I also suffered from commitment-phobia in my 20s and early 30s, and I will add my voice to the chorus suggesting therapy. It helped me significantly.
I also don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with people, for religious or other cultural reasons, moving toward marriage faster than the general public. Lots and lots of cultures don’t do the rich/western/educated thing where they have long pre-marital cohabiting relationships and… they seem to mostly do fine and end up in happy marriages. And while it may not explain earlier girlfriends, if Wendy is also in her mid-30s and wants to have children, talking about a pretty short timeline for marriage is reasonable for biological considerations. But of course if you are not comfortable with that, then it doesn’t work for you, and you should carefully consider what you want, both in terms of when/whether you want to be married, but also what your values are and what you want your life to look like. A therapist can help you talk through this stuff and figure it out.
A Toyota Camry is “suitable.” It may have simply been semantics, but that struck me as a fairly low bar to use in choosing a life partner.
“Fireworks” may not always last, but it’s not bad to feel something along those lines in the early stages.
I think the choice of life partners should begin in the heart, and then transition to the head. Love is a great thing. Partnership – how you get along in the day-to-day and how you manage/resolve conflict – is the money shot.
A less poetic take is "Sex is what gets you (mostly male yous) interested. Love is what gets you married. Partnership is what gets you staying married and happily so.
The smart and reasonably cautious person ensures the partnership piece is in place or at least is coming into place with no evident showstoppers before committing to the marriage piece.
There is an old and very true saying; “No relationship is much better than a bad one.” In other words, “Speed kills”. If you weren’t ready, you weren’t ready. One could also say that weren’t patient. It’s all a matter of perspective. If you try to force yourself into being someone you’re not by rushing into something you are not ready for, it could end very badly.
Question might be why are you consistently hooking up with women who pressure you about marriage after a few months? Why are you so fixated on taking things to the marriage level? How important is your church life to you now?
All questions to explore with a therapist, over a period of about a year. Therapy can take time. The talking is only a small part of it.
I have to agree with @MandaJo. Marriage should be viewed as a pragmatic legal construct when you are ready to start a family (at least conceptually) and bring another person into your family.
I would disagree with many posters that you need years of living together to decide whether or not you should get married. You should know after a year (and probably well before that). Any longer than that, you are kind of wasting each other’s time. Inertia can set in so you may find yourself moving towards marriage just because you’ve been together for so long.
Also, people change over time and in response to different life events. Living together for 5 years isn’t going to protect you from that person changing after you get married (or not changing when they should). Like you don’t want to spend half your life with a person to decide if you want to spend the rest of your life with a person. Take a reasonable risk (once you are ready) and if it doesn’t work out it doesn’t work out.
Finally - I’ve been married ten years as of yesterday and my wife and I dated for years and years before that. Let me tell you that marriage with kids kind of sucks. Like an unfunny version of any family sitcom. I love my wife and kids and all, but it really does seem to turn into a full time job co-project managing your life with budgets, task lists, outsourcing vendors, travel routes, inventories, relationship building and whatnot on top of my full time job (which also happens to be project management). My family brings me a lot of joy too. but I don’t want to sugar coat that a lot of it is tedium. When Frank the Tank half-heartedly describes his big Saturday of hitting the box stores, that’s an actual thing. Every time I have to drive my wife to Target or Walmart or Lowe’s to return some stupid thing she bought it takes a tremendous amount of will to not jump the median on I-80 and crash headlong into the nearest truck.
My point is that there is a very real reason you don’t want to get married. As much as you might think someone is “suitable” or even “the one”, recognize that it is a lot of work and you shouldn’t feel pressured to get married just because (I assume) you live in the sort of place where everyone goes to church and gets married at 23 because that’s what everyone does. Remember that most people are idiots and you don’t need to follow their example.
I have an old saying: before you marry somebody, it would be great if you could:
Spend a rain-soaked weekend camping together, stuck in a tent
Go sailing together for a few days
Travel for a week or two to an ‘emerging nation’
I say this for the same reason an old GF of mine used to say, “It’s easy to have fun … having fun.”
It won’t always be sunshine and unicorns. It’s helpful for each of you to understand how the other reacts, and what dynamic you can create, when the going gets tough and it’s really just the two of you.
I once heard a marriage counselor say something to the effect of “I can tell what kind of relationship I’m looking at by watching how they resolve conflict.”
Which is one reason that getting past the proverbial (not literal) honeymoon phase may reveal more than the initial heady period of dating can.
Contrary to what several posters have written above, I think that discussing marriage and kids very early in a relationship is essential.
Imagine you really, really want to have children and take that as a given, but only talk about it after a year and only then realize that your partner absolutely refuses to even consider the idea. You have two options : either one of you sacrifices their life plans and the relationship is doomed, or you break up, start all over again after having pretty much wasted your time. It doesn’t mean that you have to make concrete plans right away, of course. I agree that that could be a bit disturbing. But if just hearing the word “marriage” is making you feel pressurized into tying the knot, then I’d also suggest seeking a professional opinion.
But forget about gut feeling. Some people are insanely gifted at tricking others into trusting them. So what should you really look for ?
Well, plenty of poster have voiced some excellent advice above. I’ll echo some of them. Past the honeymoon phase where your new partner is the best thing that has ever happened to you, two things strike me as necessary : the willingness to walk the talk and the ability to resolve the inevitable conflicts in a respectful way. If one of these two points is lacking, get ready for serious trouble down the line.
The OP talks about marriage the way I talk about a job I might be considering. I don’t really “want” it “like OMG this is my life’s calling!” Usually I take a job because I need one and it checks off the major boxes. I don’t hear the OP is madly in love with and can’t live without any of these relationships. They all sound sort of “yeah, I guess they check the boxes”.
You don’t want to go into marriage with that same level of ambivalence. In spite of what the busybodies at your church seem to be telling you, no one “needs” marriage unless they really do. Those parishioners aren’t going to be living with you day in and day out helping you with your marriage stuff.
Yeah. The aphorism I’ve heard is that the decision to marry should not be inspired by the feeling that this is someone you can live with. It should be inspired by the feeling that this is someone you can’t live without.
(Caveat: Of course a good marriage does require a lot of practical day-to-day compatibility, and it is not healthy to be held hostage by desperate feelings of literally life-or-death passionate attachment. But the point of the saying is that most people who want to marry for love really do need a strong and deep emotional fulfillment in the relationship if the marriage is going to survive. Not just a lukewarm satisfaction that the potential partner is “suitable”.)
Another vote for “a relationship of a few months is not long enough to decide whether you want to be with someone for the rest of your life”. I met my wife when we were both 17. After a 5-year relationship (mostly long-distance) we decided to try living together. After a year of that we bought a place together. Then we got engaged, and then married. Obviously we were very young to begin with, which is a factor, but even at 35 I wouldn’t be committing to marry someone after a few months of dating. Even if your preference or culture precludes living together before marriage, I would give it more time before any proposal.
Having said that, it’s fair enough to discuss the topics of long-term commitment and children with your partner - it would just be, in terms of the former, that you are open to the idea but you are not ready to make that commitment yet. If that’s a dealbreaker for her, that’s more her problem than yours. In terms of the latter, if you have opposite views on the subject then that may be a fair reason to end the relationship.
Before I bought our first home with my (now) wife, I had lots of conversations with myself about whether this was what I really wanted (as I saw that as a greater commitment than marriage, in practical terms). It was hard for me because I had no other relationships to compare it to. So it was possible that there was someone else out there who would be even better for me. In the end though I basically decided (though I may not put it in such terms to my beloved) not to let the (hypothetical) perfect be the enemy of the good. I was (and still am) very happy with my decision, though like most relationships it does take constant work.