I love Doctor Nerdlove. He’s a brilliant advice columnist whose responses often give me a new perspective on love and relationships. He is kind and patient, but willing to call someone on their bullshit when that is required. This response to a writer who is bitter about women was especially exceptional. I’m opening with a thorough arse-kissing because for the first time in ages I disagree with something he wrote. It’s a really old post, and normally I wouldn’t highlight those because who gives a fuck that I disagree with something that someone wrote ten years ago? I want to discuss it, though, because the emotional wail of anguish that sits at the heart of why I disagree has been on my mind a lot lately. I don’t want to do that without first telling you how much I love his work, though. Tl;dr – I’m using an old Doctor Nerdlove post as the springboard for a rant, but you should know I massively respect him and if he ever finds himself in London I will buy him a pint and a pasty by way of apology. Let’s talk about compromise in relationships, and why I never want anyone to ‘settle’ for me.
Recently Doctor Nerdlove’s archive autopost kicked out an exchange from 2016, in which a guy asks how to stop being polyamorous. This wasn’t one of those ‘I persuaded my girlfriend to try poly and now I’m all alone while she’s being pounded by a rotating cast of whimsical arts students’ dilemmas, which is where so many similar questions end up. In this one, the letter-writer knows that he’s polyamorous, and has asked his girlfriend a couple of times if she’s up for it but received firm ‘no’s, so he’s asking how he can quash his desires in order to be with her. There’s detail and context that’s important, plus Doctor Nerdlove deserves your web traffic, so go read the letter in full, as well as his response.
Brief summary: the writer ignored his girlfriend Jane’s first ‘no’ on polyamory, then a few years later asked again by trying to initiate a three-way affair with one of his old schoolfriends, Susan. He got another ‘no’. Now he’s decided that Jane is definitely the one that he wants, even though he also ‘really wants’ polyamory, has ‘strong feelings’ for Susan, and would ‘love’ to act on those feelings with her or other people in future. But Jane’s great, and therefore he concludes: ‘so be it’. He wants advice on how to suppress his polyamorous desires so he can stay with Jane, even though she can’t fulfil a need that is clearly important to him.
DN’s response is broadly: yeah, you fucked up by talking to Susan about this before you spoke to Jane. That was not OK. You can’t put this genie back in the bottle, but if you love Jane then try to work on seeing all the good things about her and accept that you’ll never live your polyamorous dreams.
And oh, my heart.
Don’t settle for your own unhappiness
It sounds like this guy is trying to convince himself to ‘settle’ for a relationship that does not meet his needs. When people talk the way he’s talking, often I think they see themselves as a kind of romantic martyr: I want this thing so much, but my beloved won’t let me have it! I’ll quit it out of love for them! As if it’s a noble thing to do. But embarking on this self-appointed quest is not noble, in my opinion. It is bad for you, unfair to your partner, and potentially deeply harmful to you both in the long run. You’re not making a consensual compromise, you’re ‘settling’ for someone who you know in your heart isn’t right. The fact that they aren’t right for you is not your fault, but choosing to stay with them despite your huge reservations is definitely your problem.
In his reply, Doctor Nerdlove says:
Nobody gets everything they want in a relationship, because people are people and people aren’t perfect. There is no One; there’s the .6 to .8 that you round up to One. You may not get your fantasy, but look at all the amazing things you do get to have instead!
Of course he’s right in principle. We all make compromises when we get into relationships: you put up with someone’s loud snoring or weird family or massive collection of TfL memorabilia or whatever. But I think there are far bigger things that we can’t and shouldn’t compromise on. It sounds like – for this guy – nonmonogamy is one of those things. As evidenced by the fact that he couldn’t let the issue lie once Jane had said her first ‘no’, he continued to pursue it by asking again. And he’s still pursuing it by writing this letter.
This is personal – don’t settle for me
I don’t ever want to be with someone who believes they are ‘settling’ for me. And by ‘settling’ I mean ‘making a compromise that is clearly going to make them unhappy.’
If you are going to make a ‘compromise’ that eats away at you, then you are doing your partner an extraordinary disservice. It’s not kindness or romance, it’s selfishness. You’ve essentially decided that although this person isn’t what you need/want, they’re better than nothing. Or at least better than the slightly-less-good options you’ve found so far.
Do you really think your partner wants to be with you when you’ve had to make this calculation? Personally, I find the idea of being with someone who thinks that way about me pretty chilling.
‘Chilling’ might sound extreme to you. My feelings are definitely coloured by some of my life experiences – men who leapt into relationships with me then later down the line expressed disgust or discomfort with some core part of who I am, and showed those feelings in ways that trashed my sense of self. The common trope is that women get with men then seek to change them, but I have more often experienced the opposite. I have had men tell me – after professing love and often spending a lot of time building the foundations of a relationship – that actually certain things about me are unacceptable or shameful or causing them harm. As if the whole time we’d been together this awful thing was pulsing beneath the surface, gnawing away at him, and I was hurting him by existing in the way I always had. The way I thought was good. The way I thought he loved!
I say this to give you an idea of where I’m coming from. I should also probably disclose that I’m not polyamorous myself. I’m monogamish, which means that while I love the odd threesome and/or group sex with a partner, usually when I’m in a relationship my sexual drive is geared towards the person I’m in love with. I’ve had one relationship which made me think polyamory might be an option, but even as I was nurturing and building on my affection for this man (I’m a slow burner in a lot of ways), his other relationship was blossoming and evolving in ways that I didn’t hear about until the next time we’d hang out, at which point I’d discover how insignificant I’d become, and have to recalibrate. It wasn’t a bad or mean thing, it was just life. But living in a constant soup of rejection (no matter how understandable these rejections were) did terrible things for my self worth. I think that consensual nonmonogamy is a valid (and beautiful) relationship style that can work for many people. Just probably not me, if I’m honest.
Maybe I’ll change my mind in the future, but that’s where I’m coming from now. I say this just to explain that I’m not an unbiased observer. In the scenario the letter-writer describes, my sympathies lie mostly with Jane. I feel desperately sad for her when I see that her partner feels so strongly about polyamory that he’s literally writing to an advice columnist for hints on how to suppress those intense desires.
What I want from love vs what you want from love
When I wake up next to someone in the morning, I want to know that they are excited to be there. I choose that word carefully: excited. All relationships go through their ups and downs, so I don’t mean I hope we never fight. I am sure boyfriends will continue to wake up angry with me the morning after a grumpy night before. But I also hope that those feelings are measured against a baseline excitement that they get to share in my life. That there isn’t a gnawing ‘what if…?’ churning up their stomach, as they wonder whether they’ve made a horrible mistake.
If I think about it for too long, I find the idea that someone is ‘settling’ for me genuinely panic-inducing. There will literally be times when the person I see as the love of my life is lying beside me in bed thinking… that he has… ‘settled’ for me? When we cuddle on the sofa watching a film, and I’m thinking ‘isn’t this cosy and fun’, this person might instead be considering the ‘compromises’ he’s had to make in order to persuade himself to pursue a life with me?!
Shudder.
Regardless of whether you’d be happy for someone to make this choice in relation to you please, I beg you, never ever do this to me. This kind of ‘settling’ strongly implies that ‘having someone’ matters more to you than ‘having me specifically’ and that you’ve extended your own compromise to assume my feelings will match. That ‘having you‘ is better for me than any possible alternative. How dare any partner make that decision without my consent! Concluding that I will be happier with someone who has massive doubts about me than simply being on my own is spectacularly arrogant, honestly. What gives any partner the right to make that assumption? Do you think I sit alone at home pining away for want of a man – any man – even one who doesn’t actually want what I’m offering?
If this were the 17th century and we’d been arranged a marriage, knowing the alternative was to potentially lose social standing or money or whatever then maybe we could have that conversation. But this is 2025! We can be single! It’s OK! It’s actually pretty fucking awesome! I don’t want a partner just so I can avoid the faux horror of ‘being alone’, I love being alone! I want a partner if and only if I am actually loved by them. And love, for me, does not look like what this letter-writer is offering Jane. The love I want from someone comes with a lot more certainty.
What I want from love might be radically different to what you want, and that’s OK. You might believe that the love I’m looking for is impossible or unrealistic – that’s fine too! You don’t have to see love the same way I do, just respect that I want what I want, and be honest that you cannot provide it. Don’t offer me some cheap substitute painted to look like the real thing – bow out! Step aside! Stop wasting my time!
If the person I’m with isn’t jumping in with both feet, eager to splash down into my life, then I would far far rather be alone. My single life is fun and beautiful enough that the addition of a man who is ambivalent about me could only be a net drain on that happiness.
Are you being honest with yourself about this compromise?
It might sound odd for me to use the word ‘ambivalent’, but look at how the letter-writer describes Jane – the woman for whom he is proposing to suppress his polyamorous feelings. The woman to whom he says he’ll commit the rest of his life:
By all means she is fantastic, lovable, sweet, funny, and a whole load of other things. All in all I am quite happy!
‘quite happy’
Would you want that to be the conclusion of the person you’ve chosen to spend your life with? I fucking wouldn’t.
“I have already made my mind up ages ago that Jane is someone I want to be with no matter what. If that means she is the only someone, and that I will not be following my poly leanings, then so be it.”
‘so be it.’
Again, how would you feel if your partner described your relationship that way? If they wrapped their love in caveats and ended with a sigh of ‘so be it’? Personally, I would be deeply hurt. I would feel betrayed. I would feel – very strongly – that no matter what they say, this person does not love me the way I want to be loved.
If a partner said about me, as this man does about Jane, that he had a strong desire for nonmonogamy but would suppress it in order to be with me because I’m ‘fantastic, lovable, sweet, funny’, I’d be devastated. I’m clearly not ‘fantastic’ enough for you to say that without equivocating!
No one wants to hear “I love you despite X”! I want more than that from the person I’m tying my life to! If someone’s love for me comes with such a strong caveat, then that is not love in my eyes. It may be in the eyes of someone else, and that’s fine. But I have a right to say ‘no’ to a relationship that involves this kind of compromise – no one else gets to make that decision unilaterally.
Let’s not forget that Jane is also forgoing a whole universe of opportunities in order to tie herself to this man. Maybe she only wants to do that if she knows he won’t be thinking ‘so be it’ behind her back!
Compromise and consent
Settling for a partner who cannot meet your needs means embarking on a relationship that is immediately unequal – you’re compromising on something important to you, most likely without my knowledge about the strength of your feelings. What might you expect from me in return? What are you going to ask me to do in exchange for your compromise? In my experience, compromise such as this is rarely ever a one way street. Someone gives up something significant … and then what? They don’t just forget they’ve done that! They will remember that they’ve made this choice and likely expect me to make similar ones, even if I don’t actually know about their ‘noble’ sacrifice. A sacrifice that is paternalistic and extremely patronising, honestly.
Oh, you think I’ll be grateful to have you change yourself for me, do you? What makes you think you can decide that on my behalf? If I genuinely love you then I want you to live a life of joy, even if it turns out not to be with me. Go and pursue your joy! I don’t want to be with someone who would decide, in secret, that I’m a 0.6 rounded up to ‘The One’ and just sigh ‘so be it’, I want to be with someone who is delighted to have me. Who feels lucky. Who isn’t constantly looking over my shoulder to see if there’s a better option.
As you can see, this is personal. I think I date a lot of men who see ‘a woman’ and think ‘she’ll do!’ without actually examining whether we’re right for each other. Men who dismiss my needs as unimportant or just minor things they can ignore entirely, because acknowledging them would mean having to bow out and stop fucking me. ‘Enthusiasm’ is basic and vital for me, though, and you don’t get to compromise me out of that: you owe me a break up. Walk away, motherfucker! I want someone who is genuinely, head-over-heels excited to be here! I am more than happy to live the rest of my life alone if I don’t find the kind of love I want, but don’t you dare pretend to be it while wasting years I could have otherwise spent being happy! I do not consent to that ugly, dark bargain, and fuck you for trying to make it.
Ahem.
My own strong feelings aside, let’s look at what ‘settling’ does – I think it often makes you a worse partner. There’s a high chance you’ll become resentful because you made a choice that was against your best interests. Sometimes you end up actively hurting your partner for not being able to meet the need on which you have compromised. So the most important point:
If ‘settling’ risks harming your partner, you’re a dickhead.
Back to Dickhead and Jane
It sounds like this man has absolute clarity and really solid evidence that he wants to be romantically/sexually involved with more people than Jane. He asked her about polyamory a few years ago and she said no. What’s more, she was clearly pretty distressed by him asking: he mentions ‘tears and fears’, which speaks to some fairly significant hurt.
If this was the point at which he wrote to Doctor Nerdlove, I’d have more sympathy for him.
But.
Years after he received a ‘no’, and realised that Jane was distressed by his request, he reignited the issue. Not just by asking another time, gently and without pressure, to see if she might have changed her mind in the intervening years, he explicitly discussed the possibility of polyamory with another woman. A woman he admits he fancies, who is a close friend of both of them. I’m in full agreement with DN here when he says:
it seems that you took it upon yourself to start the conversation without asking your partner first. And that was where you fucked up.
Yep, really fucked up. What he did was incredibly hurtful. At best it was thoughtless, at worst it was a step towards coercion. He says he’d asked Jane if she thought Susan was attractive and she said ‘yes’, but this conversation happened before she knew that he had been discussing polyamory with Susan directly, so his actions here feel pretty manipulative. “Oh but you SAID you found her attractive! Surely it’s not weird that I do too? Oh by the way I’ve spoken to her and she’s up for a shag if we want one!”
See what I mean? Asking Jane if she found Susan attractive doesn’t sound like a genuinely curious, open question to establish whether Jane might have changed her mind on nonmonogamy. Put into the context of the conversations he’s had with Susan, it sounds like he’s trying to align chess pieces for his final coup de grace.
That’s my speculation, though. Maybe he’s not manipulative, just oblivious. Either way – this is not a man who is undecided about relationship styles! He knows what he wants and is willing to hurt his partner in order to pursue it.
It is not about your feelings, it’s about your behaviour
This last part is the crux of my frustration. I’m sure there are those who see the poly/mono debate and want to weigh in about one being ‘healthy’ while the other is ‘toxic’ (blergh). But the feelings of all of these people are valid – no one is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ for wanting a particular kind of relationship. For me the thing that shines out of this letter is not how this man feels, it is how he behaves.
Sure, there are some people in the world who can brush aside their polyamorous desires and be happy with a monogamous person, perhaps making the occasional wistful sigh about missed opportunities before swiftly reaffirming how pleased they are with their choice. Some will suppress their desires and be miserable their whole lives, letting it eat them up but never allowing it to spill out beyond their own self-loathing.
This man is neither of the above. He will – as evidenced by the things he has actually done – pursue non-monogamy even after his partner has expressly and clearly said ‘no’. When even that is not enough to help him lay those feelings aside, he’ll write in to an advice columnist to pick over those feelings some more. He is not going to let these feelings go, and has already shown that he’s willing to hurt his partner if he thinks he might have a chance to act upon them.
The advice Doctor Nerdlove gave at the time was broadly good. He highlighted where this guy had fucked up, and re-explained his choices:
Either you’re going to have to accept that the price of entry to your relationship with Jane is that you’re going to have desires that are going to go unfulfilled, or you’re going to have to break up with her.
But there’s more that needs to be said here, I think. What struck me about Doctor Nerdlove’s advice (again, to stress, in 2016 – he may well respond differently today) is that it let this guy off the hook for ‘settling’, and the impact that choice could have on Jane. He’d ‘settled’ for her a few years ago and still managed to harm her later because he couldn’t continue to accept his choice in the face of a new opportunity. His feelings are his feelings and Doctor Nerdlove is right that they won’t go away. But having had them acknowledged and validated, I’d have asked this guy to lay them aside for a second and focus on the feelings of his partner.
What about Jane?
Staying in a relationship with this monogamous woman, no matter how much he loves her, has the potential to cause Jane massive harm. I don’t think he intends to cause her harm, but the fact is that he has already caused a fair bit, and his preoccupation with his feelings over hers tells me he’s likely to do the same again in future. I think he’s asking unreasonable things of himself, in trying to suppress what appear to be very strong feelings, and he’s doing that without any reference to how those decisions might make her feel in return.
If this guy had written to me, my advice would consist of three key points:
1. You have already caused your girlfriend a lot of intense hurt by pushing polyamory after she said ‘no’. If you decide to stay with her, how will you prevent yourself from causing the same (or similar) harm in future? What concrete steps are you taking to guarantee that doesn’t happen?
2. You say you want to be with her ‘no matter what’ because you’re ‘quite happy’ despite this fundamental mismatch in needs – does she know this? Is she aware of the significant compromise you’re choosing to make in order to spend your life with her? If you were up front with her – if you showed her this letter – how do you think she would feel?
3. Breaking up with someone is not a punishment you dispense because they have done something wrong: it is a decision you make when you realise – for whatever reason – that the pair of you are unsuitable. You can break up with someone you love very deeply if you recognise that the way you interact will inevitably cause harm to one or both. The question is not whether you love Jane, the question is whether staying with Jane is fair and kind, given what you now know about how you feel.
It’s more than possible that the letter writer would think long and hard about these things and decide that he still wants to be with Jane in the long term.
But I think it’s vital to ask himself – and ask Jane – does she want that too?
As I say, this is very much an excuse to have a rant about my own feelings, that I pinned to an old post which gave me a useful framework for doing that, so apologies to Doctor Nerdlove for jumping on a (very old) post to make a (very personal) point. Go read his work, because it’s amazing, and follow him on BlueSky here. And DN, I mean it – if we’re ever in the same city then I owe you a pint and a pasty x
