Are You Really In Love Or Are You Just Settling?

As a Cosmo girl, you're out to get what you want and what you deserve. By this time, you've probably been rewarding yourself with the best: the right job that satisfies your interests, the pad you've always dreamed of, close friendships that have taken you through your quarter life crisis, and the perfect man you could ever hope for.

But is he, really?

"I thought I was happy when my college mate, Eddie, and I got together, six years ago," says Pamela, 28, an interior designer. "After all, my whole barkada was lusting over him, but I was the one he pursued and courted after graduation." It took Pamela less than two minutes to say yes when he asked her to be his girlfriend, thinking that it was the end of her boy blues. It didn't turn out as she expected. "Our relationship was rocky. He was the type who wanted his ego to be fed. I was kept in the shadow. I was always known as 'Eddie's girlfriend.' I thought I was okay with it, I thought I was happy. We got engaged, but I broke it off. But sometimes, I can't help but feel that I wasted those six years of my life."

Convenience Quotient

"Many are settling for less than love in their relationships," says mental and spiritual coach Aluna Joy Yaxkin. "Many stay in a relationship much longer than they want to, because it is simply inconvenient to leave them." This would mean, she says, that they would have to go through the turmoil of losing the relationship. "Many things change when we leave any form of relationship. We might have to move, change our jobs, lose a few of our friends, or even wake up and have to evolve to the next level."

Admit it, what we may actually be loving in our relationship is not really our man, but the convenience that he and the relationship provides. We live in a world of convenience—sometimes we believe that's all we want. "We have convenience stores, convenient online shopping, convenient jobs and convenient condo living," says Yaxkin. But are we really happy?

Fringe Benefits

Most of the time, convenient "relationships [are] based upon purely selfish reasons—reasons that have nothing to do with love, commitment to growth and development, or sharing our life," says relationship coach Deborah Cooper.

Cooper further explains that "people may say they're with their partner because of love, but often when you dig a little deeper, you'll hear statements like 'I want to start a family,' 'I was tired of being alone and lonely,' 'I needed emotional support,' 'I needed to feel that I had somebody in my corner.'"

You may not realize it, but these are all motivated by personal gain—the wrong reason to get into and stay in a relationship. Everything may seem fine when you think your needs are being met. But once they aren't, these types of relationships are, sooner or later, bound to collapse; they're most likely to be filled with disappointment, disillusionment, and hurt. Staying in such a relationship and pretending that everything is fine is being unfair to yourself and to your partner. Moreover, if you're settling for less than you truly deserve when it comes to love, you're only shortchanging yourself.

Mr. Maybe

Find out if you're in a so-called relationship of convenience or benefits. "One of the reasons people end relationships with negative feelings is that they stay together too long," says John Gray, author of Mars and Venus on a Date. "They try too hard to make the relationship work." Often, it's by believing in a fantasy, trying to change their partner, or compromising too much, without realizing that he or she is so wrong for them after all. If you're in such paramour purgatory, it may be high time to make the commitment to leave or re-examine your relationship. Waiting it out and wasting your time won't make a breakup less painful or less difficult.

Cosmo cites six false notions that may just leave you wallowing in relationship limbo with your man. If any of the following sound familiar, you might be committing a Mr. Maybe mistake. It'll be wise to accept the facts and move on.

Mr. Maybe Mistake 1: "He's the man of my dreams."

Often, we settle for an image rather than actually falling in love with a person. Hilda, 24, immediately said yes when Rico, the campus crush ng bayan, proposed to her after only six months of going steady. "I was so flattered then," recalls Hilda. "Imagine, he was everyone's crush! Ang daming girls na humahabol sa kanya, but he picked me!" They got married right after graduation only to separate four years after. "It didn't work out," says Hilda now, who explains that they had very different ways of dealing with the mundane concerns of everyday life. "He was so different from my expectations," she says. "I fell in love with the campus crush, not the husband and life partner I truly desired."

Click through to the next page to see the five other Mr. Maybe mistakes.

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