Or what made your Other Significant?
Or perhaps, when did you stop thinking of yourself as single, and start defining yourself as half of a couple, with the other half being your “significant other”?
Inspired partly by a thread in which someone was shocked to see someone called an SO after a mere 4 weeks of dating, and partly by real-life happenings–but not in the slightest by any relationship which I am in.
But tell me, if you can, when you realized that the relationship you were in was serious, and how that realization compared to milestones observable in other relationships–I mean, length of relationship, willingness to relocate for the sake of the relationship, spending holidays together, buying or wearing jewelry to symbolize the relationship, and anything else you can think of.
Discussion of past and present relationships encouraged.
With my husband I would say it was, um, 4 weeks after we started dating. Maybe a little longer. We were fixed up by a couple who both knew we were ready to settle down and we did sort of go into it with a very open mind but we fell in love for real too. Here’s how it went down:
Blind date with fix up couple. It went fine.
Bad movie date where it seems that he’s giving me a ride to the movies. I vow that I won’t go out with him again, but learn that he thought it went well and relent.
Good dinner date where he asks me to go to the fix up couple’s wedding with him.
Wedding of fix up couple.
After that we were on a regular Wednesdays at my place, weekends at his routine and we’ve never been apart since, except for a 4 day trip he took to Vegas with a buddy about three weeks after #4 on the list. The trip solidified our significance to each other.
My story aside, if he’d dumped me or I’d dumped him during those first 4 weeks I would have had to say, oh, well, no harm, foul since it had only been a short, insignificant fling.
I felt significant when he changed his “relationship status” on Facebook from “single” to nothing (which is what my “relationship status” says). That was after about 3-4 months of hanging out all weekend, every weekend, and 2-3 nights a week. It might help to know that we are both in a spot in our lives where we’ve realized how many relationships are ruined by rushing into things; for us, there are no outside pressures (housing, financial, geographic, emotional neediness, etc) so we are really taking our time, which is great.
This has always been a tricky issue for me. In this case I honestly felt like his SO even before we actually started dating; in other cases I have dated someone for a while without ever feeling significant.
Well, I would have to say the moment we were officially a couple, we were significant to one another. This is because we were significant to one another before we became a couple.
We met at freshman orientation of college, and were barely a blip on one another’s radar at first, the occasional ‘‘hello’’ in the hallway but nothing more significant. Then a year later we started becoming better friends, and then–rather suddenly–we became very, very close.
We were very, very close friends, without much thought of becoming more, for perhaps 3 or 4 months. We told each other everything, kept in contact daily even though he started living an hour away at some point, and just generally became inseparable and completely enthralled with one another. I guess it was inevitable to everyone else, but both me and my husband are kind of slow on the uptake when it comes to romance.
One day, we were best friends, and then – BAM! – like a punch in the gut – holycrap this is IT. I remember showing my aunt a picture of him within about 2-3 days of confessing our feelings for one another, and telling her, ‘‘Well, I’m probably going to marry him.’’
He felt the same way, but since we are both prudent and cautious human beings we waited about 4 years before we actually did marry. There was no question from the get-go however, that the relationship was significant. We both knew the matter was closed, we were absolutely perfect for one another, rationally and intellectually and emotionally compatible and there was no sense pretending otherwise.
To me, the moment we met. We got in contact over the Internet, and feelings developed, but it wasn’t until I met him in real life that it was official.
As I mentioned in the other thread, The Boy has been considered my SO pretty much from the moment we crossed the line between friends and lovers.
We’d been talking and hanging out for several months at that point, so we already knew we were compatible on just about every level except romantic. We’ve never spent more than 48 hours apart since that first night, aside from a handful of times when one of us had to travel somewhere without the other.
Then again, up till then I would’ve been a little bit taken aback to see someone use the term SO so quickly in a relationship. I had often stuck to being deliberately unavailable in the early stages of a relationship and refusing to adjust my busy schedule to make more time for a date, so it would often take a couple of months to take the next step and start calling them my SO (my online relationship status would stay as “single” up till that point as well).
It’s just that in this case it just didn’t seem necessary - we’ve been incredibly comfortable with each other from day one, and it just seems to grow with every day that we’ve spent together since then. Sometimes you just know.
Wow, change “freshman orientation” to “the same wing in the sophomore dorms” and friends for “3 or 4 months” to “about a year” and that describes my relationship with my wife almost exactly.
I knew after the first few weeks that it was probably going to be long term, but still thought of the relationship as essentially casual until after the first year.
Less than four weeks after our first date, I was madly in love. So was he. Less than four weeks after we realized that, he proposed. So, really really fast!
(We did wait a year and a half to actually get married to make sure we weren’t totally off our rockers. Our 7th anniversary is June 16.)
I don’t remember how many weeks had passed. There had been frequent dates, and booty and everything, but the “significant” part happened for me when, one morning, we were in the car in search of a place to eat breakfast, and suddenly I had an epiphany . . .
For years I’d occasionally and idly entertain the thought that gee . . . my future husband was out in the world somewhere at that very moment. I’d wonder what he was doing RIGHT NOW. Working on his novel? Teaching orphans in Uganda? Snorkeling in the Caymans? Clipping his toenails?
(Note: I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to get married, so sometimes instead of “my future husband” it would be “my next serious relationship”.)
Anyway, that morning in the car on the way to breakfast, it hit me: I totally know what he’s doing right now.
For him, I think it was probably the moment he first saw me in a bathing suit. I’m just sayin’.
A former employer sent me to Hawaii to attend a week long symposium. Plenty of social activities, lots of free time, and lots of opportunities to make new acquaintances; all wasted on me because I missed my Darling Marcie. I knew the first night I was there how special she was and is.
I proposed to her as soon as I returned from that trip.
We had been dating for about six months and I wanted to take her down to my parents boat on the lake. It was late April but the weather was crappy. Fog and a light mist for all six days we were there.
The boat is nice, 32’ pontoon boat with sleeping areas where you can stay dry. But I was thinking this is going to be a disaster, ( she led a fairly pampered life and never fished before)
We spent the first day just cruising up the lake going towards one of my favorite fishing spots on the lake, with mist in our face. She hasn’t complained yet so we proceed up to my spot. We arrive about two hours before sundown and I beached the boat so we could have a fire on the sand bar. It went well and after we had dinner and the fire died down we went to bed.
6:00 am and she is crawling over me to get to the sand bar. I ask where is she going? She says “fishing!” I crawled out of bed about an hour later and stumbled to the front of the boat and seeing her about 50 yards away on this small rock outcrop hunched over fishing for bluegill in the mist and fog in about 50 degree weather.
Something about her doing this and in this setting after not having seen that side of her before was sweet to me.
We started dating as students in Hawaii, and it’s a funny thing, but at some point, it just became decided we would get married. Neither one of us ever asked the other. It just became a common understanding. From time to time we do try to think back on when that point of no return was, and we just don’t know. I was already planning on returning to Thailand, where I’d lived before, so there’s not even the reference point of changing my future plans.
About a month. We had this horribly executed but wonderful date involving ice skating where he fell and I was afraid, hot chocolate with a pseudo-fight that almost made us late for the movie, and seeing Elf of all things (which is a great movie to ignore and make out instead.) Leaving the movie, the lens popped out of my glasses, which we used as an excuse to go back to his apartment, where we snuggled on the couch until 3:00 am. Throughout the night I just gradually realized that it was special.
About 4 months later, I realized I wanted to marry him. Hit me like a punch in the stomach and scared the living shit out of me. One moment I was having a happy evening walking in a park with my boyfriend, the next, I was crying. He hugged me, we talked about it for a few days, and that was that. A year later, we got married.
