1,001. I found that out.
That was considerate of you, since if nothing else it no doubt saved your wife from some family friction.
Because from the details we have it’s based upon wants and not needs.
And, ‘from the details we have’, you determined this how?
As it happens, my marriage died because we lost the spark but out values were very aligned. We’re still best friends. That said, I largely agree with you.
Well, then apparently any deadline would be artificial and loony to you. Even if I’ve got a month to live, wanting to get married before I die is still only a want.
Because there was really no reasoning stated. Without that, I assume the motivation isn’t driven by a need.
But that would make the deadline not arbitrary, since it’s based on when getting married wouldn’t be possible any more.
What, in context of a relationship, would you consider a “need” as opposed to a “want”?
I need to breathe. I need to have baseline nutrition. I need to urinate. I need to sleep. I want clean air. I want food that satisfies, tastes good, and is healthy. I want a bathroom that doesn’t smell bad. I want at least seven hours of uninterrupted sleep.
There are few needs in a relationship; there are many wants. Some of those wants are nonnegotiable. We each get to, artificially, decide what they are for us.
Yeah, but there’s nothing keeping us from adjusting our deadlines on those things. I need to eat today, I’d like to have dinner. It doesn’t have to happen at 5:30, and me deciding we won’t have dinner together because it didn’t happen by then is loony.
Both my sons-in-law did this (the second probably egged on by the first) and I assure you I found it weird but amusing. I didn’t ask my prospective father-in-law - my wife was plenty old enough to decide by herself, as were my kids.
And it is not like my saying no (no chance of that) would have any impact. Nor should it.
Yeah, but if she knew this after 18 months, why not breakup then and not waste half a year?
If someone I’m interviewing for a job wants to set a strict timetable for promotions, and has a schedule of raises we’re supposed to follow, they are not likely to get the job unless they were an extraordinary match - and probably not even then.
Yeah, my wife wasn’t personally invested for herself but she knew that her parents would expect me to at least let them know my intentions and that it would just make things smoother if I did. So I did and it was no big deal.
In an alternate timeline he did propose, but now they’ve been engaged for five years and they still haven’t set a date.
Sure - assuming she knew after 18 months. Chances are good that if he had ever said he didn’t want to get married she would have broken up sooner ( at least if this was a real situation). But there are plenty of people who are OK with the status quo and don’t want to rock the boat - both women who will convince themselves that the guy they’ve been with for 12 years really will marry them someday and men who don’t tell women they have no intention of ever getting married because they don’t want ot get married but they also don’t want to break up.
So let me see if I’ve got this right - if I want to eat at 5:30 and you want to wait until 7 , I’m loony if I decide to have dinner on my own?
No, we agree to have dinner together at 5:30 and one of us gets occupied with something that prevents that. It’d be fine if whoever was waiting decided to go ahead and eat, but pretending that they were going to die if they waited until 7 and ate with the other person would be silly. It’s an arbitrary deadline.
Okay. So we are talking about wants; not needs.
No you don’t need to eat today. You could fast 24 hours. You could eat every other day. You could adjust that timing. You don’t want to. You want to eat dinner every day and probably at least one other meal too. You decide for yourself what timeframe of meals is acceptable for those wants. What is reasonable and what is looney.
She knows she wants to find a life partner and during this period in her life. Not just play around. And she rationally believes that two years is enough time for two adults to decide whether or not they are right for each other. Maybe less but certainly by then.
It doesn’t seem looney to me. It seems self aware and mature.
Not entirely the same thing, but my (now) wife’s grandparents (her dad passed before we met) had us over for dinner the night before we were moving in together (and to another state), her grandpa called me into the kitchen and I fully expected a lecture or at least grilling about my plans for his only grandchild.
It turns out he had a beef with the cable company where I worked, about the added costs to watch the Mets, and wanted to see if I could fix it (my job was unrelated, so no). I don’t really recall asking anyone for “her hand” but they knew I was asking.
My wife did say at some point while we were living together that she wanted to be engaged by her birthday, which was mostly helpful to have a date to target as it was inevitable at that point.
We ended up buying a house together before we wed, and celebrated 30 years this week.
It’s not loony to break up. Needing a self-imposed deadline to do it, maybe a little bit. What’s loony is announcing this on the first date, before there is any sense of compatibility. If she decided she might want to marry this guy (thinking Cole Porter’s “Tom, Dick, and Harry” here) maybe see what he thinks about marriage a few weeks into the relationship?
Suzanne Somers and Alan Hamel dated for 10 years before they married.