Welcome to Everything I Know About Love, I Learned from Romance Novels, a column that pre-dates the upcoming book, but shares a title and the best of intentions: to demonstrate that many real-life problems can be examined with the strength and lessons of romance fiction. Today’s letter is about marriage.
Dear Smart Bitch Sarah,
I would love some advice from you and the Bitchery, regarding my rather contemporary guy problem.
My boyfriend and I have been together almost four and a half years and are still very much in love. He was, and is, a wonderful, kind, gorgeous, caring man that I would be lucky to spend my life with. After about a year of dating we started to throw around the, “well, someday when we get married…” talk. Being raised in a community of drum-beating hippies where many of my friends parents shunned the patriarchal institution of marriage in favour of “life partnering”, I recognize that marriage is not a necessity, but it’s something I have always wanted. I thought that my very traditional, old fashioned BF felt the same way.
Now, fast forward a couple of years to one month shy of our three year anniversary. My lady clock is starting to tick while all around me girlfriends are getting engaged and my family (read: my mother) is starting to drop hints. I ask him what he thinks about getting engaged in the next year or so and getting married in the next couple. He flips his lid. Totally loses it. He is a stunned, shocked, horrified mess at the mere mention of getting married. He said, “wouldn’t it be easier to go our separate ways if we’re not married?” Now I am a shocked, horrified mess and think that I have spent 3 years planning a future with a man that doesn’t know if he wants to stick around.
After about a year he managed to fully convince me that he doesn’t have one foot out the door and does want to marry me…someday. Eventually, but hey, what’s the rush, it’s just a slip of paper.
Has any woman ever dreamed of meeting her perfect man, dating for awhile, eventually cohabitating while keeping clear financial boundaries, eventually getting a dog as a test run and after 8 to 10 years of “just making sure” and extensive discussion, reaching a mutual decision with her partner to tie the knot in a quiet, low-fuss civil ceremony?
I think that I can safely speak for the majority of the romance-addicted bitchery that this scenario falls woefully short of the mark.
I can think of only a couple romance novels where the hero and heroine fall in lurrrve and don’t put the cherry on top with a mawwiage (that was an ode to the Princess Bride, by the way). I know many couples that don’t bother to make it official and have wonderful, long lives together. I also know that a marriage isn’t a guarantee that you’ll work out. While I don’t expect our life together to always read like a shiny, sexy romance I suppose I always hoped for the love of my life to feel something more than a commingling of terror and apathy at the thought of marrying me.
He’s recently started talking about, “for our wedding I’d like…” and saying, “when we get married…” I either want to cry, punch a hole in the wall or slink away in embarrassment. I have managed to leech all visible romance and eager anticipation from the prospect of a proposal. The entire thing seems ruined to me. I also recently found out that I can’t have kids, which adds an entire new dimension to my obsessing: if I don’t get to do the pregnancy/baby/mommy gig, can’t I at least have that stupid slip of paper, some tacky wedding photos and a cheap gold ring?
He may be low on the romance, but I do have a great guy that treats me like gold. Am I being a twat? Should I shut up, move on and count myself lucky regardless of whether or not we get married? If he does propose eventually can I in good conscience accept when I know that my marriage is taking place as a result of my tears and emotional blackmail?
Sincerely,
Where Have All the Knuckle Draggers Gone
Dear Knuckles:
You’re not being a complete twat, but clearly your hurts are overwhelming your clarity. I think that’s understandable.
It sounds as if the officially and legally binding commitment of marriage means a lot to you, particularly as you say you were raised in a community where challenging authority and institutional establishment was commonplace, and marriage as a state-defined commitment was disdained. Now, there is nothing wrong with wanting to be married. But whether you have a notarized marriage certificate or whether you’re living together happily and the only thing in both your names is the electric bill, relationships and happily-ever-afters still take work. The official stamp of federal joint tax returns doesn’t make marriage any easier or harder. It’s still tough.
As for your news of infertility, I’m so sorry. That sucks out loud and it sounds as if you are hurting from it. But even if you can’t do the “pregnancy” part, you can absolutely have the baby/mommy gig through a few different options. Granted, some of them take longer than nine months (and are just as difficult, hooray) but it can be done. There are many, many ways to welcome a child into your heart and your home, and if you want to be a mother, infertility is an obstacle that can be and has been circumvented.
But you need to work out your relationship problems first, obviously. Parenthood is enough of an emotional hurdle without bringing relationship struggles into it. There’s no sense in bringing a child into your drama, and your feelings about being a spouse and about being a parent are different things. They’re related, but for the time being you need to separate them a bit.
That said, holy hell, did your man screw up. He essentially said, when you asked about that permanent binding commitment, “But what if I want to leave?” NOT COOL. No wonder it’s taken a year or more for you to begin to trust him again. And it sounds like you still don’t trust him entirely. I understand that. He did a number on your confidence in his feelings for you.
I think the first step is an honest, possibly painful conversation wherein you explain how you’ve been feeling, vent all your hurt and frustrations of the past year, and explain specifically how his recent talk of marriage makes you feel guilty, ashamed, and hurt. If he’s been acquiescing to the idea of marriage because it is important to you, and he personally finds it repugnant, you need to hear that as well, and hear his reasons why. You have to explain, and you have to listen, and so does he. This is not going to be an easy conversation to have.
But if you want an unpolluted future with this person, you need to be honest, get your feelings out of your head and into the air between you, and then, together, get past them. Time to move on, either together, or separately.
Part of why there’s so much marriage in romance is because once you tie the knot, it can be very hard to undo. In the expectations of the reader, courtship leads to commitment. However, happy ever afters can be tough. There is no “just making sure” and “we’re good enough for now.” There are “happy for now” endings in romance but in most cases, the likelihood of forever afterward is more than a mere possibility. Most romances, however, end with a defined moment that establishes the relationship as permanent.
Real life certainly doesn’t come with guarantees like that, but you aren’t out of line for hoping that your boyfriend of four-plus years would be able to say without test-dogs and joint finances that he is sure you are the person he wants to be with. If he’s not sure, it’s time to end the relationship and find someone who is as sure about you as you are about them. By focusing on marriage, you’re asking him to declare his surety that you’re the one for him permanently. If he’s not willing or able to make that declaration, with or without marriage, it’s time to ask yourself hard questions about moving on.
As for weddings, some people do live together, and quietly have a no-fuss civil ceremony because that’s what is meaningful and beautiful to them. Other people want as many ruffles as possible. Both are totally ok.
But there’s a balance between what you want, and what your boyfriend wants, and that’s what you need to find. There is room for fewer ruffles in your dream wedding, for example. But there is not much room for “If you love me, you’ll want what I want” in a relationship – and neither is there a lot of room for, “Well, you’re good enough for now, but maybe someday we’ll break up.”
That balance, if you can find it, may mean that you move on separately, or move on together. But you need to stop thinking about this in your own head, have a painfully honest conversation, and see what happens. Good luck to you.
Everyone has already given such good advice, I don’t feel that I can add much, except to say I’VE BEEN THERE. Sort of. What happened to me was, after four years of dating and general happiness and glowing “I love you”s I was ready for engagement and eventual marriage. I was cool with taking things slow, but I knew what I wanted. When I brought it up in casual conversation, there was dead silence. Not panic or rejection, just a seizure of communication. I worried that I’d ruined the romance by asking for what I wanted. I worried that he wasn’t on the same level as me emotionally. I worried that he was looking to keep an escape hatch by not proposing. I worried, and worried, and made myself sick over it by keeping that worry to myself and not trying to open the lines of communication again.
Six months later, after much agony on my part and a lot of purposeful steering around the marriage topic, he proposed. He basically said “I’m an idiot for not realizing you would want this. I’m an idiot for not doing this sooner. ” It turns out he was just in shock that I wanted a formal, legal union. But after some thought, he decided he wanted that too.
The tagline of this is COMMUNICATE. Always. Don’t keep all your guilt and worry bottled up. If you two are meant to stay together, communication will help that to happen. And if not, at least you’ll know where you stand.
Lots of great comments tonight!
I’ve been married for 39 years and I am in love with my guy. It was not always easy, but the ups and downs were worth the trip.
Since this is about what I learned about love from romance novels, I refer to the last page of Elizabeth Hoyt’s classic tale The Serpent Prince:
“You’ve changed the ending!” Simon sounded outraged.
Well, she didn’t care.“Yes, it’s much better now that Angelica marries the Serpent Prince instead. I never did like that Rutherford.”
But, Angel,” he protested. “She’d chopped off his head. I don’t see how he could recover from that.”
“Silly.” She pulled his face down to hers. “Don’t you know true love heals all?”
So, I have always remembered that where there is love, all things are possible.
I don’t know if I believe in ultimatums because that term makes it should like you wouldn’t actually leave and are just playing a game to get your way. HOWEVER, I am a big believe in looking at your options and figuring out the ones which would work best for you.
I think you need to have a clear, rational conversation with your partner. Where do you both see yourselves in five years time? What does marriage look like to you? Do you want to explore other options for children or will you fill your lives with other activities?
Ultimately you need to understand what your options are. Basically I see three:
1. You stay with him and understand that yes he hurt your feelings but that he’s committed to your relationship.
2. You separate, live separately and date each other for a while. Give it a time frame – if you both don’t have some clarity after six months then break up.
3. Leave. If you believe that what has happened truly means that you can’t be with this person or that your visions for the future are completely incompatible then sometimes you need to make the hard decision.
There are so many reasons he may have said what he said. It might be that he has some long harboured dream that he thinks marriage will put an end to (travel or a university degree for instance) that he hasn’t been game enough to put into words. He may not have truly understood how hurt you were by his reaction and in his own little way be trying to show you how committed he is by talking about the wedding.
And yes, I’ve made that third decision. I was in a relationship where the chemistry was amazing, we were fantastic together and loved each other absolutely but our idea of where we would be in the future and what we needed from a long term relationship was completely different. We had the talk and decided to break up. He’s married now and extremely happy and I’m pursuing my dreams and am extremely happy. I don’t regret our time together and it certainly taught me what I want in both a relationship and my life.
Just chipping in with my two bits of support! One if the things we know from Romance Novels is that it’s the girls’ job to support you.
Your dreams may not come true in quite the way you hoped (everything is much easier and quicker in my dreams, certainly!) but they won’t come true at all if you don’t continue to believe in them and in yourself, and therefore work towards them. Your dreams sound positive and achievable, and there has been so much good advice! Good luck!
I think SB Sarah nailed this one—the writer needs to sit down with him and talk this out. His reaction could mean anything from “I’m head over heels in love but I have issues about marriage” to “I’m just staying in this relationship until something better comes along.” None of us, just reading this letter, can know the reason for his freaking out when the topic of marriage was broached, and that reason is critically important.
If he refuses to discuss the subject, however, I personally would walk.
Yes, you can live together for years and then decide to marry and have a quiet little union. We lived together for 6 years when I said to him, “It’s blue.” He said, “when you do want to get married?” We were married in our hearts years before we signed the paper. The paper was never important to me. It was only important to provide legal protection for our son. It’s 26+ years now and we are happier than ever. And I really wish that kid would move out so we can play naked chase me around the house again.
I think the idea of professional help is a good one. Sometimes it takes a trained third party to help you find out what you both really want.
My own experience, too, Delphia. My husband and I have been together since 1971, but we did not actually marry till 2003, when we decided that the many looming problems of old age would be slightly mitigated by the legal provisions of marriage (easier to make a standard type of will, easier dealing with health professionals etc. when one is a legal spouse rather than a co-habiting partner).
It is those legal provisions, making a married couple ‘family’, that so many gay couples have sought, (and happily have now found, in our country and in at least some US states), rather than ‘romance’. We make the relationship bonds ourselves, and the ‘piece of paper’ is no more than a declaration or affirmation of it for the rest of society. If there are religious sensibilities involved, of course that makes a big difference, because the opinion of a deity must be taken into account above all else. For the rest of us, it is really a matter of cultural/societal norms.
Here’s what I don’t like about ultimatums: they’re asking for a behavior from someone else. You say to someone else, “You need to do this/stop doing this, or (insert consequence here).” I think everything works better when you own your own behavior and don’t predicate it on someone else’s. Act, don’t react.
That said, there’s something to be said for making your expectations and needs clear, which an ultimatum *can* do to some extent. All too often, though, an ultimatum takes the place of an actual, honest conversation. (How many times does this happen in a romance novel? One character demands something stupid of another without explaining what it is he/she truly needs from the situation. And the results are typically ridiculous and eye-rolling.)
Sort out your needs and your hurts for yourself. Then have the conversation. Maybe it’s time to leave, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Maybe you’ll stay, and you’ll be the stronger for it.
Verification text is nuclear95, which seems fair. Ultimatum = nuclear option.
What I get out of this is that Knuckle actually proposed to her guy, just not very romantically and trying to keep an out. It seems a bit, mmm, rigid and double-standards to expect him to do the big fancy pretending-to-be-a-Disney prince. (Though clearly lots of couples are happy with this as a negotiation in several stages, with the staged proposal sealing a done deal.) I’d phrase the ultimatum differently: make a real proposal. Be just as careful to make a wonderful setting as a guy is supposed to, be just as terrified, put your heart right on the line… and if he is sensible of the honor but can’t see his way to it, you’ll probably know if you need to leave.
Other than that, I mostly agree with Isabel C. and Rose Fox. I’ve had a wonderful committed relationship since 1995, we’re not married, we’re extremely egalitarian—which is important to both of us, and includes letting one of us go become an Argentinian spy as long as the other can come (metaphorically!). It’s incredibly romantic, for us.
Knuckles, reading your letter I hurt for you. Like many persons on this thread, I can empathize with you, having been in a similar predicament in my last relationship. While I am now single, I feel pretty happy and confident that I made the right decision for me. I realized after breaking up with my BF that a really good guy friend (and an all round fantastic guy), had been interested in me the whole time I was agonizing over my BF (as I was otherwise occupied, he moved on and is now engaged to someone else). So here’s my two cents for you:-
– First of all, it is very important to know what are the things that you need to be happy in your relationship and in your life. If you do need to be married, then there’s nothing wrong with wanting or needing that commitment. Life is short, and you have to please yourself. If you are not content or happy with where you currently are, then you have to decide what will get you there, and take the necessary steps to achieve it.
– It is hard to be content with past hurts continuously at the back of your mind. So, I I too echo the sentiment that an honest talk is needed. Explain how hurt and betrayed you felt; find out what the BF’s goals are for the future of your relationship, and see whether those are compatible with yours. I don’t know if your BF just had a moment where he plain lost his mind. His sporadic comments about marriage now may be his way of hinting that he really does see a future with you. Alternately, he may have issues with marriage, or even making a commitment to you. If that is the case, you owe it to yourself to know sooner rather than later, and move on.
– Finally, (you might not believe now but) know that whatever happens, things will be OK. When you waste time with the wrong person, you don’t notice when other potential partners come along. Loving someone and wanting him to commit isn’t enough; he has to want it too. Don’t force it, thinking that this is the only guy in the world for you. Don’t limit yourself or stay with someone who can’t make you happy because of fear that you won’t find someone else who’ll treat you well. It only hurts you and your self esteem in the long run. The good guys may be rare, yes, but they are out there, and they’re looking for you too đ
Maybe I can speak from the other side of the equation.
My love proposed, and I agreed… and then I put him off for three years. I delayed the wedding by a year, and another year, always citing perfectly reasonable excuses that he agreed with, but I saw the hurt it caused. He tried to hide it but one of the things we share is a complete inability to hide our emotions.
That hurt eventually made me throw logic and calculation to the wind and finally actually make plans for the wedding. Because part of love is the desire to ease pain, and I had that ability and it was only my own complicated, unspoken fears getting in the way. And when I weighed those against my hope for the future and his heartbroken expression, I realized how stupid they were.
Maybe he just doesn’t realize how much this hurts you. And maybe seeing that hurt is what it will take, not to blackmail him, but to snap his head on straight. After this long, blackmailing is not even something you should be thinking about. You know him better than that. You know, more than anyone else, that he’s not going to be blackmailed by you, because if it was like that, you wouldn’t love him as much as you do.
Dear Abby would tell you to move on. I think that’s good advice.
I can totally relate. I was in the same situation once…
To me, marriage was a nice plus but not a necessary thing to the relationship. But when I made the VERY INNOCENT question to the BF and said “When you’re older, do you see yourself getting married to someone?”… he totally flipped. He said with absolute certainty “No, I will never ever get married to anyone.”—which is weird considering his parents have the most wonderful and solid marriage I’ve ever seen.
Anyways… I trusted that we could be happy without a piece of paper. He was a wonderful, reliable, faithful and supportive partner.
And then one day he broke up with me. Out of the blue. After dinner with his parents. He disappeared from my life entirely.
What I’ve learned from the experience is that any man who truly loves you and wants to share a future with you, won’t shy away from the idea of marriage. He might not want it, but he will be willing to do it if he knows you really want to, just to make you happy.
@kkw
Best advice ever. Well that and figure out what you need and then sit down and talk it out with him. Don’t be afraid of where your story is at. I mean, who knows this might just be your prologue/backstory with much romance and a HEA on the way.
I sincerely hope that everything works out for you Knuckles.
Knuckles, don’t know if you’re still reading the many thoughtful comments here (WOW, so much good advice!)
If you’d like a man’s perspective, this guy’s got the right idea imo (and I think he’d generally agree with the bitchery, from what I can tell):
http://www.evanmarckatz.com/blog/how-long-should-i-wait-for-a-real-commitment/
A dear friend had a similar response from her long-term boyfriend when she brought up marriage.
He rejected marriage as an institution. He didn’t think they needed a ring and marriage license to love each other. Blah blah blah fishcakes. Marriage was for suckers…
Eventually he met someone else and married HER within a few months. What he meant when he said he didn’t believe in marriage was that he didn’t want to marry my friend.
Not always the case, but it’s worth considering and asking some questions when you have a good talk with your boyfriend.
Well, it is indeed a total waste for you to spend those whole three years with a person who does not even plan on settling down. Because at that span of time that you are together he should have felt that you are already the one. Anyways you should be hung up with that boyfriend of yours who does not have plans with you in the future. On my case, that is the complete opposite. I am currently 22 years old and I have my boyfriend of 5 years now and he constantly talks about marriage and when I will be prepared to be married with him. Well, marriage is a tough call, since you would be with that person for the rest of your life since we don’t have divorce here in our country.
You should find a better person who is looking to spend his lifetime with you. You should not spend your time wasting with a person who does not plan his future with you.