I agree with Electric Warrior. It’s entirely up to Don.
More people in the world don’t marry for love than do. Some of them simply lie about it. More of them don’t choose their own spouse, or marry a family friend under pressure from their parents. Seems like, most of the time, things work out fine.
Marrying for love is a wonderful thing, don’t get me wrong. But it’s not the only way it works, and works well. If they’re compatible (as it sounds they are) and everyone’s being honest, I think they’re already ahead of the game.
On the other hand, we’re in a culture which strongly, overwhelmingly, views love as a prerequisite for marriage. And that seems to work pretty well, too.
And asking her for more information might be interesting, too. Maybe she’s got some delusional vision of “love” imprinted from too many Disney movies as a young girl. Maybe she’s got some baggage from a previous relationship and can’t allow herself to speak the word, but feels the emotion. Maybe she’s a sociopath incapable of love (doubtful, given her caretaking history.)
Nonsense. There are any number of people I’d do that for if I were able to, and I love them, but I’m not in love with them. To the best of my knowledge that doesn’t constitute a mental disease. :dubious:
Should he marry her? No. Even if the ONLY thing missing is that indefinable ‘something’, that indefinable something is important, and living without it is pretty unsatisfying.
I think that’s contradicted by her saying that she doesn’t think she’s capable of feeling or at least expressing the depth of feeling Don just has. He says that he’s never loved anyone as he loves her, after all.
Mightn’t it be that she’s dismayed by the Romeo-&-Julietness of his protestation of love? If she thinks that that sort of thing only exists in sonnets, or can never last in the long run, she might be dismayed to hear someone claim to feel it for her. If she thinks that romantic love is nature’s way of tricking us into reproducing, she might not be able to admit to feeling that way about anyone herself, even if her actions say otherwise.
He should rescind the proposal. I don’t think love between two people is ever totally equal, but ideally Don should wait for someone that feels considerably more romantic love for him than Mary appears to. It’s also possible she’s been lying to herself about her feelings for him or isn’t sure what she feels, and that alone is reason for him to wait.
Nobody is saying it isn’t. The question is about what advice you would give him. Telling him “it’s up to you” is no advice at all.
Don clearly wants to marry for love (which is really the only healthy reason to do it, absent some purely cynical, mutually self-serving legal reason), so it would make no sense for him to marry if he doesn’t have that.
Have you been seriously dating these people for over a year and are you having regular sex with them? You can’t be in a dating relationship with someone, act completely selflessly when your partner needs you most and then turn around and say “Yeah, I don’t really love you, but you’re my best friend, and if you REALLY want to get married, let’s do it.”
If she’s not capable of feeling it at all, for anybody, then she has some kind of emotional disorder and he should be very wary of marrying her. He should definitely not get her pregnant.
No, but that wasn’t your assertion, your assertion was that doing that proved she was in love with him, but too mentally ill to realize it. I’m simply noting that it’s possible to do that for someone, and not be in love with them. I could even see doing it for someone I’d been dating but wasn’t in love with. Of course, if that person then proposed, I would just say no.
Pretty much this. If they’d mutually agreed “Hey, I care about you and this is really working, and I can live without bells and fireworks.” that would be fine. But I certainly wouldn’t recommend being with someone you’re deeply in love with who doesn’t feel the same way.
Well, you could tell him “{marrying / not marrying her} is the better course of action for reasons x, y, and z”, but I don’t think this applies, because in my opinion there isn’t one correct answer. I think that the hypothetical is worded so that Mary’s statement should be taken at face value - that she cares for him deeply but isn’t in romantic love with him - and as such, Don just has to decide if he can deal with the fact that things are probably not going to change and she isn’t going to wake up one day and decide that she is suddenly in love with him. So that is my advice.
They should ask him what, precisely, he wants out of marriage, because that’s going to be the determining factor in rescinding the proposal or not.
If he wants someone who will be his friend and lover and will wipe his ass when he can’t without even thinking about what’s in it for her, then he should marry her. If he wants someone to feel the same way about him that he feels about her, then he shouldn’t marry her. There’s no right or wrong, only what he can and can’t be happy with.
Relationships where one party has more of an emotional investment than the other are, in my opinion, a lousy idea. I’d paste the xckd that deals with this if I could. Mary is settling. I would tell Don to look for someone who loves him, who is in love with him, and who chooses him above other people because they click.
There are lots of relationships where one party never feels “That way” about the other. I don’t think it’s much of a foundation for a marriage.
Several of y’all (Dio & jsgoddess are the first two who spring to mind, and I’m too lazy to scroll up) seem to feel that it’s the not-being-in-love thing that would cause you to say, “Look, Don, you’re filthy rich, you shouldn’t settle for a woman who isn’t in love with you.” Can I ask y’all to define “being in love”?
Mary knows she’s lacking something that Don is expecting out of a romantic relationship. That’s really all the definition necessary for this particular hypothetical.
But, in general, being in love to me means feeling that someone is special to you, longing to be with that person, enjoying their company above the company of others, feeling a frisson of delight and desire in their company, loving them, thinking good things about them, valuing them, cherishing them, and, to put it bluntly, being able to say “I love you” wholeheartedly because it’s true.
Retract the offer, see how things are in 6 months.
I cant see why this needs to be put under such time pressure, 12 months can be pretty early to be sure of anything, particularly if a large crash has been in the middle of it.
Does sounds like theres a fair chance she’s just someone who over-thinks things but that can be trouble in itself.