I know that you are taking some flack for your opinions in here, but I actually agree with your approach and have used it similarly in the past. The poster came to an outside, and in this case anonymous, group in order to gain some insight, but I agree with Tollhouse in that I believe the poster just doesn’t want to admit what her own conclusion is. If her boyfriend were a quarter as awesome as what she is trying to convince herself of, she wouldn’t be coming to us. So Tollhouse goes to the extreme to challenge the poster’s own “beliefs” and to help her admit what everyone else sees. So I think Tollhouse’s points sync well with my own.
Well put. It’s easy to recommend a bold plan when you aren’t the one who has to carry it out.
Some of the advice in this thread is just unrealistic. People are actually saying variations of, “If he loved you he’d want to do anything to make you happy so he’d get married just because you wanted to” By that logic if she loves him shouldn’t she abandon the marriage idea because it would make him happy?
Yes she’s in a financially insecure situation right now. And she should work very hard on trying to improve that. But that’s easier said than done. Is dumping the boyfriend who helps support her financially going to improve her financial security?
I don’t think anyone is arguing that the OP doesn’t need to prepare herself for the very real possibility that boyfriend isn’t going to marry her. But Tollhouse and some others are extrapolating limited data to some oddly specific conclusions.
I think you’ve nailed it - that sounds like a very good idea.
Mr. hunter and I dated for five years before I proposed to him because he wasn’t fast enough on the draw. He was in his late 30’s. People (especially my parents) were telling me that he didn’t care about me, that he wasn’t ever going to marry me, if he really loved me he’d have married me by now, etc. He also asked for premarital counseling as a necessary step before we got engaged. So I have a fair amount of sympathy for some of the things the OP has said. (28! At 28 there would have been no way mr. hunter would have agreed to marry anyone!)
As someone else said, the clearance thing is not much of an issue for premarital counseling (although I strenuously, strenuously disagree with another poster’s advice to pay cash and lie about counseling, THAT is what will prevent you from getting a clearance).
All that being said, this just doesn’t sound like a healthy relationship at all to me. I don’t think he’s evil, and I don’t think you are, but I do think it sounds very much to me like both your issues and his issues are playing off of each other in ways that just don’t sound good to me at all. Do you really want to get married with all these issues on the table?
[quote=“Grey_area, post:155, topic:652565”]
Echoing Lobohan, the advice to dump him or poison him in his sleep or whatever it was is kind of rash.
I always find it pretty entertaining that whenever anyone asks for relationship advice on this board, invariably half the responses are variations of “dump him/her”. Saying shit like he doesn’t love you is easy because it’s not your problem. QUOTE]
Well, yes it is easier to say because it isn’t our problem, but I think that’s why we sometimes ask the Dope - the people here are impartial and not entangled in the situation.
And I would say that often the answer is “dump him/her” is because by the time you write it down here you are likely to be in trouble already. I’ve actually mentally and sometimes physically written posts of the “what should I do about relationship x?” variety and the chorus of “Pookah, you know the answer” comes into my head immediately. I usually end up not even having to post them. It’s a case of, if you have to ask…
“Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t.” - Erica Jong
Better at least marry someone now, if not him. If you don’t get married by your mid 20s you never will. Some would say you should have been married before graduating from college.
Seems to me you need to really examine what YOU want, preferably away from him so you can know your own mind,without influence from another.
You seem to kinda want him to choose between marry me or be single again.
When really, it seems to be you who needs to choose between:
Becoming a harping shrew, in an attempt to get what you want/need from him risking that doing so may ruin your existing relationship. (Upside? You will learn, if not immediately, eventually, that you cannot push a rope. It will be messy and painful, but a good lesson to fully grasp, regardless!)
Sucking it up because otherwise you enjoy the relationship. I’m assuming he does indeed have other charms, yes? But still harbour ill feelings and growing resentments. Remember if you stay with him, you’ll be attending the weddings of your friends together. How’s that going to feel? Will every wedding you attend end in a shift fight? Some thing to think about.
Make a decision, go off alone somewhere preferably, and decide if this is a deal breaker or not for you. Then own and embrace that decision fully. Which means if you decide not to press him, or not to leave, that you accept it, and quit both trying to change his mind, and wishing it were otherwise. Also you then cannot blame him any more for your unhappiness.
Own it, one way or the other. This will shift responsibility from, him not abiding your wishes, to you having chosen this knowing full well he may never change his view. Now it’s on you, not him, should you grow disenchanted and unable to let it go. He has been open, and made no secret of his feeling, and YOU decided to hang in there expecting things to change or magically become unhurtful to you. When the shit hits the fan it will help you to recognize the responsibility, to get what you want is on you. Not on him.
Stop trying to frame your life as, “it just happened”. That’s terribly immature. You chose to move in without discussing your futures, you fell into complete financial dependence without regard for how crippling it would be for you moving forward in your life, or how much control he would have over you as a result.
Time to put on your big girl panties and decide what YOU want, and then do it. All decisions come with consequences. Not making a choice is also a choice. If you recognize you need/desire a change in the dynamic, yet fail to act in any way, it becomes just one more, ‘we’ll it just happened’, way of avoiding taking responsibility for yourself and your life.
Condensed version, if you are unsatisfied with the direction you are headed, then step up and start steering your ship instead of just going along and “falling into” one thing or another. Nobody gets where they want to be in life, it seems to me, being tossed by the wind, out of an unwillingness to step up and steer their own ship.
If it’s a deal breaker, for you, then own that and get on with the business of seeking what you want instead of tolerating something lesser out of sheer laziness or a unwillingness to create/face change!
Seems to me you need to really examine what YOU want, preferably away from him so you can know your own mind,without influence from another.
You seem to kinda want him to choose between marry me or be single again.
When really, it seems to be you who needs to choose between:
Becoming a harping shrew, in an attempt to get what you want/need from him risking that doing so may ruin your existing relationship. (Upside? You will learn, if not immediately, eventually, that you cannot push a rope. It will be messy and painful, but a good lesson to fully grasp, regardless!)
Sucking it up because otherwise you enjoy the relationship. ( I’m assuming he does indeed have other charms, yes? ) But still harbour ill feelings and growing resentments. Remember if you stay with him, you’ll be attending the weddings of your friends together. How’s that going to feel? Will every wedding you attend end in a shift fight? Some thing to think about.
Make a decision, (go off alone somewhere preferably), and decide if this is a deal breaker or not for you. Then own and embrace that decision fully. Which means if you decide not to press him, or not to leave, that you accept it, and quit both trying to change his mind, and wishing it were otherwise. Also you then cannot blame him any more for your unhappiness.
Own it, one way or the other. This will shift responsibility from, him not abiding your wishes, to you having chosen this knowing full well he may never change his view. Now it’s on you, not him, should you grow disenchanted and unable to let it go. He has been open, and made no secret of his feeling, and YOU decided to hang in there expecting things to change or magically become unhurtful to you. When the shit hits the fan it will help you to recognize the responsibility, to get what you want is on you. Not on him.
Stop trying to frame your life as, “it just happened”. That’s terribly immature. You CHOSE to move in without discussing your futures, you fell into complete financial dependence without regard for how crippling it would be for you moving forward in your life, or how much control he would have over you as a result.
Time to put on your big girl panties and decide what YOU want, and then do it. All decisions come with consequences. Not making a choice is also a choice. If you recognize you need/desire a change in the dynamic, yet fail to act in any way, it becomes just one more, ‘we’ll it just happened’, way of avoiding taking responsibility for yourself and your life.
Condensed version, if you are unsatisfied with the direction you are headed, then step up and start steering your ship instead of just going along and “falling into” one thing or another. Nobody gets where they want to be in life, it seems to me, being tossed by the wind, out of an unwillingness to step up and steer their own ship.
If it’s a deal breaker, for you, then own that and get on with the business of seeking what you want instead of tolerating something lesser out of sheer laziness or a unwillingness to create/face change!
I agree that you need to think about what is best for you…if you know in your heart that marriage is the next natural step, and want to be his wife, not his live in girlfriend (as you described yourself) think very long and hard about the implications of letting him string you along. If you know you want to be married, and to me it sounds like from what youve said you do, how will you feel five years from now when your attending weddings and baby showers ? Also if you really want children, as you know there is a time limit for that while he doesnt have to worry so much about a timeline, he can meet someone when hes sixty and become a dad. Other posts above cuationed you about staying indefinately with nothing to show for it, one said her friend stayed 26 years and the guy never did marry her, she ended up with nothing.
If you decide to stay it should ** only ** be if you have decided you honestly in your heart dont care about getting married or having children, since as another poster mentioned, he will likely start coughing up excuses about kids if that bcomes the next issue
In other words only stay if you are at peace with never getting married or aving kids, only if you are 100% happy and satisfied being as you put it “his livein girlfriend”
do not stay if your just really hoping he will change his mind
And, one other thing if you decide to stay bc your fine with remaining his indefinate girlfriend, you will need to financially protect yourself. As another poster said, go get yourname jointly on eerything. If he refuses to even have your name put on those things, then you have to decide if you can stomach the idea or if its even safe financially. He should be looking out for your well being. That is the very very least he should do, …if he does not want your name on anything then he is basically only really. concerned with himself
Let me also say (responding to my comment last night) that mr. hunter and I always agreed that our relationship was moving towards marriage, even when it was maybe not moving as quickly as I would have liked.
Also, when we talked about marriage, mr. hunter had good points and valid concerns – and so did I – that helped both of us clarify what we thought about our relationship and about marriage. We were in a semi-long-distance relationship for a while, and it concerned him that we didn’t necessarily understand how to live in close proximity. (We were both right. He was right that we needed to work through these issues before getting married; and I was right that our bond was strong enough to work through it.) He worried that I had been influenced heavily by my culture to think that I had to get married at a certain point, that it was The Thing To Do rather than something I really wanted for rational reasons. (He was right about some of that, too.) I thought at five years in (after we had gone to counseling and determined we had no significant issues) that there was no rational reason for him not wanting to get married, that he was just procrastinating at this point, and he agreed that this was the case.
I agree a lot with what elbows said above. You need to think hard about what you want and what he wants, and what deal-breakers are going to be (or not).
It’s fine with me if you’re not on the title to the house, if he gives you money for your business and you give him money for fixing up the house. Lots of people rent their whole lives and never buy, and lots of people are more or less tight with their money arrangements with their SO or spouse. It’s fine with me if you never get married. I have friends who never got married and they seem very happy. (To me, it’s less fine if he thinks he’s being abusive, but more on that below.) But if it’s not fine with you that you don’t have the financial security that most people in established relationships have (whether they are married or not, and whether one partner does much better financially than the other – I know couples where one doesn’t work, and they still regard themselves as partners and not as “oh, this one contributes more and this one contributes less,” because that is crazy-making), or whatever, then you need to address that.
Oh, as for the premarital counseling. If this is something YOU want, you don’t need to wait for him to set it up, as long as you are setting it up together as a pair. mr. hunter and I approached our counselor together, but I was clearly the one who was setting it up. That being said, if he’s really concerned about his anger issues, yeah, maybe he should be looking at counseling for that independently.
(Security-clearance wise, sure, counseling for anger issues might give him a slight ding, but if his anger issues get out of control, this will be a much, much bigger black mark against him. He should really talk to the security officer at his company about his concerns, and I really don’t understand why he hasn’t done this, for his own sake if not for yours.)
Is this a joke? I can’t really tell.
The thing is, I can tell you from very specific experience that people are only willing to listen to advice like this when they’re ready for it. This board told me to break up with my ex. My mother told me to break up with my ex. Everybody in the world could have talked until they were blue in the face but I wouldn’t have really listened to them. When I was really ready, as in I’d thought about it a lot myself and I suppose I’d really started to get on with grieving the relationship, somebody I hadn’t seen for ten years and wasn’t great friends with in college told me at our reunion to break up with him and then I listened.
I can’t either. We have people on this board with even whackier ideas, and they are (as far as I can tell) dead serious about them.
I’m leaning towards joke, but I too have my doubts.
I didn’t actually read the whole thread - only the OP and about half of the first page.
The reason I replying so quickly is that then I was reminded of the debate for whether a couple should move in before marriage or not.
Well, I am only 15 years old so I don’t have enough experience to offer anything that spectacular. But one thought that came to my head was that the OP’s situation is one reason why you don’t move in before marriage.
Just saying, I feel like it’s a risky move to move in before marriage and that it would have been better if the OP had waited this out until marriage. This way, you don’t end up in the situation the OP is in now and furthermore, you are kind of spoiling the fun. Marriage all of a sudden may not feel as special because you already spoiled the “excitement” of moving in.
These are just my 15 year-old thoughts and opinions, not really advice. I will also try to catch up on reading the thread.
I get what you’re saying, Anonymous User. There’s moving in together, and then there’s moving in together - sometimes people just move in together because, what the hell, why not? Other times people move in together because they know they’re going to get married in the not too distant future, and this is The One - you’re going to be together a long, long time. I don’t think either way is right or wrong; I think one situation is great for when you’re young and trying on different things, and the second is great for when you’re a bit older and you’re ready to settle down.
To tell you the honest truth, I don’t know which one applies to the OP - maybe she thought she was doing the second one, and her boyfriend thinks he’s doing the first one.
Lady, you’re an idiot. (I’m an idiot too, so don’t take it too hard.)
Any lawyer will tell you you’re making a huge mistake making contributions to his net worth rather than yours. Step 1: have him file a quit-claim deed on the house, so you’re part owner. If you’re renting, I guess we’re just talking about cars, so stop paying for his car. If you have a joint account, no problem: that’s half yours, half his – if you’re fine with that no worries.
After you’ve taken care of that, let the dust settle for a month or so.
Then give him an ultimatim. Tell him that you plan to live life as someone’s wife and you want it to be his, but if that’s not in the cards, then “it’s been nice but so long.” Or whatever words you like.
My wife gave me an ultimatim (about moving in together, not marriage, but I knew that for me, moving in meant that she was the one.) That was 27 years ago, and I’m still glad I didn’t hesitate. She was also the one to say “If we’re getting married, the timing would work out best if …”
I disagree with anyone who says he’s a lost cause. You don’t know that yet. But to find out, you’ll have to risk your relationship. You have to decide what’s more important to you: being in a truly committed relationship, or being with him. Chances are good that you can have both.
I had a friend (co-worker; I was her manager) who lived with her BF for over 20 years. They were definitely soul mates. But one day he had a heart attack, and she went from being his virtual wife to a bystander. She had no legal ground to do anything, regarding disposition of his property to planning his funeral. Fortunately, his mom wasn’t an ogre, and included her – but it was entirely his mom’s show legally and literally. Of course, the loss of her man was the tragedy, but the consequences of being unmarried made everything worse. The real irony was, they’d recently asked each other, why the heck aren’t we married, and had decided (informally) to fix that.
Fortunately she was joint owner of their house, so she had no fear of being evicted. Things were bad enough without that.
BTW, “relationship counseling” is not “psychological therapy”.
You don’t have to have psych issues to need relationship counseling. If you can talk him into that (good luck) he can honestly say “no” to any questions about psych therapy. After all, you don’t think he has psych issues, you just have issues with your relationship. Right?
Above, someone mentioned discussing children first. Definitely yes, and other critical value issues. My guess is you should already know the answer, but good friends of mine married after years of living together, but as it turns out they were incompatible regarding children: he never wanted any, she did. So, make sure you really know the answers to core value issues. People can get over all sorts of problems, but if there are core values that are incompatible, the relationship is doomed in one way or another.
I would say you’re not totally off the mark, in that many people do what my ex and I did - move in accidentally. Never at any one point in that relationship did we sit down and consciously decide to move to the “next level” - he just stayed over at my place more and more until he didn’t really live at his apartment anymore, but that was his office, and then eventually they quit leasing that house but it was never a specific conscious decision that we made together. That’s the kind of moving in that is IMHO a bad idea.