This is natural and probably will last the rest of your marriage, or forever the bad news. The good news—with conscious communication and planning, a successful marriage means that conflict is inevitable it has absolutely no reflection on whether or not you are in a marriage that will last , but how you repair your conflict is much more important. Whether you are engaged, living together or married, work on healing your conflicts, create healthy communication and your relationship will last for the rest of your life together. So really, it doesn't matter whether you waited five years or five months to get engaged.
The most important part is that you're confidently committed to one another. Do you agree or disagree?
How Long Should You Date Before Getting Engaged?
Not sure where to begin with your wedding planning? I loves me some sociology! I would add another book recommendation—I actually picked it up because I'm in an interracial relationship and knew that making assumptions about people's communication styles from different backgrounds would just be disastrous. It's " Mixed Matches: But I would recommend it to anyone, simply to recognize that what people say, what they mean, and how you hear it are often 3 different things. Wow, that's certainly not something I would ever want to imply! I don't think anyone was implying that there's anything wrong with waiting — just offering theories on why some folks who wait a long time sometimes might then bafflingly break up after the wedding.
I knew a couple who were together for 13 years and got divorced after 14 months. Their story pretty much terrified me and I still think about them from time to time. I think it comes down to more than just communication. I think a big part of it is that both members of the couple have to place the same value on marriage.
I know it sounds like the same thing, but in my mind it's different. Part of the reason I feel comfortable marrying my finance, even though I wouldn't have married my old boyfriend of 6 years, is because I know that he believes so strongly in the commitment of marriage that he will fight tooth and nail to keep us together. I loved my ex very much, but to him marriage would not have strenghtened his idea of commitment.
It would have been just an excuse to throw a party and hope for the best. Ariel — I totally get what youre trying to convey. One of the reasons I like your website is how diverse and wonderful the couples are. I am sensitive about this topic as both myself and several other friends of mine were put down by people who thought it "odd" that we didnt get married after 5 yrs of being together.
I thought this was an interesting topic as I really dont know many people who have gone through this. I hear more of the been together for 6 yrs, broke up and immediately found the love of their life. Ariel you should totally start writing "Offbeat Wife" if you haven't already! Well, if you ever want to have a family, there IS such a thing as waiting too long before you get a commitment. Unfortunately we get 10 fewer years than the guys do to get our shit together before we have kids.
I married my husband after dating him for three weeks…and it’s working out.
Although evidence is coming out that this is less and less true, although women have a harder end date of fertility. Advanced paternal age is more correlated with birth defects and health problems than advanced maternal age. That's not to say that one can't have health children after that age heck, my mom was 36 and 38 when she had me and my sister, my dad was in his 40s but that both men and women's fertility and gamete quality declines with age. But getting married and family planning are not always the same thing. There are plenty of committed couples who have kids before or without ever getting married.
Just as there are plenty of married couples who are child-free and don't want to have children at all. I think it's risky to start lumping marriage and family planning into the same time-constrained bucket. On 95 in Philadelphia, there are billboards for Robbin's Diamonds. It's a picture of a woman, sticking up her ring finger, with the caption "She's tired of waiting. Marriage is seen by some as the ultimate, the goal-not the adventure.
(Closed) dating for 4 years. break up or get married?
The timing is different for everyone, whether you've been dating 8 months or 8 years. Communication is so, so, so key. It has saved us countless fights and is probably the reason we're still together, let alone getting married. Me and the husband: I absolutely have to agree that expectations are a huge part of the way a relationship changes after marriage. And a big part of that, I suspect, is that so many people think once you're married you're 'done.
A few of our favorite wedding vendors
As part of our weddinged reception long story we are promising not to 'be together' forever, but to work at loving each other forever. Sort of a different expectation, imo! If you go and assume that marriage is an automatic assurance of happiness and togetherness, you're bound for double whammy; you expect that your needs and wants will continue to be met by your partner and they aren't, and you resent the idea that you have to do things to work on the relationship now that you're married. I've talked to both of my parents about it and feel quite certain that this is what happened to them.
To Jan for raising this important issue, and to Ariel, as ever, for wise and common sense advice. This has been of grave concern to me in the past and I have had the same theory for a long time. I knew this awesomely laid back, best-friends couple once who'd been living together for 11 years, were separated and filing for divorce less than a year after their wedding.
I saw this and similar time and time again and for many years it made me very anti-marriage, until I realised, or inferred, what the problem was. Discussing and understanding one anothers' expectations for marriage has been a primary focus for us among all this wedding planning. I'm so glad this is being discussed. Kate, I think you make a very good point about our society in general treating marriage as the destination instead of the journey. All those Disney movies, the prince and princess get married and live happily ever after, right? I've got a friend who is convinced that if she and her on-again off-again boyfriend get married, he'll have to change all the behaviors that bother her.
Like being a sphincter flambe and having a drug problem. She doesn't want to hear anything to the contrary. I wonder if some of the "long-term couples who split soon after marrying" thing has to do with the way you approached things in the first place. By the time we parted ways, there was a lot of repressed irritation I had to unpack. With my intended, however, we're both pretty good about letting the other one know how we feel about things and working out a compromise, which is one of the reasons I feel so comfortable with the idea of spending the rest of my life with her.
And I think part of why we've both been so willing to put so much into that is that we've both felt from early on that this could be a life-long thing, so it mattered more to get things worked out now.
And then they file for divorce. Maybe if you'd been dealing with it all along, it wouldn't be such a big deal. Or maybe it would have been, and you'd have split up awhile back.
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As it was, you drifted along not rocking the boat, and now you realize you're way the hell downstream from where you wanted to be. Obviously, I'm not saying that's the case for all long-term couples. I just wonder if that's not part of it sometimes. This is me and CDH.
We are so blessed — I don't know how it happened. Everything fits, everything works. We talked a LOT before we got married, because we both realised the the 'wedding' was a big fun party, and after that we still had to come home to each other every night. We discussed every whim, every dream, every value, every eventuality.
They all fell together like perfectly cut jigsaw pieces. Your partner is the most interesting person on the planet — I never get tired of listening to his ideas and hopes and dreams.