Skip to main content

The Reacher-Settler Paradox.

Every relationship has a reacher and a settler. Says Ted Mosby in "How I met your Mother".
Interesting theory. Marshall and Lily start fighting about who among them is the settler and who, the reacher. Interestingly, both of them want to be the settler.

At first, it looked understandable, natural.
But on a deeper level of thought, I was deep in dilemma. Which one of them am I? Which one of them do I want to be? The reacher or the settler?

You would want to be the settler which would mean you are more desirable than your spouse . On the other hand, you should not like to be the loser who had to settle for less. The very fact that someone decided to settle for less removes the superiority/desirability from that person and (s)he cannot be the settler anymore. Similarly, the very fact that the reacher had it in him to reach for his dreams makes him desirable.. The minute you decide that you are a settler, you are reduced to a less desirable person who may not have much to settle for anyway and the moment you label yourself a reacher, you gain the desirability of a settler. This is, therefore, a paradox. You can never decide on who you are - the reacher or the settler.

I decided to ask people to test my theory and one beautiful evening in Ooty, with a group of friends in a happy high state of mind, I asked my friend what she thought of herself in her relationship. She kept changing her mind. I didn't get a chance to ask her husband about what he thought. I am not sure if this was the result of the conflict between the human need to be the best and a possible female need for a superior spouse (She seems too cool to have this need, but you never know. Afterall, natural selection has had reason to preserve the set of genes in females to want to select the best of males) . I need to`ask a guy friend to understand more about this and I shall complete this post then.

Comments

sp said…
Very interesting post. And the line of thought about how once you become the settler, the desirability is gone. So many aspects of life are like this. N remember Heisenberg' uncertainty principle?
sp said…
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
bombay dosti said…
Oh man!! This line of thought was awesome :) :)
deepthi said…
SP, BD,

Its been so long since I've seen comments in the blog world that I was looking for the Like button to like your comments!! :D

Thanks for the comments! Yes, I found this cause-effect thought stuck in my head for quite a long time- so I just had to pen this down.

Popular posts from this blog

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr | Book Review

The fragrance of old and new books- you ask any book lover and this stands apart as one of their indulgences. Cloud Cuckoo land is a story that celebrates the love for books and gives you a whiff of this fragrance, through words.  Set in three timelines and places (15th Century-Constantinople, 2020 - Idaho and in a certain unspecified near future timeframe in an interstellar ship), the book is a clever compilation of narratives from 5 protagonists whose destinies are interlinked to help uplift the destiny of a lost ancient text while the text in many ways becomes their beacon of hope to make progress in life and to march onwards. In a beautiful symbiotic relationship, the book saves them as much as they help resurrect the book. With his clever writing style, Anthony Doerr makes the reader work towards building that narrative  much like a jigsaw puzzle and that's part of the thrill of reading this book. Chapters are small yet very detailed in presentation, which gives the impre...

Meeting Rhett Butler.

Talked to a friend after a long time and he reminded me about an old crush of mine. I had a big crush on Rhett Butler, was head over heels for him after reading Gone with the Wind. His personality and the perfect romantic picture his masculine presence in the novel, imprinted on my mind, had blown me off my feet . As much as I hated Scarlett O ‘Hara, for her snobbishness, I liked her for her spirit. But I kept feeling that it should not have been her who should have been with Rhett!!! I hated it that a snob like Scarlett got all his attention. My crush on Rhet Butler would have been probably like Scarlett’s feeling for Ashley. (When she finally could have won Ashley, she realized that she is no more attracted to him.) Looking back, I realize how silly a feeling it was because I have come to realize that a Rhet Butler really does not exist, for his very existence will spoil his magnetism. Rhett Butler is like that complicated yet beautiful song which I had imagined myself sing a...

Book Review | The Courage to be Disliked

  "Humanity is a thin layer of bacteria on a ball of mud hurtling through the void. I think if there was a god, he would've given up on us long ago. He gave us a paradise and we used everything up. We dug up every ounce of energy and burned it. We consume and excrete, use and destroy. Then we sit here on a neat little pile of ashes, having squeezed anything of value out of this planet, and we ask ourselves, "Why are we here?" You wanna know what I think your purpose is? It's obvious. You're here, along with the rest of us, to speed the entropic death of this planet. To service the chaos. We're maggots eating a corpse" - Quote from the HBO series, West World   I  find the above interpretation of who we are a lot more humbling, liberating and "real" as opposed to all the meaning, purpose and grandeur that we tend to give to human life. This is the basic message I took away from the book "The Courage to be Disliked". Yet another  lif...