When Are You Going to Settle Down?
I did settle down. There's a house, a village, people I've known forty years. I just don't sit in it every week, and apparently that's the part people struggle to understand.
I’ve been asked this more times than I can count. Repeatedly, by people who mean well, usually right after I’ve mentioned where I’m going next.
It’s the same shape of question as how could she — a verdict with a question mark stapled on.
The assumption underneath it is that movement is a phase. It’s something you do until you’re finished doing it, at which point you stop, and stopping is the proof you’ve arrived.
I don’t blame the people asking. Settling down used to describe something concrete and worth wanting… like a house that appreciates in value instead of sucking your bank account dry. Or an employer that would keep you until 65 and then pay you for the rest of it.
That was a real deal, and for a stretch of the last century it was mostly honoured. The people asking me this question grew up watching it work.
But it’s stopped working. Not gradually, and not because anybody in particular failed at it. The pension dried up, the house and all of its utilities and insurance got expensive, the loyalty stopped running both ways.
Plenty of people did every part of their end and got a fraction of what they were promised.
But the language and the expectations have somehow survived all of that. So we still use settle down as though it means safe, when what it increasingly means is stationary.
Here’s the part that surprises people who ask me this: I did settle down. I’ve never stopped being settled.
I grew up in a village of eight hundred people in rural Canada and I now live twenty-five minutes away from it. There’s a house, and my people are in it. There are people around I’ve known for four decades, some of whom I’d trust with my life, most of whom I cannot buy groceries without running into. That is a settled life by any measure anyone would have used in 1975.
I just don’t sit in it every week of the year.
That’s the whole difference, and it’s the thing the question can’t accommodate, because settling down was never really about where you sleep. It was about being finished. Done choosing. Past the part of life where you’re allowed to want something you don’t already have.
And it isn’t by accident of the English language that it shares a root with settle for. Both come from the same place: to come to rest, to accept a position, to stop.
The better question, I think, isn't when you're going to settle down. It's what you still want that you think “settled” means you're not allowed to have — and who decided it.
Try this, it takes about ten minutes.
Write down three things you’d change about how you live if nobody would say anything about it.
Think of the real things you’d actually do, that are truly available to you, that you haven’t done.
Now, for each one, answer this: who exactly told you it wasn’t allowed?
Don’t worry if you can’t name a specific person. It could be a composite… a tone of voice, a look somebody gave you in 2011, a general sense of what people like you are supposed to do. That composite has been making decisions on your behalf for years, and it has no name, no face, and no stake in how your life actually goes.
For the ones where you can name someone: are they living a life you’d want? Would you take their advice on anything else?
I’m not suggesting your objections are fake. Some of them are load-bearing. Money is real, aging parents are real, a partner’s job and where the kids go to school are real.
But those are constraints to work with, and constraints have workarounds. What people usually find on that list is something else: an inherited rule about what’s dignified at a certain age, which has never protected anyone from anything.
The next time someone asks when I’m going to settle down, I think the honest answer is that I already did, and it just so happened that I settled into a more flexible life rather than a stopping point.
I doubt I’ll actually say it out loud. I’ll just tell them where I’m going next.
✌🏻 Miranda
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