Too many wrongs beat one "Mister Right"

We've heard it all before: You’re supposed to wait for Mister (or Ms) Right. You’ll know when you meet The One, your Soulmate. There’s a Prince Charming or fairytale princess, or a Knight on a white charger out there, someone for everyone, your other half. True love turns up when you least expect it, and you’ll just know that this is the first day of the rest of your life…

Let’s try that again.

We've heard it all before: You’ll never find someone if you don’t put a bit of effort in. You need to get out and meet people. He/she has let you down again? Talk it out. You could do a lot worse. Relationships take work; you didn't expect it to be all plain sailing did you? Oh, you’re on your own again; poor you! Plenty more fish in the sea. Got to get back on the horse. Have you considered lowering your standards? You are a bit high maintenance. We all just want you to settle down and be happy.

Well, what are we supposed to do here? Are we saving ourselves for the best, or settling for what we can get? Is it better to risk being left on the shelf, or being stuck in an unhappy relationship? Well, hopefully we are starting to realise that being stuck in a loveless marriage for the rest of your life, just for the sake of being paired off neatly by the age of thirty, is hopelessly old-fashioned. Divorce rates are rising, they tell us, and that can only be a good thing if it means fewer people condemned to that kind of future.

It looks like the looking-for-Mister-Right picture is the culprit in the old-fashioned way of doing things. It is the belief that there is one soulmate out there for each of us that has shaped our search for permanent relationships. But have we really let this picture go? It seems that we are still ambitious – if anything even more so that we used to be. We aspire to true happiness like never before, in relationships as in everything else. It’s just that we expect to have to work a bit harder and look for a bit longer to get there. The only error we have really accepted is that we were too ambitious in expecting to find the perfect partner so early in life. We still have a romantic side.

But at the same time, we have a cynical side. Part of us thinks that there really is no such thing as the perfect relationship. When things get rocky with a current partner, it’s a judgement call, not whether we are really happy with them, but whether we are likely to be able to find someone else with whom we are happier. If not, we tend to think we should stay put and count ourselves lucky.

There’s an up-side to this. Relationships really do take work, and leaving at the first hint of a disagreement, rather than talking about it to try and understand each other’s points of view, seems to be jumping ship too soon. No-one will ever understand you perfectly, or agree with you about everything. However, trying to be too forgiving and compromising over everything can just mean that no-one ends up happy. In the worst case it can result in tolerance of abuse.

That judgement call over whether to stay or go will always be tough, but it can be made somewhat easier by dropping the insistence that being with anyone at all is better than being alone. If we really believe that there is a Mister or Ms Right out there, we have to accept that finding them will take wading through a fair few wrong'uns. And / or that some people will never find the right person at all. If we don’t believe there is any such One, then there will only ever be right or wrong for now, and we can still expect people to change partners every now and again. And / or that some people will choose to be single long-term or permanently.

In any event, we can expect break-ups, new relationships, and periods of being single, in various proportions depending on personal tastes, to be the norm for almost everybody. If that really is what would best facilitate happiness, we need to make being single, and breaking up, more socially acceptable. We still punish people for being single and “not settled yet”, and that makes no sense by our very own lights! Either we think they haven’t found the right person yet, but we know that can take a lot of work, or we think that different people make the best partner for different phases of life, and being single is best for others. In neither case should we be pushing people into little cottages with roses round the door, and a tandem parked by the picket fence, just because they've reached some arbitrary age called Time To Settle Down.

In general we seem to have agreed – and good thing too – that it’s better to leave relationships when they go horribly wrong than to stay with someone who seemed perfect at first glance. Too many wrongs beat one “Mister Right”. Now we just need our other attitudes to catch up. In particular, we need to accept singledom, breakups, and new relationships (as “unsettled” as they may be) as just part of our society. These are not things to punish people for, and the temptation to do so is a result of a hopelessly outdated view of relationships that we have already explicitly and happily abandoned.