So, you're recently engaged after three years of dating your boyfriend.
Actually, three and a half years. We'd been living together for two years! It was getting embarrassing! If you can live with someone for two years, especially in a small apartment, you should know by then whether you could spend the rest of your life with him. Why wait?
I can think of a number of reasons. Many people wait until they're financially stable or situated in their careers before they get married. You merge assets, you share a home and you share financial burdens, in some cases you have kids. Many people wait until they can afford to get married before they propose, even if they know they're going to spent the rest of their lives with their significant other.
There are plenty of people who get married when they're young and broke and build their lives together. Think about most of the rich, successful couples we know. Many of them got married before they became successful and that's what makes it so great. It truly was for richer and for poorer.
It's also about having stability in your career and life otherwise. I have a friend who just got married in May, and in September his wife returned to school in Virginia. His job was in D.C., so they now live apart and see each other two weekends a month. They've essentially chosen separate lives and neither of them wants to compromise, but because they're married, they're going to spend the next six years basically apart. That doesn't sound ideal.
But if they hadn't gotten married, they would have probably broken up!
But maybe they should have. Love is not always enough. Marriage is also about timing. If you set a hard date on it, you can get stuck in a position like my friend, who has to try to make a long-distance marriage work for the next six years.
So instead, she's supposed to start over in her late twenties and find someone new? If they decided to get married after she was done with school, they'd be in their mid-thirties. Then if one of them suddenly decided they no longer wanted to get married, the other would be in a really tough position. It's harder to start over as you get older. If you want to have kids, you could be screwed.
But why does it matter if you're married, if you love each other? I don't think every relationship should be fixated on marriage or figuring out if that person is the one. I've dated plenty of guys I knew I could never marry, but it didn't make the time we spent together any less meaningful. Isn't it better to let a relationship run its natural course?
But after a while, what's the point? If I waste another three years with this person and we end up breaking up, then why not just break up now? If you're not ready to commit to someone after three years together, there's something wrong with you! It's about making a lifelong commitment, not testing the waters for twenty years.
Statistics show that people who wait longer to get married usually have better luck in marriage. With one in ten marriages ending in divorce, don't you want to make sure that this person is the one for you before you make the commitment?
You can never be absolutely one-hundred-percent sure. After a few years together, if you're not ready to take the leap, it's more like you're never gonna be ready, not that you're still not sure.
Everyone's relationship progresses at a different rate. What if you're ready to get married and your partner isn't, but both of you eventually want to get married to each other? Wouldn't you rather wait until the person you love is ready? Why force the matter?
I don't think that's fair. I told my fiance that if he didn't propose, we would break up. It's not like he was waiting for anything, but he needed to realize how important marriage was for me, and that I wasn't going to stick around without a commitment from him. I want to have kids, I want to have the security of a commitment, and I'm not getting any younger, so I didn't want to waste any more time if he wasn't in the same place.
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