Kemanchi, how do you get along with his parents?
My mom is like this, though in general she sounds rather nicer than your dad (and she doesn’t do the cussing thing).
Oh, yeah, is it tricky. One book you might want to look at is Elgin’s Gentle Art of Verbal Self Defense. (I’d recommend checking it out from a library if you can, as I’ve found people have varying responses to it.)
I’ve had to set some boundaries. This is of course easier to do when you are not in the same house, but possible even so… “Mom, please do not say those kinds of things about my husband / criticize my parenting style in front of my child; if you do that again we are leaving / we will end this conversation,” and then follow through. (Of course, if you are living with them you can’t go far, but still you can remove yourself from the conversation.) It feels horrible, but it is the only way some people learn. The trick, as Ferret Herder said, is to remain calm and composed during this time so as not to give your father the drama he craves, and I know that is very hard. But you have opportunities to practice!
Something I do that isn’t very nice, but that sometimes I resort to, is to playing the superior: for this you have to say in a very calm, slightly amused tone of voice, “Oh Dad, will you listen to yourself? You sound like a teenage girl – so dramatic!” and continue to do the verbal equivalent of patting him on the head indulgently. The more they yell, the more calm you have to get, and the more amused (yeah, I know, you will be screaming inside, but fake it) at how silly he is being. Drives control freaks crazy!
One thing about being engaged… I’m surprised no one has really talked much about the long-distance aspect. My husband refused to get engaged until we had lived in the same city for a while, and he was right – our LDR hadn’t prepared us for a lot of things we needed to work out, like his needing a lot of alone time or our different attitudes toward washing the dishes.
Oh yes, about the whole relationship/age/distance thing - I met my now-husband at age 19, dated him through college, went long-distance for a couple years after that, moved in together for a few years, then finally got married at age 27.
The difference here is that we started the relationship as a “local” one and spent a lot of time together, and only then did we go long distance. I agree with those who say that you need to spend real time together, living in the same area. And if you turn out to not be compatible during that time, don’t try to force it to work because otherwise you “wasted” time on the LDR - it’s worse to waste time in a relationship that really is no longer working.
Really Not All That Bright–I get along pretty well with his parents. His mother is a wonderful woman, very talkative. His father is a nice man, but very quiet.
In response to the spending time together thing–we began dating in July of 2009, living in the same location, and had a few weeks before he went to his freshman year of college, three states away. After that, we had his Christmas break, then his spring break, then the next summer–he’s a year ahead of me in school. Following that first year, we had some time over Thanksgiving break and had Christmas break, then had our spring breaks, and then this past summer. I flew down to see him this past fall break, and we also spent time together during Thanksgiving.
However, his parents have recently moved–(that was what we spent this Thanksgiving doing, helping them load the truck)–several states away. So he won’t really be nearby for breaks anymore, making it more difficult.
That’s some, which is helpful, but it’s all “honeymoon” period time. You need the sort of time spent where each other’s quirks turn into irritations and worse. 
Anyway, I think you need to work on your relationship wih your parents first, both on becoming an independent adult and getting them to accept that.
Add it all up and you spent approximately 6 months of time together over a 3 year period while you were 17-20, and you’re ready to spend the rest of your life with this dude? You need to spend time together in the same space for extended periods of time living life. Not just on breaks from your regular life, which is what you’ve been doing. You don’t really know what each other is like day to day boring stuff.
Agreed. There are three stages to any long term relationship:
- I love him so much everything is wonderful. Isn’t he perfect?
- Umm…he’s not perfect at all. Where did all the faults come from? I don’t know if I can do this but I still love him.
- Okay, he has some good and some bad. More good than bad. I love all of him including the bad. He is what I need.
If you aren’t sure if you have been through the second stage yet, you haven’t. This is where most relationships end.
My father is a mormon and mormons are taught that the sole purpose of a woman is to be a wife and mother. In Sunday school, the idea of getting married immediately after high school was hammered into my head for years.
When I was about 18, I was a freshman in college and madly in love with my then bf. I was talking to my dad about him and my dad broke from the party line for a minute and quietly said to me, “I want you to be happy no matter what, but. If you never listen to any other advice I ever give you, please let it be this: Don’t even think about getting married until you’re at least 25. You don’t even really figure out who you are and what you want until then and anyone you settle down with before that might not be the right person for you once you finally do figure it out.”
Kinda risky for him to say something like that to me and I had to take a little crap from the church leaders for going off to a secular school and not getting married straightaway. I’m 42 and still not married because by the time I hit 25, I realized he was spot on. And then when I hit 30, I realized I’d grown so much that the right guy for me at 20 was a completely different guy than the right guy for me at 30.
So do some reading on self esteem and boundaries. I recommend Nathanial Brandon’s Six Pillars of Self-esteem. Wish I’d read it at your age because it would have been a really handy sort of guidebook for my early 20s; I wouldn’t have had to learn a lot of the life lessons in my mid 30s. I think you should sort out first things first. And the first thing is separating yourself – while still maintaining a close and loving relationship – from your parents. I should say “individuating” yourself, but there is some degree of separation that must happen. What needs you have that are being met by the BF right now will be very different needs in a couple of years, I promise. He might not be exactly the right person to meet those needs in a very short time. He is right to chill out about making things official.
Just relax. When you’ve figured out who you are and what you want out of life, and then act decisively toward your goals, your parents’ respect for you as a capable, discerning adult will deepen. When they start treating you like a peer, e.g., asking your opinion as opposed to flat out telling you what to do, then you’re ready. That doesn’t happen usually until you are fairly financially, physically, and emotionally independent from your parents. At that point, you are a good candidate for marriage to another person.
Alot of women who come from highly dysfunctional families get married young as a way to flee the family dysfunction. This is a bad idea because most people are attracted to people like their parents and end up repeating the dysfunction in the new family. Plus the fact that you are in a long distance relationship means that the level of knowledge of you boyfriend isn’t what it should be. Anyone can be nice for a week at a time, you only get to know someone by seeing them all the time at their good times and bad times. A long distance relationship develops that level of knowledge much slower than a normal relationship.
People at different ages experience time differently. When you are young and in college you have alot of new experiences which makes time seem to go slower and you think a couple of years is a long time. At your father’s age he has a set routine that he likes and most days are like the last. This causes time to seem to go by more quickly and it probably just seems like yesterday that he was teaching you to drive. It is thus your responsibility to assert your own adulthood and remind him that you are not a child anymore.
I can definitely see the wisdom in waiting, yes. I know we’re past that honeymoon stage as a couple, as well.
I had a strong attraction to a guy years ago who, looking back, acted much like my father. I’m happy to report that my boyfriend does not behave as he did.
I feel as though I’m stuck in a situation where I want to be more independent of my parents, yet find it difficult to from a financial perspective. As I said earlier, I’m working two jobs. One is minimum wage and the other is slightly over that. The better-paying one is tied right in with my field, and I’m working on trying to get an internship over the summer. The town where I’m from is not somewhere I want to go back to and work.
Granted, in this economy, most people would kill for the two jobs I have. I’m worried, though, about keeping my head above water in the long run. The job related to my field is only going to last through next semester. I’d like to have a working, reliable car. Yet I don’t want to end up with student loans. At present, I don’t have any. I’m strongly leaning towards graduating a semester early too, just to lessen the chance of having too much debt by the time I am out of here.
Thank you, everyone, for all your advice Writing all of this down is really helping me to process it too.
You should spend a few years living on your own. When you are forty and in the relationship all those years, you’ll wish you had that time. I got in my current relationship at 21 and we’ve been together ever since. I love him to death but I wish I had lived alone for a couple of years first.
I’m not sure this is as true as you think. The large majority of your relationship has been long distance, and the time you’ve spent together has been mostly “fun time.” That’s very different from spending time with someone under their everyday stresses for a period of time. You definitely want to experience being physically together for a while before getting married.
My husband and I started dating young, too (we were 19), and it’s not a trivial task to grow together and consciously decide that you want to be with someone enough to be sure you won’t “miss out” on the freedom of dating around and being single at that age. We both lived apart (albeit near one another) before we moved in together, and we waited a while to get married. If you’re sure about each other, it’s not like either of you is going anywhere.
Not to be condescending, but when you’re one of the players on the stage, it’s really hard to see the whole story. You only see it from your perspective and through your own lense. As someone that’s been where you are…it’s almost impossible to be truly objective about your relationship.
In your situation I think it would be very hard to distinguish between a desire to be living with your boyfriend and the desire to be living anywhere but with your dad.
You are WAY too young to get married!
I say that as someone who was engaged at 19 and married at barely 21. Are we still married? Yes. Happily? Yes. But there were some REALLY rocky years in there that were a direct result of us marrying too damn young.
You’re 20 and have been with this guy 2.5 years. Have you ever dated anyone else? I’m not saying this guy can’t be “The One” - people can and do find their soulmate early sometimes. In the next few years you’re going to change SO much, and so will he. You may be right for each other right now, but terrible for the long haul.
Finish school, finish school, finish school. Did I mention you should finish school? Yeah, you should, because it’s a pain to do it when you have a husband and toddler.
After school, find a real job. You are probably going to have to move for this, maybe somewhere far away. Live on your own for at least 1 year.
You don’t have to wait until you’re in your 30s and your eggs are drying up to get married. Wait 'til you’re 25. I know it sounds cliche but if this guy really loves you, he’ll wait. Srsly.
As far as how to cope with Dad as a couple - limit your time with him and once you’re out of school, MOVE. You don’t have to move cross country, even just an hour away will allow you to have your own life and still be somewhat nearby.
I’m going to echo just about everyone else. Please please PLEASE don’t get married until you’re graduated and have lived on your own for at least a couple of years. I’d say that nobody, NOBODY, should get married before 25.
I got married when I was 19. Paradise by the Dashboard Light could be my theme song. I was financially dependent upon my parents, and I didn’t see any immediate way out other than to get married. So I did. There’s an old saying, “Marry in haste, repent at leisure”, and even though divorces are much easier to obtain, they are still messy and expensive.
Learn who you are first. You will change a LOT in the next five years. Maybe the two of you will still want to get married, and if you do, then your marriage will be stronger for waiting.
You’re worried about keeping your head above water with work and school now. Will planning a wedding (assuming you want one of any size bigger than you two and witnesses at the town hall) help that?
If you were to be married any time before graduation, what will it change? Will you drop out of school to move with him? Will he drop out of school to move with you? I assume not.
Would you still live where you are right now, in the same financial situation as before? You still wouldn’t be with him, and it’s not like it would be practical to merge finances like groceries, phone and utilities when you’re living 2 states away. He wouldn’t be closer to you to talk to, to hug, to fuck. He wouldn’t be in your day-to-day life any more than he is now.
What would marriage change in your situation now?
Why do you really want it? The pretty dress? The fancy party? Those are stupid reasons to marry someone, and you know it. They are a bonus when you’re marrying the right person, but not a reason to do it.
So, why do you want it? Status? The piece of paper? The legal “I don’t belong to my parents, I belong to my husband?” The idea that it’s a step away from where you are?
If you’re truly ready to be married, you’d realize that weddings and marriage don’t mean a damn thing. They don’t change anything in your relationship. They don’t fix a damn thing with your parent’s behaviour. They don’t make it easier to go to school, get a job, get a car.
If you love him, it doesn’t matter if you’re married to him.
I’m saying all this as someone who is married (both of us were 24) - for love, for the declaration that we are 100% right for each other (or, at least, greater than 50% hehe!), for the fact that we knew that any changes that may happen in our lives from there on out would be handled together, not individually.
THAT’S why you get married.
Add me to “wait until you are at the very least 25 to get married.”
Also, if it is not “official,” then you are not engaged. That’s what engagement means. It means it is official.
my advice is to slow down a bit. When you are not living independently, and especially when you are not in the same city, relationships can move really really fast. But sometimes the speed that they move can conceal a shortness of depth. I’m not saying this is what’s happening, but I will say that only time will tell. You and your boyfriend are going to change a lot in the next five years or so, and you will both have a lot of opportunities ahead of you. Marriage is about compromise- where you live, what kind of work you do, who you spend time with…and you will have your whole life to compromise. But if you are making this compromises now, you are going to miss the most opportunity-filled moments of your life.
In other words, learn how to live independently for a while. Don’t put all your eggs in this one basket- build a solid foundation of your own, and then start seeing what marriage could add to it.
We’ve never planned to be married during our undergraduate careers. When we initially discussed it, we knew it wouldn’t be until after I graduated. Until we were finally in the same location. There was always a line between engagement and marriage on the timeline.
As a research assistant, and during the course of applying for internships, and all of these career-related decisions, I’m trying to figure myself out professionally. I do have plans to graduate cum laude.
I’ll tell you something about an official engagement.
Getting officially engaged - even for a point in the somewhat nebulous future - is boarding the marriage express. It has one safe stop - marriage. If you decide to stop the train, it can be very messy - so messy that you decide to get off at the marriage stop anyway and maybe get divorced later rather than derail the train. Its sometimes possible to pull of an emergency stop without derailing, but it still not clean, you end up unloading 40 miles outside of Topeka.
Get engaged when you are ready to get married and can set a date. Preferably, as Annamika indicated, wait until you are on your own and independent for a bit before you do even that. Being an independent adult, out of school and on your own, is an experience I’d really encourage. I didn’t get my chance until after I divorced that guy I should have been smacked upside the head with a trout before I married - and I learned so much about myself that I wouldn’t have learned without that time.