You live together (assuming that’s what you are doing now) or you don’t, and you don’t set a wedding date until you’re ready and looking forward to being married.
You think he would resent you for the rest of your life just for delaying your wedding, even if you did get married? How do you expect to be in a satisfying relationship with someone like that? Do you want to marry him just in the hope that having a ceremony will solve your problems?
I don’t see how you can go forward with things the way they are. I think you probably need to take time to evaluate what’s going to happen, and that means postponing the wedding. A looming deadline won’t help and neither will all of the stress and planning that goes into a wedding.
You haven’t been together long enough to know that you will help each other through the hard times. 5 months is not long, you had , what, 8 weekends together before you got engaged?
And there’s a lot more people out there than you might think especially coming from an insular community like yours. The chances are far better than frighteningly small. How old are you, by the way? It sounds like you are in your very early 20’s.
Wait, you have all the time in the world right now; don’t rush into something because of hormones or fear.
If you two are truly so well-suited for each other, I don’t see how postponing a ceremony will change that. Obviously, I don’t have the complete picture of the dynamics of your relationship or your religious restrictions – but if you (as in both of you) don’t have the discipline to delay the gratifications that marriage brings in your religious setting until you’re in a position where getting married would make sense (which it doesn’t in your current situations), then you likely won’t have the discipline to make the marriage a successful one (IMO). I don’t mean to be such a naysayer, but you guys sound really young, and you both have quite a ways to go before you’re stable enough for such a life changer.
Well, whatever happens, I wish you the best! Love is hard work. Marriage is even harder.
Huh? Postponing will make him resent you for the rest of your life? Wha?
That doesn’t sound like a healthy, sound relationship to me OR you are catastrophizing this. Take a deep breath. TALK to him, not us, but figure out what you want to say first. How on earth could pushing back the wedding make any difference at all? This leads me to believe that you both truly are not ready for marriage. If making a sensible, mature decision incurs his resentment, he is too young to get married. If you get married because you dread his resentment, you are too young to get married.
You have options re career and jobs. He has options, no matter how complicated he or you make it seem.
I’m really torn as what to tell you here. I was in this situation about 7 years ago and we did not get married. It was one of the defining moments of my life.
If it’s now or never with this person, is that really a demand that you want to live with? Only you know the answer to that.
Your parents sound like very wise people. I am a firm believer that no one should get married until they really know who they are. And speaking as someone who has been there, it is extremely rare that someone under the age of 25 knows who they really are and what they value in life and what they want to do with their life.
You add on the issues that both you and your fiance are currently undergoing…I would expect that you both will be very different people in 5 years. You might still be right for each other or you might not.
Based upon what you have described in this thread alone, if you were my daughter, I would be taking the same path as your parents.
You’re not selfish at all. In fact, I think your first priority should be to help yourself and get to a point where you feel like your mental health is at a point you’re happy with. That is probably best accomplished without the baggage and worry associated with the guy’s problems.
In a case like this, I think your parents are right, though my first thought would be as others have said: postpone. If you propose postponing and he gets bent out of shape, that would just be an indicator of further problems down the road.
This is what I was going to ask. Unless I miss my guess, you both sound very young and (forgive me) maybe not mature enough for marriage yet.
Given this, your respective emotional challenges, and the short time you’ve known each other, I think dating and allowing your relationship to continue to grow and develop is the best course of action.
Really, what’s the hurry? Relax, be young and enjoy having a boyfriend. If he leaves you or resents you for postponing the wedding, you may have dodged a bullet, quite frankly.
Your parents are right. There is absolutely no reason to rush a marriage and every reason to wait. You don’t even really know the guy. Five months is nothing, believe me. You’re not even past the initial chemical infatuation stage. It’s not like you have to break up with the guy, but getting married this soon would be rash and immature. You sound kind of young and naive, to tell you the truth. Everybody thinks they’re super in love after 5 months. That’s the chemicals talking. That wears off, and that’s when you’ll really know if you love the person.
This guy sounds really needy, and possibly smothering, by the way. Do not put yourself in a position where you’re financially and emotionally responsible for some guy you’ve dated for less than six months. Those are the kinds of decisions that lifelong regrets are made of.
There’s an analogy about this that I hear used a lot - when you fly, they always say something about how if there’s a problem and the airmasks drop, you need to secure your own first before you help others around you, even children. That’s because you need to ensure your own safety, and make sure that you can breathe and therefore have enough oxygen to make rational decisions, before you can help others. If you’re fuzzy-headed due to a rapid depressurization, you may not get someone else’s mask on right, and both of you might be doomed.
Same thing with mental health. You absolutely need to be healthy, for your own sake as well as for any possibility of a healthy relationship. He also needs to see his way to doing this for himself. I realize that he doesn’t have a lot of options that he can see at the moment, but marrying him now now now is not going to make the problems better.
I know I’m just a voice in the choir now, but I’m posting because I come from a religious tradition that also postpones sex until marriage, where people don’t usually have long engagements. (I married my husband of 14 years about 11 months after we met. And I feel the same way as you do about soulmates and how we two are suited.)
If this is the right guy for you, he will still be the right guy in 6 months or a year. And if he is as angry about a postponement as you fear, then that’s a big red flag that he isn’t as well suited to you as you think. It’s not that much fun to be married to a guy who gets that angry every time something doesn’t go his way.
Now personally I’d move to Israel and have a big adventure, but that’s me. If you are that sure it would be awful for you, then you’ll need a different plan–one that involves your guy doing some work to get himself back on his feet.
Let me just say that if a man (or woman for that matter) is incapable of taking care of himself, it’s not a good idea to marry him. I have seen that happen, and it hasn’t been a favor to the guy. Marriage involves a whole lot of taking care of other people as well as yourself–your spouse, your kids, etc.–and putting that kind of burden on a man who isn’t able to carry it can lead to disaster. You need to think about whether, if you marry him now, you won’t end up with a husband who can’t work and can’t take care of the baby, so that you wind up doing everything while he watches TV. Love has a very hard time surviving that scenario.
Love is great, but it isn’t everything. Hard work and willingness to compromise or do something you don’t want to do is huge too. Love cannot survive on its own, and it can be killed.
I wish you the best in getting this figured out, and I hope that everything will work out great.
Your OP sounds like my friend many years ago - she married a schizophrenic man. Nice guy, they were madly in love, but a couple of years and two kids later, she got tired of being the caretaker for two babies and an unstable man (as well as the sole source of income).
Whatever your religious things are, I see nothing but red flags here for going ahead with a quickie marriage. Saying that he’d resent you for postponing is really troubling - are you not allowed to do what’s right for you? Is he the only one who gets a say? To be blunt, most of us have (at least) one relationship in our early twenties that is our first love and all-consuming and all that, and if we’re lucky, we don’t marry them because they turn out to be horrible for us. This guy sounds like that one for you.
I don’t know that I’m a font of wisdom, but I’m an Orthodox woman and thus probably have a better idea of where you’re coming from about social pressures than most of the folks here. PM me if you’d like. It’d be easier for me to understand your situation with more details (where was he in smicha? Are you in Stern, Touro, another college?)
Ultimately, yes, people in your community/extended family won’t like it if you have a very long engagement. (For everybody else, ‘long’ is longer than 3-4 months (depending on the community), and ‘very long’ is longer than six. I was engaged for 3.5 months, although we’d dated for seven months first.) Tough. They’re not going to be part of your marriage, and until you feel that you’re both emotionally and financially/lifestage ready to be married to this particular guy, don’t get married.
I was going to offer an ear (and possibly an opinion) as well, but, given that I am, myself, secular (and a of the male persuasion,) and I see that a far more qualified person than me has joined the thread I will defer to GilaB, who is far more qualified to listen and help.
FWIW (and it might not be worth much) but I think this is a problem. You’re settling for your fiance because you think you might not find anyone else. This is a terrible way to start a marriage. I don’t think it’s fair to you and I don’t think it’s fair to him.
This doesn’t preclude marriage in the future for you two. I just get the sense that both of you are pretty rudderless at the moment. The prep work to get married and the first few months of marriage are a great excuse to avoid dealing with your (and your fiance dealing with his) problems but eventually the piper has to be paid. IMHO, I think you would find it well worth it to figure out what you want in life before rushing into anything. It’s sometimes extremely annoying when parents give out unwanted advice but it sounds like they want the best for you, I would listen to them. Good luck either way.
If he’s not willing to wait until you’re comfortable, then he doesn’t, as you wrote, understand you better than you ever thought possible and you don’t trust each other when you’re most vulnerable. All those things you wrote about your relationship are only true if he’s willing - happy, even - to do the same for you.
This includes his finding a steady job and being able to support a family. That’s not being selfish. That’s the hard part of being a grown up in a grown up relationship. It only works if you’re -both- grown ups.
As for what he does in the meantime: he does what all the rest of us do. He gets a job. He finishes school. Maybe he switches his career plans. Maybe he takes a hard look at why there’s only one school in this special denomination. Maybe he sees a therapist. And he gets his shit together.
Or he doesn’t and you, in a year from now, are glad you dodged the bullet.
After reading all of these helpful thoughts, a session with my therapist and a talk with my fiance, we’ve come to something of an agreement. We’re going to postpone the wedding, probably for a year. We have to determine what we’re doing for the next year, but we now have some breathing room. Fiance readily agreed that this is the best thing for us at this time. I still have to talk to my parents, but life suddenly looks a lot brighter.
thanks everyone.
oh, and when was the last time everyone who replied to an OP pretty much agreed?
This worries me FAR more than anything that has gone before. He’s going to resent you for taking care of yourself, for wanting to be absolutely certain you’re up to the task before committing yourself to a lifelong partnership of taking care of each other? He’s going to resent something that’s in your best interests? You might as well break it off now, because you haven’t a snowball’s chance in hell of being happy together in the long term, not if he’s got that sort of attitude.
You see, that old song is right–love just ain’t enough. I’ve been with the same guy for 15 years, since right after I turned 19, and I will tell you right here and now it’s not warm fuzzies and inside jokes and the agreement of our friends and family that we’re well-suited that got us through depressive episodes and the loss of loved ones and unemployment and the times when we were both working so much and at such misaligned schedules we often went a few days at a stretch without actually seeing each other. It was our mutual concern about each other’s well-being that got us through those times. If he hadn’t been taking care of me, I wouldn’t have had the strength to take care of him, and vice verse. And when it came to the points where neither of us had the strength to take care of the other, we each said “don’t worry about me, it’s more important to me that you take care of yourself.”
If we hadn’t both been willing to do that, Og only knows what sort of shape either of us would be in. All I know is that we wouldn’t have ever made it to the point of getting married because the rough patches before that point would have done us in.
If you postpone the wedding, he’ll be upset, certainly, and worried and frightened about how he’s going to take care of himself, and that’s all reasonable. But resentful? Only if he’s a selfish pig who’s more worried about having someone to take care of him than his about your well-being.
You honestly believe there are very, very few men who are clingy and needy and compromise your ability to look after your own mental health and need you to be the sole breadwinner for the first years of your marriage and are so worried about what’s best for them they can’t spare some worry about what’s best for you? Honey, there are millions of those out there.
I will defer to GilaB, who is far more qualified to listen and help.