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emotion and no one is responsible for your happiness except you. Having said that, if you are looking for someone else to make you happy, you need to examine the reasons why you are unhappy in the first place.

Recently, in my local newspaper, I read about a couple who were celebrating their eightieth wedding anniversary. They were both in their late nineties. In today's world, that is an incredible feat. Today, if a person is going to leave a marriage, almost twenty percent do so between the fifth and tenth year of marriage, according to Divorce.com.

The first ten years of marriage is when people are still building a life together, starting jobs and careers, having families. Money is probably tighter during this period than at any other time during a marriage because big expenditures such as first houses and cars are generally purchased during this period. This is often a time when people feel they have settled for less, and they want to find something or someone better.

We settle for less in almost all aspects of our lives. Schools, jobs, careers, houses, money, etc. Is it not somewhat selfish to think that because we feel that we do not have the perfect mate that we have "settled for less"? Does your spouse feel that way about you? Just about all of us will, at one point or another, feel that we could have done better, or picked a better mate, but endlessly pursuing that ideal can also leave you wondering "what if we had just tried harder to make it work".

We can, and will, always find reasons to leave a relationship, but marrying someone, and then feeling that you have settled for less, is not always fair to the person you married. Remember those five little words in most marriage vows "for better or for worse". There is a reason that those words are in there and it is because all relationships have both good and bad times. No one is immune from that, no matter how hard we try, but we have to keep on trying. Everyone has his or her own definition of "settling for less". Endlessly pursuing the ideal mate just might get you that but for most people settling for less simply means making the best of what you have. At the end of the day, that really is not so bad after all.

Learn more about this author, Leah Curtis.
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