The Opposite of Settling
Get What You Want in Love and Life, Without Losing Your Spark
By Case Kenny
Category: Motivation & Inspiration | Reading Duration: 18 min | Rating: 4.8/5 (28 ratings)
About the Book
The Opposite of Settling (2025) is a practical guide to modern dating that helps readers find empowering love without losing themselves in the process. Blending mindfulness, research, and optimism, it offers a clear roadmap for navigating dating with confidence, recognizing relationships that lift you up rather than weigh you down, and letting go of fear-based habits.
Who Should Read This?
- Singles who want to learn to date with confidence and clarity
- Couples who’ve gotten lost in their relationships and want to find themselves again
- Anyone who’s ready to get off the apps and find true connection
What’s in it for me? Love that works for you.
Dating for years, recovering from a breakup, or perpetually single when you'd rather not be? At some point or another, someone's probably given you this advice: it’s time to settle down. Stop being so picky. Something is better than nothing. In fact, in your worst moments, it might even be advice you've given yourself – why not compromise, adapt, make yourself a bit smaller? When that big romantic love you were hoping for doesn't come along easily or immediately, it's all too easy to tell yourself that settling down is your best and even your only option.But it's not.Instead of settling down, try settling up: building a life that genuinely excites you and approaching love from a place of fullness rather than lack. It's about creating a world you're passionate about – your dreams, your growth, your vibrant everyday reality – and only welcoming people who resonate with and amplify that energy. Love doesn't complete you; it complements the richly fulfilling life you've already built. When you reframe love as an amplifier rather than a cornerstone, everything shifts from a zero-sum game to a win-win. Whether or not you're coupled up, your life is a trip and you should be enjoying the ride.
Chapter 1: Settle up, not down
When we look for a partner, we're often looking for someone to build a life with. That's understandable – from romantic comedies to well-meaning relatives, the cultural script tells us that real life begins when we find "the one." We're fed this narrative that love is the foundation upon which everything else rests: the career moves, the home, the adventures, the sense of purpose. It's deeply embedded in how we think about relationships.But what if instead of looking for someone to build life with, you looked for someone to do life with? Waiting to meet someone before you start building your life means you might never build the life you actually want – the one that feels authentic to you. It puts enormous pressure on finding that person and even more pressure on anyone you do date. When you assume life only begins once you're partnered, you're putting your larger purpose on hold. You're essentially telling yourself that your real story hasn't started yet.On the other hand, looking for someone to do life with is a fundamental shift. It means inviting someone into the life you've already built and asking them to participate in it with you, taking it to even greater heights. Your purpose in a committed relationship should be the same as your purpose when single: to get more out of life. Stop thinking of single and coupled life as before and after, like some dividing line in your biography.Commitment to the right person offers a "moreness" to the life you kickstarted when you were single – it’s an expansion, not a beginning.Most importantly, your relationships shouldn't be built around settling down. Yes, there's a certain maturity necessary to commit to someone, but you don't have to embrace the boring life, the cookie-cutter mortgage, whatever society says you're supposed to do. Your purpose in life is the same whether you're single or partnered: to find what makes you happy. As a couple, your mission is to support each other in that pursuit – two people amplifying what already matters to each of you.
Chapter 2: Show up as yourself
Okay: you're doing the work. You’re following your purpose and building the life you want. But – and it's totally okay to admit this, even if you're totally fulfilled – you want someone in your life to share it with.Here's the catch: if you want someone to love you the way you deserve, you need to show up as yourself.That's easier said than done, though. Research from the University of Pennsylvania on what's called the "liking gap" reveals something fascinating about why we struggle with this. After conversations, people consistently underestimate how much others actually liked them. We walk away from interactions convinced we were awkward or boring when the other person genuinely enjoyed our company. This gap between perception and reality keeps us playing it safe – performing a polished version of ourselves instead of showing up as we really are.The irony? That polished performance is often what prevents genuine connection. When you're busy editing yourself and toning down what makes you unique, you're also filtering out the people who would actually love the real you. So what's the solution? Embrace the cringe. Yes, that sounds uncomfortable – because it is. But you're not trying to please everyone. You're trying to find someone who connects with you, in all your glorious weirdness. Maybe you laugh too loud at your own jokes. Maybe you're genuinely passionate about medieval history or you still sleep with a childhood stuffed animal. The right person won't just tolerate these things – they'll find them endearing. And embracing your own cringe opens up something beautiful: it means celebrating others' cringe too. When someone admits they cry during dog food commercials or shares their enthusiasm for competitive bird watching, there's something wonderful about simply letting people lean into their weird – even if it's not your particular flavor of weird.That openness extends beyond quirks and hobbies. Settling up means letting go of rigid ideas about what your love story is "supposed" to look like. It might mean dating someone older, shorter, or otherwise different from what you imagined as ideal. It might mean doing things in the "wrong" order – becoming a stepmom in your twenties or getting married for the first time in your eighties. When you settle up, the rulebook goes out the window. What matters isn't checking boxes or following a prescribed timeline. What matters is genuine connection with someone who gets you and enhances the life you've already built.
Chapter 3: Your soulmate won’t complete you
Soulmate. It's a loaded word, isn't it? We've been fed this idea through countless rom-coms, love songs, and fairy tales – the notion that somewhere out there is one perfect person who will make everything click into place. Your other half. The one who completes you. And yes, the promise is seductive: a soulmate heals.Is this really true? Yes – but not in the way you might think. A soulmate isn't a fix. They're a spark.Here's how it actually works. A soulmate breaks patterns. Maybe you've been stuck in cycles of self-doubt, cynicism, or negativity. The right person comes along and suddenly those old grooves don't feel so inevitable anymore. But here's the crucial part: they don't fix you. The work of establishing new patterns and leaving the old ones behind? That's something you need to do for yourself. And for your soulmate, you act as a catalyst too, breaking their patterns. When you understand soulmates as pattern breakers rather than destiny, you can let go of the limiting idea that every person has only one soulmate in their entire life. Different soulmates might break different patterns at different times in your journey.The other insidious idea about soulmates? That they're perfect. Not true. A soulmate is an imperfect person that you love perfectly – or as perfectly as you can. They leave dishes in the sink. They're grumpy before coffee. They have baggage and bad habits and days when they're not their best selves.And guess what? You're not perfect either. Though maybe you already knew that. The great news is that when two imperfect soulmates are in a deeply fulfilling relationship, they help each other become better versions of themselves. Psychologists call this the Michelangelo effect: the way close partners sculpt each other toward their ideal selves, much like the artist revealed the figure within the marble. Your soulmate sees who you're becoming and helps chisel away what's holding you back.That's settling up. Not finding perfection, but finding someone who sparks your growth and whom you inspire in return.
Chapter 4: Don’t let a breakup break you
Here's the truth: love isn't always easy. And even when you think you're settling up, it doesn't always work out. Breakups are tough, but the toughest kind of breakup is when someone decides you're too much or too hard to love. How do you rebuild and find your way back to self-love after that?Let's start with what psychologists call the peak-end rule. Our brains have a tendency to remember experiences based on their most intense moments and how they ended. After a breakup, this means you might fixate on the peak – all the beautiful things you've lost – or the end, which can leave you feeling unlovable and worthless. Your mind replays the greatest hits and the devastating finale on loop, conveniently forgetting the mediocre Tuesday nights and the arguments about whose turn it was to take out the trash. Combat this with mindfulness. Challenge those highlight reels your brain keeps playing. Look at the whole picture, not just the romanticized version or the painful ending. Maybe the relationship had incredible travel adventures, but it also had incompatible life goals. Take what good you can from the experience – the growth, the lessons, the memories that genuinely mattered – without letting it define your worth.Next, pursue inner peace. You've been hurt, and that's real. But reaching inner peace isn't about hurting back or proving something to your ex. It's about demonstrating that even though others have hurt you, you don't hurt others. You rise above. This doesn't mean reconnecting with your ex or pretending everything's fine. It means pouring kindness and love into the people around you, like friends, family, even strangers. When you choose compassion despite your pain, you reclaim your power.And please, don't blame yourself. Bad things happen in life that aren't our fault. When the bus leaves early and you're stranded at the stop, you don't spend the afternoon agonizing over what you could have done differently – you just catch the next one. Don't reflect those bad feelings back into your self-worth. Here's an important reframe: instead of asking "What's wrong with me?" ask "What's going on with them?" Maybe they weren't ready. Maybe they're dealing with their own wounds. Maybe their capacity for love was limited by things that had nothing to do with you. Their inability to love you says nothing about your lovability.
Chapter 5: Say no to struggle love
Settling up is all about saying yes: yes to more adventure, growth, connection, and joy. But it's also about saying no. And there's one thing you should always be saying no to: struggle love.Struggle love is all the negative, draining aspects of a relationship with your partner. It's everything we endure in the hope that our commitment will eventually be rewarded. Mixed signals about where you stand. One-sidedness where you're always the one making plans, initiating conversations, or doing the emotional heavy lifting. Gaslighting that makes you question your own reality. The full array of behaviors that leave you exhausted rather than energized. Essentially, struggle love is defined by a lack of reciprocity: when you give your whole self and they do not. It's staying up late helping them through a crisis while they can't be bothered to remember your birthday. It's rearranging your life to accommodate theirs while they never adjust their schedule for you.Saying no to struggle love means first convincing yourself you deserve better. The reason you put up with it? That voice inside your head that whispers, "Maybe this is all I deserve." Here's a word you need to know: because. Researchers at Harvard found that people are far more persuaded when given a reason, even a simple one. Apply this to yourself. "I deserve honesty because I treat my partner with honesty." "I deserve someone who knows what they want because I know what I want." "I deserve consistent effort because I show up consistently." When you articulate the "because," you're not being demanding – you're recognizing fair exchange.If you're serious about settling up, that means you've made promises to yourself. Promises about the kind of love you'll accept, the treatment you won't tolerate, the life you're building. Now's the time to ask: Am I keeping those promises? We can't control how people treat us, but we absolutely can control the promises we make to ourselves about the treatment we want and won't compromise on.This means learning to love yourself again. It means embracing being single without closing yourself off to possibility. And it means cultivating what might be the most powerful mindset of all: being unbothered. Not indifferent, not jaded – just secure enough in your own worth that struggle love simply isn't appealing anymore. When you know what you deserve, settling for anything less becomes impossible.
Chapter 6: Start with a clean slate
Time to take ownership. If relationships have gone badly in the past, it's worth asking: what role did you play? And yes, this can be uncomfortable, but get granular. Why have you pursued the wrong people? Why have you found yourself in the same toxic dynamics again and again? Why have you ignored your gut instincts when they were practically screaming at you? Worst of all, have you rationalized all of these choices by saying the person was "your type"?Here's the thing: you don't always fall for love-bombers, gaslighters, and commitment-phobes because they're your type. Your type is simply a pattern you've unconsciously followed. Maybe you're drawn to the emotionally unavailable because the chase feels like passion. Maybe you mistake intensity for intimacy because that's what love felt like growing up. Recognizing this isn't about blame – it's about breaking the cycle.So how can you wipe the slate clean?Start by understanding the difference between sacrifice and betrayal. Some sacrifice is essential in relationships – compromising on where to eat dinner, adjusting your schedule to support your partner's big presentation. But when your own fundamental needs are consistently disregarded, you're not sacrificing – you're betraying yourself. Don't dress self-betrayal up as noble sacrifice. There's nothing virtuous about abandoning your boundaries to keep someone else comfortable.Next, consider the law of attraction – not in a mystical sense, but in a psychological one. We attract what we believe we deserve. We tend to attract people at the same level of healing as ourselves. Keep finding flawed partners who can't show up emotionally? It might be time to look inside yourself and ask what work you still need to do.How did you arrive here? Look honestly at your past relationships. If they've been characterized by drama, chaos, or abandonment, there's a chance you've learned to seek those patterns out again because they feel familiar, even when they hurt. Familiar dysfunction can feel safer than unfamiliar health.Finally, learn to understand the difference between being loved and feeling loved. Being loved means someone shows up consistently, respects your boundaries, and treats you well even when it's inconvenient. Feeling loved might just be the adrenaline rush of uncertainty or the relief when someone who's been distant suddenly pays attention. Settling up means choosing to be loved, not just to feel loved.
Final summary
In this Blink to The Opposite of Settling by Case Kenny, you’ve learned that settling up is about building a life you love first, then finding someone who amplifies it rather than completes it – choosing love from a place of fullness instead of emptiness. It means showing up as your authentic self, rejecting relationships that drain you, and understanding that the right person sparks your growth while you spark theirs. Whether you're single or partnered, the goal stays the same: create a life that excites you and only welcome people who enhance it, not define it.Okay, that’s it for this Blink. We hope you enjoyed it. If you can, please take the time to leave us a rating – we always appreciate your feedback. See you in the next Blink.
About the Author
Case Kenny is an author, podcaster, and “optimism educator.” He’s best known as the host of the popular podcast New Mindset, Who Dis?, where he shares practical insights on self-improvement, mindfulness, and living with intention. His work – making mindfulness accessible through short affirmations and mantras – has been featured on The Today Show, Forbes, and Good Morning America.