of things, you know this all sounds like nonsense, well, you know. But because you’re in love and you want so badly to believe that your man would never, ever cheat on you, you choose, that’s right, I said choose, to go against your gut, your instincts and all things logical, to believe what he says. . You continue with the blinders on, pretending that you are happy in this “committed relationship”, that you are really the only one committing. You throw out the window the fact that he is disrespecting you, first by cheating on you and then by lying to you. Just so you can say you have a man. Even if he is presented with undeniable proof that he is cheating, he begs and begs for forgiveness and promises that he will never do it again and that you forgive and believe him. You don’t make it hard for him to keep you at all. By doing this, you are showing him how to treat you. You’re showing him that all he has to do is apologize and say he won’t do it again every time he does something wrong and then everything will be fine after that. If that’s the only consequence he has to face for his actions, why would he stop? You are settling for this type of deal and you will continue to be cheated if you continue to allow it to happen without consequences for him.

5. You always accept it after a breakup. Every relationship goes through its ups and downs. Most of us have been in relationships before where we broke up, only to find ourselves miserable without the other person and getting back together. But if the reason for the breakups is mainly due to your man’s infidelity, you have to ask yourself when is enough, enough? If you’re dealing with a serial cheater, and you’re strong the moment you find out and decide to call it quits, you need to stay strong enough to stand your ground and refuse to accept being cheated on. Many times when we try to deal with the anguish of losing a relationship, we reach moments of loneliness and it is in those moments that we miss them terribly. It is very easy for you to call an ex in a moment of weakness and invite him and his deceitful ways back into your life. He becomes a patron. You are together and you are happy. He cheats and you find out. You break up with him. You feel lonely. You call him to come back. You are happy again. Until you find out he’s cheating on you again. You broke up with him again. And the cycle repeats itself over and over again. If your man continues to ignore your feelings and can’t bring himself to stop cheating on you, you need to find the strength to break that and move on. You have to stop settling for this type of treatment because by doing so you are contributing to your own misery. To stop allowing yourself to be treated this way is to acknowledge your part in your own unhappiness. Take it as a learning experience, stay strong, stay strong and find someone who is true and loyal to you and treats you the way you deserve to be treated.

If you’re guilty of any of these five behaviors, it’s time to step back and really assess your relationship. Have you been settling in? Ask yourself what you really want from your relationship and if you see that happening with the person you’re with. Decide whether or not you are willing to give up your own happiness by staying with someone who is not willing or able to give you the kind of relationship you want. If you’re not, it’s time to go.