Male board members, time to give your two cents

In My Humble Opinion
101

This is really bad advice. If you take it, this is what will end up happening to you. . .

No long-term relationship is ever going to work without open and honest communication. Hiding things from your partner results in a relationship that ends “with a lot of hurt on both ends.” You’ll eat yourself up alive not only keeping secrets and hiding your true feelings, but wondering about all the ‘what ifs’ when it’s over.

It may be painful to walk away from an otherwise wonderful relationship, but if it’s ultimately not fulfilling for you, odds are that it won’t stay a wonderful relationship for very much longer. Resentment and disappointment have an ugly way of building up and destroying affection.

I understand exactly how you feel about what you want and why. It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks about the value or merit of your decision. You want it for whatever your personal reasons are, and you have a right to pursue relationships that will potentially offer you that. I gave up a relationship in my early 20s, after 5 years together, because in spite of how deeply we loved each other, we wanted different things for our futures. He’s Catholic and I’m Jewish, and compromising turned out not to be an option with regard to raising children. I don’t regret a moment of that time I spent loving a man who brought extraordinary joy to my life and helped me grow and learn, even though he ultimately changed his mind about how strongly he felt about having only his religion in the home. A lot of people disagreed with our decision to “let religion get in the way of our relationship,” but I respect him enormously for having the strength of his convictions and I wanted nothing more than for him to find happiness in his life, even if it couldn’t be with me.

And I have since found my soulmate, too. But my husband is from Denmark, where they take a much less ‘urgent’ view of marriage. Couples tend to live together, start families and then get married after many years have gone by. It’s kindof SOP over there, so that’s what his expectations were with how things would progress with us. However, like you, that’s not the way I wanted it. I wanted to be married, and I made it quite clear from the beginning that I wasn’t willing to compromise on that particular issue – no ‘playing house’ for me. If he didn’t want to get married, we could move on and look for more compatible partners. He proposed 9 months after we met, and I feel pretty confident in saying that he doesn’t feel as if he was pressured into doing it my way as opposed to his.

To sum up, the best advice I can give is not to compromise and to be forthright in your desires. I don’t think you’ll ever regret either action, even if you end up having to walk away to pursue what’s important to you if he’s unwilling to provide it. I wish you well in resolving this situation with your partner.

102

It sounds to me like what HE needs is the following:

–for lezlers to be a good girlfriend to him;
–for her to remain silent about her needs and desires to be in a committed relationships;
–for her to stay with him for an indefinite amount of time whether he is willing to make a committment or not.

He uses tactics to shut her up about the issue, or to give her just enough hope that she will stick around, but at the same time makes it just clear enough that he doesn’t want to hear about it. That doesn’t seem fair to me. All the while lezlers sits patiently, but with no knowledge about how he feels or where things or headed, or if there is any chance that he wants the same things out of the relationship that she does. I think she may be giving him too much power over the status and future of the relationship.

103

dmatsch, I’d like to believe that we’ve created an environment here where people can be honest about their feelings and not be judged. If you can’t do that, please don’t participate in the thread.**

For everyone else, we just had an unplanned conversation about it (he saw me typing over here and guessed what the topic was about, go figure), wherein he again tried the “relax” bit, which didn’t fly. He convinced me that he does intend to marry me, so it appears as if we’re good. At least, I feel much better now.

Thank you everyone for your advice and support.

104

What perpetuating of stereotypes is the OP doing?

She may have started out the thread with that statement, but (as with most issues) once delved into, her position became clarified. This is perpetuating stereotypes? :confused:

I NEVER as a child played “wedding” or “bride”–I did play house (I preferred to play school), as did my brother and every other child socialized in a house. Kids mimic their parents and want to be grown up.

Forget the stereotypes–I think you have more than one problem on your hands at present. I don’t like his evasion of this topic. “you have nothing to worry about” sounds awfully close to “don’t worry your[pretty little]head about this.” It’s dismissive and almost patronizing (alot would depend on his tone and body language when he says it, though).

He is of an age that should be wrestling with this-I also don’t like his cricket who sang all summer attitude. Perhaps he is wrestling(?). IMO, he needs to come clean with you. Either come out and say, “the thought of this so paralyzes me that I can’t breathe” or “there is no chance for us” or “yes, in 2 years” or whatever.

At least you would know where you stand. No one wants to coerce anyone into anything, much less something as crucial as marriage, but there are limits and standards of conduct to be adhered to.

How is it fair to the OP to just go along to get along? What is that? How is that “a compromise”? Seems to me that that compromise is pretty one sided. He gets a convenient fuck and nice company (and hell, probably clean socks too) and she gets…what exactly? Not what she wants–which is to be married and planning a family. She gets a convenient fuck and nice company–but it’s not enough for her. He would be getting the same things if they were married. She is not getting what she needs at present.

There is no shame in that, and she shouldn’t have to defend it as a choice. Jeesh.

105

AMEN! eleanorigby! Well put, well put.

106

oops- a simul-post! Good news, and I hope things work out for you.

(excuse my bitterness in my previous posts, I’m in a bit of a turmoil re men and marriage right now)

107

No worries. Thank you, both eleanorigby and nyctea, for your support, especially. You both put into words exactly what I was feeling, much better than I have been able to.

He wanted a definite time table, but I didn’t want to give him one, it seemed way too business-like. He said he thought a good time was when we were established in our respective careers. I told him that would be a good 2-3 years away which was too long for me. He mentioned he wanted to concentrate on school right now and I told him that was entirely reasonable. So it appears we reached some kind of compromise.

108

The OP is asking about his boyfriend not willing to marry her, but I’m going to ask the reverse question : why exactly does she want to marry him?

I don’t think the default assumption should be marriage and that only the person refusing to get married should have to justify himself.
You’d certainly have to come up with a good reason to convince me I should marry you (something practical could do the trick) . Also, I find marriage unromantic.

109

I really hate to say this, lezlers, but his actions and signals to you sure aren’t encouraging. He’s not a child; he flat-out knows marriage and children are important to you. But he still evades, stalls and makes dismissive comments about marriage in general. All his ‘answers’ come slantwise but every signal he sends is, no, he doesn’t want to get married. It sounds like he’s hoping enough time will drift past until you give up on the idea.

Why be so concerned about his peace of mind? He shows little sign of being concerned about yours. If he’s so antsy he can’t even handle a little honest communication then the relationship isn’t all that strong to begin with. Stating your needs and wants isn’t confrontational. Neither is letting his know that you won’t wait forever while he makes up his mind. That isn’t fair to you…or his daughter, whom he allowed to become fond of you. If his committment to you is so fragile it won’t bear even some serious talk then better to know that now.

My advice, which is about as useful as anything from a total stranger, is to just sit him down and tell him, without apology or debate, that you want marriage and children. Period. If he doesn’t want that then he owes you honesty enough to say so. If he might, then he also owes you some indication that he’s seriously considering it. Telling you to ‘relax’, making dismissive comments about marriage, etc. isn’t just dishonest. It’s damned unkind, at the very least, especially towards one he claims to love enough to make marriage unneccessary.

At the least, put him on notice that you are not his to string along forever. If he can’t make a firm committment right now, at the very least he can promise to stop treating the idea carelessly. He owes you that. If he can’t even do that much…then, I’m sorry to say, you already have your answer.

The best of all possible luck to you, lezlers.

110

Well, it looks like things are winding down, but I just had to chime in and say AMEN to eleanorigby as well. Anyway, best of luck lezlers and I hope it works out; glad to hear he made some sort of a committment.

A little ways back, nyctea asks why men behave like this while women behave like that. I wonder if part of it isn’t just our culture encouraging it. Girls are encouraged to play wedding–lots of them anyway–I wasn’t and I didn’t. Guys are sometimes brought up to value getting around and not family life.

I have to say that I grew up in a sub-culture that highly values marriage and family, and a huge percentage of guys I’ve known have actually been more eager to get married than the women have. Not that I haven’t known any women who wanted to get married right away, or guys who wanted to wait, but by and large, when my rather large network of friends was pairing off and getting engaged and stuff, it was very, very common for the women to be the nervous ones and the men to be the impatient ones. I can remember living in a house with 3 other women, all of us in possibly-permanent relationships, and we were completely freaking out. When DangerDad asked me out for the first time, I panicked, and when he proposed, I had hysterics. And we were all like that!

I dunno, maybe we were weird, but there were quite a few of us. (Oh, and I got two proposals from boyfriends long before I was ready to think about marriage; one was at 17. Neither of them were in my little sub-culture, either.)

111

Here’s my $.02…to me, marriage is a contract that a person enters into with the idea that there are special commitments that should stand the test of time and temporary circumstances.

Having said that, as a man, when I willingly married, it was with the intention of promising that I would hold to certain standards of faith, affection, tolerance, and companionship. The concept of marriage is only for those who want to make such a promise (I have no issues with those who don’t want to agree to those conditions; I don’t really understand those who want to waffle later with claims of being pushed into the marriage); so if you want a marriage you need a partner who also wants a marriage.

But I admit that there is a certain bias after 42 years of marriage.

Best wishes.

112

lezlers cares.

113

Well, this is opening up a can of worms, but . . . .

As I mentioned, one factor is that in a grossly-oversimplified view of things, the dating/mating marketplace favors hot, young women and established, secure (older) men.

Without pointing a finger of blame, when we ask, why don’t 30 year old men always leap at the chance to marry 30 year old women who are “ready,” we could also ask, why don’t hot college cheerleaders stop to examine the merits of the stammering freshman chemistry major? Because they don’t have to. They don’t gain much by doing so. And they don’t lose much of value to them by not doing so, whatever inner virtues Poindexter may have.

Here is a theory: people rarely spontaneously act much better or more philanthropic than the market requires them to. Professionally successful 30 year old men have some market value among similarly-aged women (just as hot college cheerleaders have a market value with just about any men). They may subconsciously sense that even if they do not please their current squeeze 110%, they might likely be able to find another. They don’t experience, at all, any sort of biological clock. (In my early 30s, I would occasionally do the math and think, well, I’d be fifty when my kid went to college, that’s a bit old, but oh well – but that was the extent of any time pressure I felt, and it wasn’t comparable at all to the fertility concerns my GFs had at the time).

Another theory: Empathy is pretty weak as a human motivator. Everytime I or my friends heard the biological-clock arguments, there was a tendency to think: Okay, but that’s not MY problem. Of course that’s an awful way to put it, and of course it’s not true if you’re really committed to her such that it is your joint problem – but I think it’s a human-nature knee-jerk reaction.

I believe that (many) women do have a hardwired desire for security in the form of marriage. The writer Alain de Botton once theorized (I don’t think he’s alone) that (paraphrasing) feminism had really screwed women by dissing marriage as some form of servitude and creating an illusory age of free love where it was socially “okay” (for the first time) for men and women to shack up (more or less monogamously), long-term, with no real shame and without the man feeling any pressure to “make an honest woman of her.” Women, who had previously demanded a ring as the price of admission, felt “old-fashioned” or otherwise embarrassed at the thought of “demanding” marriage, so they stayed silent and in relationships that were “good” for the guys, who got what they wanted (companionship and sex) without having to give the usual reciprocal commitment (longterm presence and financial support over time).

I think de Botton was a little harsh on the guys (he doesn’t mention the market advantage that hot young women have and exploit, and the effects this might have on the equation), but essentially correct. If nothing else, the fact that we see, overall, a pattern of young/middle-aged women wanting marriage and their peer-group men sometimes evading it (exceptions exist, YMMV) pretty crushingly gives the lie to any Friedan-esque notion of marriage as slavery for women.

114

I don’t want to sell a brother out, but are you sure that is a compromise? It sounds like you guys were not exactly joining issue.

You: I’m not going to wait forever.
Him: Ummm, okay . . . how long will you wait?
You: I’m not going to make an arbitrary deadline.
Him (hopeful): Umm, okay, then how 'bout let’s say 2-3 years?
You: No, that’s too long.
Him: Okay, umm, I want to concentrate on school now, let’s talk about this later.

To me, there’s a reading of that that says when the conversation took a turn he didn’t like, he sort of changed the subject to an equivalent of “I can’t think about this right now.” Unless you read this as affirmatively meaning “I’ll marry you as soon as school is over.” Which is plausible, and you were there and I wasn’t, but I just wanted to point out that he might not implausibly think the only “compromise” you reached was an agreement that you would not bug him about this until graduation.

115

What some people need is not really relevant. If party A in a couple wants marriage and party B doesn’t, it’s a problem for that couple. A person who doesn’t “need” marriage needs to find a partner who feels the same way about the matter.

What you feel the need for isn’t necessarily the sole consideration when you’re in a relationship with someone who needs or wants more. The question is, really, does what party A need conflict with what party B needs. The question for party B in this relationship is: Is a public declaration for you simply unnecessary in your view or is it undesirable?

116

I’ve been exactly in the position her boyfriend is in.

She wants children. IMHO the discussion should be more about whether he wants children then whether he wants to get married. The fact that he already has a kid seems pretty important to me, and in my experience if he did not already have a child he’d be more willing to move forward. One thing that scared me about (re)marriage was that should it fail and we had children, I didn’t want to be in the position of being a part time father again. It’s hard to be a good father when limited to biweekly visitation.

I think lezlers should focus on the children issue, and that will answer the marriage issue.

117

And that’s exactly what he should be thinking through. If he really does not want to get married, then he should be looking for someone who doesn’t want to get married. The facts as presented suggest that he’s either trying to avoid thinking about it or trying to string Lezlers along as long as he can.

If the things that the two of them need are seriously in conflict, then it’s better that the relationship end sooner than later.

118

One advantage the notion of “marriage” has for me:

It carries certain given definitions of levels and details of compromise.
So, if you consider “adultery” as a “bad thing”, since that is part of the legal definition, you don’t need to talk about it. It’s already been talked about, and by accepting the whole “legal package” you accept it.
If, on the other hand, you want to be with this person forever but want an open relationship, that’s one point you need to clarify.

Once you have this “basic package” on the table, you need to clear up some details (which ok, can be real big things; in Spain for example you have to decide whether property obtained after the marriage will be common or separate ownership, with the “default value” changing by region and by how you obtained said property) but you have a list of possible details and of the usual options for each of them.

119

Well, I hope I helped. IMO, you should show him the whole thread. NOT in a “see, I’m tallking about this with complete strangers in your face” way, but as a forum to really talk about it.

I know you said you have discussed it–but are you any further along than you were before? IMO, you backed away from the sticking point–and he gets to coast on YOUR decision. He can now say, “well, I asked you and you said you didn’t have a definite date/time frame.”
You could be me (he doesn’t sound a bit like my husband, so no worries there!)–I mean this nicely, but you need to be more assertive, even with generations of socialization screaming “don’t speak your needs aloud”. It doesn’t have to be marriage–you can say that in one year, you would like the two of you to get engaged. Small steps. “In 5 years, I’d like to be either a mother or pregnant”–whatever your timeframe is.

To generalize hugely(and why not since that seems to be the trend here)–guys like concrete, quantifiable goals. If for no other reason than they can at least agree or disagree with them. Vague, nebulous “plans” baffle them. I think you may be driving the bus on this one–so drive. (I also would be a bit concerned that you are driving the bus here–are all major life decisions to come from you? They should be mutual, as much as possible, ie, not many people “decide” to have twins etc). :slight_smile:

120

I’ve never been married, but fidelity has been the default assumption in my relationships anyway. I hardly think I’m unique, or even unusual, in this.

You mean that you by default consider your relationships to be open until you get married, at which point they by default become exclusive?