Would you settle? Have you? Is there a difference between settling and compromise? If so, what is it?
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I think about it all the time.
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Years ago, I read a quote somewhere that went, “whenever you settle, you always get less than you settled for.”

As the conversation progressed many women (myself included) said the differences between compromising and settling is that you decide what your deal breakers are and then don’t budge on them. Those things that are most important to you aren’t things you can compromise on ’cause then you’re settling.

When I mentioned that a deal breaker for me was lack of a college educated…I was immediately called shallow…and Belle’s comment to me summed up what many of the men and women felt about my deal breaker:

…your qualifications about a degree are shallow. (sorry to be blunt, but I’m typing in a hurry.) I’m not saying go find a man who doesn’t read. I’m saying that degrees don’t have a sense of humor or investigate bumps in the night, or bring you soup when you’re sick or keep the bed warm. It’s a piece of paper not a character trait. If the piece of paper is more important than any of that, God bless you and good night. Oh, and there are a lot of dumb people with degrees who don’t read or watch the news. I don’t say this to get at you in any kind of way. I just [dont] want the younger women reading to think that makes any kind of sense.

Shallow?

‘Cause i expect a man to be college educated?

Right.

Here was my response:

LOL
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Black American women are the only women I know who can say with a straight face that a man NOT being college educated is shallow and shouldn’t be a deal breaker.
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The only ones.
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I’m convinced it’s because younger generations of black women have been conditioned to expect less from brothers. It never fails that I get such a venomous reaction when I say I expect a man to be college educated.
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“I’m saying that degrees don’t have a sense of humor or investigate bumps in the night, or bring you soup when you’re sick or keep the bed warm.”‘
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I never said they did. I just said it was a deal breaker for me.
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And no it’s not shallow. I value education for education’s sake. Not out of some sense of money and success, even though there is a high correlation between the two…anyone can Google the studies and see for yourself.
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All men who go to college aren’t intelligent – no joke – but I don’t date them.
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I date brilliant, highly intelligent and/or talented, ambitious men, I haven’t met one yet who didn’t have at least a bachelors.
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There isn’t a single man in my group of friends and extended peer group who doesn’t have At Least a bachelors and most have advanced and/or professional degrees. Not One. And my circle of people are 99% black.
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Take a poll of the fortune 500 or 100 all of our Presidents and most anyone with a professional career of any sort (hell many policemen and firemen too) and then come back and tell me how being college educated isn’t important and is merely a shallow requirement.
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If all you want is someone who has a “sense of humor or investigate bumps in the night, or bring[s] you soup when you’re sick or keep the bed warm.”
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Then by all means don’t consider his level of education.
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But i require much more than that in a serious relationship…and a man who poo poo’s at furthering his education isn’t going to give it to me.
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Sorry
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And note to the young women on the board, my advice remains the same: Know what are deal breakers for YOU and then make your choices in men. Don’t decide on what’s a deal breaker based on what other people think…’cause then you’d be settling.

And I stand by what I said. For me, being college educated is about shared values. I will be John Brown if I marry a man and he says to our children, “Oh daddy didn’t go to college and I’m successful so you don’t above to go either.”

That would make me slap him and any child who thought that was a good idea.

It’s funny to me ’cause most of the women I hear saying a college education doesn’t matter are college educated themselves. Often this “he doesn’t have to have a degree” mind set seems to be perpetuated by women who feel like they should, “give a brother a chance,” and understand how hard it is for a black man to make it or feel like they’re shutting off the number of available of black men they have to choose from for marriage if they insist he has a college degree.

That kind of thinking comes from a place of fear and sets you up to actually settle and be unhappy in whatever marriage you have. I don’t know about anybody else, but I’m not looking for any good man, but the right good man for me and nine times out of ten that’s going to require a college education.