Wow. That just sounds like it’s from the 1950s… a bad sitcom plot from a VERY traditional time. This week on The Andy Griffith Show, his sweetheart Helen Crump manages to kiss Andy, but then realizes that the sheriff isn’t going to immediately make an honest woman of her! Drama ensues.
7:30-8pm Thursdays, after The Danny Thomas Show.
My daughter and her guy have been together for over a decade. Living together, consolidating finances, saving for a house… with no plans for marriage. They’re fine, as are many of their friends who are co-habitating and raising dogs, hedgehogs, even kids.
No one younger than my 90-year-old mother is shocked by this state of affairs.
Some people date for fun, or companionship, with no particular interest in marriage in the near or foreseeable future. Some people date with a plan to find the person they want to marry and/or have children with. The latter should probably weed out the former pretty quickly by asking if their life plan includes marriage and or children in the near future, and if not, that’s fine, but this isn’t going to go anywhere.
That’s not a marriage ultimatum, it’s a basic compatibility check.
If someone, early on in a relationship, asks if you’re open to marriage in 2 years, they’re not asking you to promise to marry them in two years time. But if you don’t want to be tied down for the next decade, it’s time to move on.
I get the idea that an “engagement” begins with a specific performative proposal, and also that it’s sort of silly. My wife and I decided to get married before we publicly announced our engagement. Like, we designed her engagement ring together. But then when I had the ring and we spent a romantic day together and then I got down on one knee during the sunset: that’s when we got engaged and told everyone.
I guess my question for you is what changed after being with someone for 10 years that the next 6 years sucked so badly? Going by your math, it sounded like you had 2 “unsatisfying” years before you even got married.
From my own experience, the problem with getting married after years or even decades of dating is that you are basically setting into a contractual commitment at a point of the relationship where you probably should be thinking about how to end it.
I’m going to say that in retrospect, I think you shouldn’t date anyone for more than six months unless you plan to get married. You should know everything you need to know about someone within six months. If you aren’t sure you want to marry them (or anyone for that matter) after six months, what’s another decade going to tell you? You’re just wasting each others time.
And if neither of you plan to marry anyone, and are in love (and compatible), you still have to break up after six months?
I think I agree with you, but your formula only applies to people who are dating to find a partner they can legally marry.
Although I’m firmly in that camp (as is my wife… handy, ain’t that?). I’m proud of the fact that I never dated anyone that I wasn’t willing to marry… or that wasn’t up to my “marriage material” standards (sorry, I don’t know of a way to say that that doesn’t make me sound unromantic…). Guess I’m just proud of myself for being the opposite of a skank!
Oh, I know what my point should be! Even though I was very traditional and dated with the goal of investigating the possibility of marriage, I’m accepting of my kids and others who are rejecting/delaying the traditional rules of society.
Did they tend to be Evangelical or from small towns/rural areas?
Sorry to mention him but he’s the best known example I know: Bush courted for 3 months between first meeting and marriage proposal. So apparently, it’s a thing among more conservative people. You would think that with the Biblical opposition to divorce, you’d want to measure twice before cutting. George W. Bush - Wikipedia
As others in the thread have pointed out and as is my feeling as well: marriage is not the endgame for some people. We live our lives just fine without rings and ceremonies.
If by dating you mean seeing someone a few days/nights a week, I don’t agree that this is a firm enough base for spending the rest of your life together as marriage is supposed to be. You can talk all you want, but getting to know someone in their worst of times is not going to happen on dates.
Since the OP hasn’t returned, I’ll go back to this, specifically the bolded part:
I suspect some of these women are saying isn’t, “I’m breaking this off unless you commit to marriage,” but rather, “I’m looking for a lifetime relationship. That may or may not be with you, but my point of being in a relationship with someone is to see if we might be right for each other over the long haul. If you’re not thinking along the same lines, then I’d like to know that now rather than later.”
Which is a bit different from “are you willing to commit to being married to me?”
I guess the way I look at it is if you don’t want to spend the rest of your life (or at least a significant portion of it) with someone, raise a family and all that, you don’t really need to be married. An if you don’t want to be married, then why spend a significant portion of your life with just one person?
Generally if you are dating someone for any length of time, the other person often wants to know if it is going anywhere. “Shit or get off the pot” so to speak.
Statistically speaking, I think it’s very unlikely to find a couple where both people are content to “just be together” for 20 years like Tim Robins and Susan Sarandon.
I think it’s more like, with the Biblical opposition to premarital sex, people were eager to get it on! (Seriously, I think that the relaxed mores regarding sex before marriage make it easier for people to wait to become wed).
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My wife was of the attitude that, if we weren’t interest in progressing our relationship, what was the point? It wasn’t that we rushed (we dated for 2 years before marriage, and lived together half-way through that courtship), but the idea was to progress to starting a family. Part of that insistence, though, was because we met when she was in her mid-30s (and she had our son right around the time she turned 40), so I think she didn’t want to ‘waste time’, since she wanted to have a kid and that biological window is only open for so long.
Of course, you don’t have to be married to have kids, but it does sort of make sense in terms of legal rights once that happens.
Maybe not, but I’ve seen plenty of relationships that are like that for a year or three. And if you’re a woman in your mid-30s or later like Moriarty’s wife was when they met, and you want to have a family, you surely have in mind that you really can’t afford the time for that sort of relationship any more.