The hidden danger of waiting too long to choose

Sal Hernndez

What I am writing here is not about to add to the accretion of anxiety that may have been building over the years about “having waited too long to find a partner.” There’s enough of that out there, not the least of which comes from friends and family who panic you into feeling it’s too late . . . or the memory of someone in your life telling you “if you leave it too long, all the good ones will be taken!”

Those are the kinds of sentences that can haunt us for years, long after the person ever remembers having said it: They were right! I left it for too long and now all the good ones really are gone.

No, this isn’t about adding to fear or regret. 

I believe today will actually be a kind of pressure valve for you, because in a sense, it puts you back in the driver’s seat when it comes to your choices. (I should also say that what I write about here can be applied to most things in life you may feel you’ve neglected or postponed for too long, and now it feels too late to make a decision about them.)

 

The real danger of waiting “too long” is not, in my opinion, that we’ll run out of options. 

Yes, there will be plenty already married, or sick, or dead. Certainly, many will come with more complications—kids and ex-marital partners, for example—though I don’t always think this is a bad thing. Complications do not automatically equate to “baggage”; in some cases, they add value. 

Many people become more interesting, mature, responsible, and compassionate by the ways their life has developed. To be sure, others are made bitter, resentful, or shut down by the very same things, but not all.

(As an aside, did you know that watches get more valuable with every “complication”? If a Rolex can tell you the date as well as the time, that’s considered a “complication,” and it makes the watch worth more. Our own personal complications are responsible for all sorts of roles and functions we were never capable of performing in our younger years, which I think make us more valuable too.)

To say one more thing about the notion of running out of options: 

We should remember that if we ourselves—a good catch—are still looking for someone, it stands to reason that we are not some strange outlier, but instead part of a larger pattern: that there are in fact many wonderful people who for myriad reasons find themselves looking for love at the same time and age as us.

 

So what is the real danger I speak of in waiting too long?

Early on in the choosing process, there’s a serious value to being choosy. It protects us from settling for less than we should reasonably expect, keeps us from selling ourselves short, and is an indicator that we have some kind of standard that is guiding us toward a quality relationship. Since there is no shortage of people who are wrong for us, we need a way to filter them out.

However, invariably, along the way, we don’t only say “no” to obviously terrible choices, but to some we deem as only 60-80% of what we are looking for. They are close, but with time on our side, and plenty more to choose from, we continue the search for our 90% person. Many find themselves on less sure footing when the balance tips, and it no longer feels like the future is this ever-receding horizon, but an unforgiving wall of finality that is rushing toward us.

Sometimes this can have the effect of causing us to reevaluate what’s truly important to us, while letting go of the need to win the battle on more superficial frontiers, like how much hair someone has, how successful they are, or how perfect their body is. And yet, what actually happens for a lot of people is something else. 

Every person they’ve ever passed up has only made the stakes higher for the person they eventually settle on.

The more people we’ve said “no” to, the more we feel we have to justify who we eventually say “yes” to. And not just to ourselves, but to everyone who knows how long we’ve been looking for a partner, as though we will one day come home with someone to a chorus of our loved ones saying: 

“Really? This is what you held out for?”

We are no longer looking for a flawed-but-wonderful HUMAN to spend our lives with, but a truly perfect partner who makes sense of everyone we have put behind us. 

What began as the freedom to choose turns into the burden of choosing. 

We must avoid this trap if we are to be happy. 

It’s a kind of inverse to the “sunk cost bias” people feel in long-term unhappy relationships—the feeling that they need to make it work with this person to justify all the time invested in them. 

In the scenario I’m talking about today, we have the “single sunk cost bias”—the more time we’ve invested in looking for the ideal partner, the more we feel we have to acquire a “unicorn” to make it all make sense: I’ve sunk so much time, energy, and effort into finding a perfect partner that the person I choose really does have to be perfect . . . otherwise, what was the point?

This is why we must be wary of the instinct to choose while looking backward. 

It stops us from being present with our actual lives. 

We don’t need the person we choose today to be better than anyone we’ve chosen to reject in the past. It’s not a competition, and if it is, it’s only one we have created in our own head. 

All that matters in reality is that we find someone we’re capable of living happily with today, with all of their flaws, their vulnerabilities, their quirks, no matter how they might deviate from the choices we would have once made at a different time in life.

When we find a person like this, we have to stop seeing it as settling for them. 

We are, in fact, settling on them. 

Settling for someone implies something passive and resigned, like throwing in the towel and accepting less than we wanted. 

Settling on someone implies real agency. The desire to lean in and create what we want with a person whom we are capable of creating it with. 

When deciding where to live, we settle on a house or a plot of land and resolve to make it a home. 

When we settle on a relationship, we are making a conscious decision to end the search and build something beautiful with a real person. That’s not us shortchanging ourselves—it’s getting on with the work of building a tangible life with someone instead of repeatedly playing out a fantasy in our head.

When we realize we aren’t on the search for the perfect partner, but instead, the much more humble mission of finding someone with whom we make a wonderful team, it unburdens us from the decision paralysis that time and past dismissals have infected us with. It takes the impossibly high stakes we’ve been carrying and simply puts them down.

You have nothing to prove to anyone—not even to your former self and their expectations of who you should be with. 

Your only obligation today is to help yourself find the happiness you deserve in this lifetime. 

It’s surprising how many different people we can find it with once we stop the search for perfection and start noticing the wonderful and imperfect humans who will yet cross our path.

Key Takeaways

1. When we’re afraid we’re running out of options, we should remember that if we ourselves—a good catch—are still looking for someone, it stands to reason that we are not some strange outlier, but instead part of a larger pattern: that there are many wonderful people who for myriad reasons now find themselves looking for love at the same time and age as us. 

2. We must avoid falling into the “single sunk cost bias”—believing that the more time we’ve invested in looking for the ideal partner, the more we feel we have to acquire a unicorn to make it all make sense.

3. Settle on someone rather than for someone. When we settle on a relationship, we are making a conscious decision to end the search and build something beautiful with a real person. It allows us to get on with the actual work of building a tangible life with someone instead of repeatedly playing out a fantasy in our head.

What About You?

1. What’s the area of your life where you’re still dealing with a “sunk cost bias”? 
2. Are you searching for a unicorn after spending so much time single? 
3. Do you find yourself looking to “optimize” every relationship? 
4. What’s an area where you could go a little easier on yourself—reminding yourself that you have nothing to prove—and that your only obligation is to your own happiness? 

Matthew Hussey