What You’re Settling For vs. What You Actually Deserve: A Reality Check

This content is shared for storytelling, educational, and entertainment purposes only and is not a substitute for professional counseling or therapy.

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Sometimes the most useful thing is not another paragraph of encouragement. It is a mirror. This post is a reality check, laid out plainly, so you can measure what you currently have against what is actually available to you — not in theory, but in the lived experience of women who stopped settling and found out what full looks like.

This builds directly on Steps to Choose Yourself Beyond Side Relationships and Saying Goodbye to Being the Side Chick. If those posts named the pattern, this one gives you the checklist to measure it against.

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Why We Need a Reality Check at All

Settling rarely looks dramatic from the inside. It looks reasonable, even sensible, framed as patience, understanding, or ‘not wanting to be difficult.’ Psychology Today describes one common form of this: a relationship that prides itself on being ‘conflict-free,’ where in reality both people are lonely underneath the surface, quietly avoiding the vulnerability real intimacy requires (Psychology Today). Settling wears very convincing disguises. A checklist cuts through the disguise.

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The Reality Check

Read through this slowly. You do not need every item on the left to apply to recognize the pattern — even a few is worth taking seriously.

What Settling Looks Like	What You Actually Deserve
Being available to him on his terms, whenever it’s convenient for him	A partner who makes consistent time for you, without being asked twice
Being introduced as a ‘friend,’ or not introduced at all	Being claimed, proudly, in every room he’s in
Explaining away inconsistency as him ‘being busy’ every single time	A pattern of follow-through that doesn’t require constant explaining
Feeling grateful for basic decency, like a reply or a plan kept	Basic decency as the floor, not the ceiling, of the relationship
Wondering where you stand more often than you feel secure in it	Clarity about where you stand, even in hard conversations
Shrinking your needs to avoid seeming ‘too much’	A relationship where your needs are treated as valid, not inconvenient
Staying because leaving feels harder than staying	Staying because the relationship genuinely adds to your life

Takeaway: If more than one row on the left describes your current relationship, that is data worth taking seriously, not a coincidence to explain away.

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Why the Left Column Can Feel Normal

Sherry Gaba, LCSW, points to a common root of this normalization: a childhood fear of abandonment that leads adults, without realizing it, into relationships with people who are emotionally unavailable — because unavailability, ironically, feels less threatening than the vulnerability of being fully chosen (Sherry Gaba, LCSW). The left column can feel normal precisely because it echoes something familiar from earlier in life. Familiar and healthy are not the same thing, even though they can feel identical from the inside.

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The Question That Cuts Through the Excuses

If you find yourself defending an item on the left column, ask this instead: would I recommend this exact situation to my daughter, my sister, or my closest friend? Not the romanticized version you tell yourself — the actual, plain facts of what you are accepting. Most women answer no almost instantly for someone else’s life, even while still defending it in their own.

That gap between what you would accept for someone you love and what you accept for yourself is not a coincidence. It is the exact gap this reality check is meant to close.

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Reading the Table Honestly

It helps to slow down on each row instead of skimming the whole table and feeling generally uneasy. Take the first one — being available on his terms. Ask yourself plainly: in the last month, how many plans were made around his schedule versus yours? How many times did you rearrange something for him that he would not have rearranged for you? The specificity matters. Vague unease is easy to dismiss. Specific patterns are harder to explain away.

Do the same with the row about being introduced, or not. Think of the last three social situations he was in without you and consider honestly whether you would have been welcome there, or whether that welcome was never actually extended. This is uncomfortable work. It is also the exact work that turns a feeling into evidence you can act on.

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What the Right Column Costs

It would be dishonest to present the right column as effortless or automatic. A relationship with real consistency, honesty, and full availability still requires effort from both people — it is not a fantasy where nothing is ever hard. The difference is not the absence of effort. It is where the effort goes. In a settling dynamic, your effort goes toward managing your own expectations downward. In a full relationship, effort goes toward two people actually building something together.

That distinction matters because it corrects a common misread: that wanting the right column means wanting something unrealistic or ‘too perfect.’ It does not. It means wanting effort that is mutual instead of one-sided, which is a considerably lower bar than perfection, even though it can feel, after enough settling, like an impossibly high one.

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What Healing After Settling Actually Requires

If this reality check has surfaced something painful — infidelity, broken trust, or a relationship that has already caused real damage — Healing After Infidelity: Consequences and Forgiveness walks through what genuine repair requires, as distinct from simply enduring more of the same pattern in the name of forgiveness.

There is an important difference between forgiveness and tolerance. Forgiveness releases the resentment for your own sake. Tolerance keeps accepting the same behavior indefinitely, mistaking endurance for growth. A reality check like this one is meant to help you tell the two apart.

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What If You Recognize Yourself on Both Sides

Some women read this table and recognize themselves not just as the one settling, but as someone who has also, at times, offered a partial version of herself to someone else — guarded, inconsistent, unclear about where things stood. That recognition is not hypocrisy. It is useful information. The same self-worth work that stops you from accepting less is often the same work that makes you capable of offering more, because both require the same underlying belief: that real, full connection is safe enough to risk.

If that is you, this reality check applies in both directions. It is not only a measure of what you are willing to accept. It is also a quiet invitation to check what you are willing to offer.

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Both Sides of the Table

It is worth hearing what full availability sounds like from the other side too. In the Real Talk Series, Sherley and her husband Kalief speak candidly about what it actually takes to show up on the right side of this table — consistently, in public and in private. Find those conversations at sherleysshow.com/category/podcast/realtalkseries.

Listen: Real Talk Series on Sherley’s Show  My husband and I talk about what genuine consistency and full availability actually look like, from both sides. Find it at: sherleysshow.com/category/podcast/realtalkseries

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The Excuses That Keep the Left Column in Place

There is a familiar script that runs whenever this kind of reality check starts to land. ‘He’s just not good with words.’ ‘He shows love differently.’ ‘It’s complicated right now, but it won’t always be like this.’ These explanations are not automatically dishonest — sometimes context genuinely matters. But it is worth noticing how often the explanation is doing the emotional labor that consistent behavior should be doing instead.

A useful test: if a friend told you the exact same explanation about her own relationship, would you accept it at face value, or would some part of you wonder if she was working hard to make peace with something that did not actually feel peaceful? Extend yourself the same scrutiny you would extend her. It is usually more accurate than the version you have been telling yourself.

‘It will get better once things settle down’ deserves particular skepticism. Circumstances change. Patterns, left unaddressed, tend not to. If the current version of a relationship requires you to wait for a future version that keeps getting pushed back, the present version is the actual relationship, not a placeholder for a better one that has not yet arrived.

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Using the Checklist Without Spiraling

A reality check like this can go one of two ways. It can become the clarity you needed, or it can become another stick to beat yourself up with for staying as long as you did. Choose the first one. You made the decisions you made with the information and the self-worth you had at the time. The checklist is not evidence of past failure. It is a tool for the decision in front of you now.

Takeaway: This checklist is a tool for what happens next, not a scorecard for what you should have known sooner. Use it forward, not backward.

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Key Takeaways

• Settling rarely looks dramatic — it usually wears the disguise of patience, understanding, or ‘not wanting to cause problems.’
• A direct, side-by-side comparison cuts through the disguise faster than another round of self-reflection alone.
• The ‘settling’ column can feel normal because it echoes something familiar from earlier in life, not because it is actually healthy.
• Ask what you would want for someone you love — the gap between that answer and your own life is worth closing.
• Use this reality check as a forward-looking tool, not a source of shame about the past.

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Go Deeper With Sherley’s Show

• Real Talk Series — What full consistency looks like from both sides. sherleysshow.com/category/podcast/realtalkseries
• Conversations — Sherley and Kira on infidelity and healing. sherleysshow.com/category/podcast/conversation

Subscribe to Sherley’s Show  wherever you stream podcasts, and leave a review — it helps more women find the conversations they need.

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What to Do With the Answer

If the reality check confirmed something you already suspected, you do not have to act on it tonight. Clarity does not require immediate action to be valuable. Sometimes the most important thing this kind of checklist does is simply remove the fog — the constant second-guessing about whether what you are experiencing is real or exaggerated. Once the fog clears, the next step tends to become obvious on its own timeline, even if that timeline is not today.

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Final Word

You do not need permission to want the right column. You never did. What you needed was proof that the right column is real and not just a nice idea — and it is. Women build it every day, not by finding a perfect partner, but by refusing to keep signing off on the left column out of habit, fear, or fatigue. The reality check is done. What you do with it is the part that is entirely yours.

We are rooting for you. We always are.

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