Love in List Form Is Not What The Notebook Was About

We're all going to settle. I don't mean settling in the way those Lewis and Clark gents settled something or the other back in some year that no one currently was alive in. I mean we're all going to settle when we eventually find the person we're going to be with for the proverbial "rest of our lives." The Internet is a bastion of people trying to find love. E-harmony, Match, Craigslist, that weird underground one that starts with "Sex" and ends with "Now" that you only told that one friend about once are all trying to help people find "the one". The overlying mantra from people that are looking for love in 2011 is "I will not settle."

A close second is "No penis pictures."

Before you get the pitchforks and dynamite out, I know people are going to assume that I'm just being good ole pessimistic me. To that I say bollocks. I may be quite cynical, but I don't find myself pessimistic. I believe in people, think that the ozone can be repaired, and don't find the glass half empty because the type of product in said glass should be known before such proclamations are made.

But is settling such a bad thing? We talk about settling for someone like it would the worst possible outcome, but in reality it's going to happen. And that's not bad. At some point the word "settle" in the love world became synonymous with "giving up." How is it giving up if you meet someone you like, but they have 3 or 4 things you don't like? You probably have 3 or 4 things they don't like either. The best relationships compromise. "If you want to watch football on Saturday, then we're going to go flower shopping on Sunday." Isn't meeting in the middle settling? It's not exactly what you want from the other person. You're sacrificing something to appease someone else.

To be fair, a lot of the reasons I come up with why settling isn't so bad is because I'm the settler. I'm not the person in the bar that a woman sees and says "I HAVE to talk to that average height and build Indian guy with hair." If you were to ask 100 women what their perfect man is I'm not going to be it. I’m not tall enough, don’t understand pottery, or sometimes wear my underwear backwards. Whatever it is, I don’t have all the qualities they want in the opposite sex. (Coming this fall, one man has been looking for love in all the wrong places. Finally he’s realized that there is only one place to find his soul mate: Our hearts. Macaulay Caulkin is…THE SETTLER. CBS Wednesdays at 10 after CSI.) It took far too long a time for me to come to grips with the fact that I won’t have women flock to me, but I've learned to adapt. I attempt to make people laugh and have a decent personality. A lot of that bore out of not being the symbol of brute handsomeness. Of course, life would be easier if I looked like George Clooney and had the money of Bill Gates, but that's not the hand I was dealt. THANKS DAD.

The fun part about having a fair amount of woman friends is that you get to hear every so often what they want in someone. The reasons vary from physical (6’2, AT LEAST 6’2) to financial (Enough money to take care of us) to emotional (he has to be able to talk about his feelings) to the absolutely absurd (Must be right handed). “Hey, I found this perfect guy, but he’s left handed. We broke up. Yeah would have been great, but I couldn’t get over how we wrote on those desks specifically for right handers in high school. All leaning over and stuff. GROSS!” I chuckled when I heard these things knowing the impossibility of finding someone that hits every single quality we want. What kind of person would keep a list of all of these traits? It’s never ending process that no sane human being would…

Oh.

Since I turned 27 I've kept a list of all the things I would want in the "perfect woman." When I first started the list it contained a lot of physical traits which I've since condensed into number 1 on the list which is "attractive to me". The list is titled "I want a woman who" followed by its current 96 items. That's right, there are 96 things I've written down throughout the years that I would love to have in someone that falls in love me. Surprisingly none of them include the words "chloroform" or "citizenship."

Worst Bucket List Ever.

I just recently looked at all the things on the list and realize its neverendingness (Not a word alert. Sorry grammarians and Webster.) I will always be adding things to it, but never taking things off. To prove how all encompassing the list is in a Your Beard is Good exclusive, since I'm the only one that has the list thus making it exclusive, I will release numbers 31-50. Why those? Because they are the easiest to re-type. Convenience trumps quality. A slogan for America.

I WANT A WOMAN WHO….

31. sends me a goofy text at 8am
32. shouts answers while watching Jeopardy
33. is spontaneous
34. smiles at me from across the room
35. enjoys a Cool Runnings Joke
36. Answers the phone on the first ring
37. Always leaves a message
38. holds my hand when no one’s around
39. dances like a fool
40. sneaks food into the movie theater
41. tells me when my joke is dumb
42. likes hypothetical questions
43. giggles when I attempt to Rap Eminem
44. will meet my friends with no makeup
45. quotes movies with me
46. has ambition
47. likes a good prank
48. surprises me
49. knows what the “two line pass” was
50. will play Monopoly until the bitter end

Looking at just this portion of the list again shows how I toggle between wanting something simple (ambition) and wanting really specific things like playing Monopoly until someone wins. I understand that it will be extremely hard to find someone that plays Monopoly with me for 4 hours that also has ambition because if they have ambition they aren’t going to want to move a thimble around a square board for hours. Point taken. But the reality is I want ALL of these things in my perfect woman.

The reason I decided to put all of this out there was to show that WE all have qualities and little things we are looking for in other people. I also did it to show that I have a zero percent chance of finding someone with all 96 qualities or remote chance to find these 20 qualities that I posted today in someone and also have them love me back. And that should be ok. So if I find someone that has 80 of the 96 things I’m looking for then I’m settling? Where exactly is the line drawn? 50?

That’s probably my main gripe with using that word. Settling is not being in love. That's all. It's not anything else. We all want to be with someone that we’re in love with. We love them for all their shortcomings and how they make us feel. Sometimes they’ll do things that we won’t like, but that doesn’t mean we’re settling for them. It just means we’re learning to adapt ourselves to that person that we want to be with. We all have a picture of the perfect person in our heads or written down on an excel spreadsheet saved to a flash drive. We probably won’t find that person, but we’ll find someone pretty close.

I’d settle for that.