She’s Been In A Relationship For 11 Years And Is Ready To Tie The Knot, So If Her Boyfriend Doesn’t Propose By Year 12, She Wants To Leave Him
For the past 11 years, this 28-year-old woman has been in a relationship with her boyfriend, 33.
When she and her boyfriend met, she was 17, but she had already moved out of her parents’ home and was living by herself. Also, she was already in college and had completed her first semester of classes, and he was still in college.
She and her boyfriend started dating a month before she turned 18, and he was 21.
Even though she clarified that she may not have been too mature back then, she doesn’t think her boyfriend was, either.
In her view, she and her boyfriend have matured and grown, both on their own and within their relationship.
They have been living together for roughly 9 years, and in her view, it would make sense for the two of them to start thinking about marriage.
She has felt this way for about five years, and she’s brought up the topic with her boyfriend a few times.
Every time she’s asked him if he felt like he wanted to get married, he would always say, “‘Yeah, I guess.'”
“His tone and expressions made it feel to me as though he wasn’t taking me seriously, but I don’t know what he would say about what his intentions were with how he responded. I just know how it made me feel, not how he viewed it from his side,” she said.
Photo 125186185 © Mariia Boiko – Dreamstime.com – illustrative purposes only, not the actual person
Several years ago, she asked her boyfriend more upfront if he had ever looked into buying her an engagement ring, and his response didn’t make her feel too optimistic.
He told her that he could have either purchased a new car or an engagement ring for her, and he was referring to the new vehicle he purchased after his old truck died.
This answer was astounding to her because she thought it was outrageous that a ring would cost the same as a car, and she told him so.
This was when she started researching and comparing prices of engagement rings.
On the high end, some of the rings she found were as much as $15,000.
As she searched, she saw some rings that she liked and some that came in sets with a wedding band included that were $1,500 or less, and she pointed these out to her boyfriend so that he knew that there were rings she loved that were less expensive.
After this, she didn’t bother him about the topic of engagement rings for a few years because he had expensive car payments to worry about, and she didn’t have any big monthly expenses. So, she decided to wait until her boyfriend was hopefully in a better financial position to have the discussion again.
When she’d first tried to bring up the idea of getting engaged, her boyfriend told her that he didn’t think it was the right time because she was still in college.
As the years went by, she graduated from college, and her boyfriend’s car was finally paid off.
Her hope was that now that her boyfriend no longer had this big monthly expense, he would start saving up money for an engagement ring since he had more money that he could use on whatever he wanted.
However, her boyfriend started spending money to get tattoos and buy a PlayStation 5.
While she acknowledged that her boyfriend could choose to use his money how he chooses, she felt disappointed that these things seemed to matter to him more than moving their relationship forward.
“And the last time I brought up getting married, he said, ‘Marriage is just a box people feel like they need to check off, just like having kids and having a house.’ I replied with, ‘I want to check the box. I want to get married and have a wedding, then have kids.’ I feel like I have made my position clear, and it doesn’t feel like he cares or places any values in something that’s important to me,” she explained.
While she wouldn’t want her boyfriend to flip and become wedding-obsessed, she does want him to be on the same page as she is about what the future of their relationship should look like. From her perspective, it wouldn’t matter to her if he only wanted to get married because it mattered to her.
She clarified that she didn’t want to walk away from someone she’d been dating for over a decade just because he wouldn’t agree to purchase a piece of beautiful jewelry for her.
As she thought about it, she didn’t think she’d be comfortable having children with her boyfriend before getting married. She predicted that this could brew resentment because she would know that her boyfriend didn’t agree to the one thing that she told him she wanted.
Now, she’s wondering if she should come up with a timeline of how long she would wait before breaking up with her boyfriend if he didn’t propose. She’s thinking of giving her boyfriend one more year to make the decision to get engaged to her.
If she did go forward with this plan, she doesn’t know if she should let her boyfriend know about it or if she shouldn’t.
The second option would entail her allowing her boyfriend to do whatever he wants, and if he doesn’t choose to propose to her, then she knows that they would never want the same things in life.
Upon reflection, she’s not sure if she’s wrong for valuing the meaning behind an engagement ring and her boyfriend proposing despite not caring about how much the ring costs.
“We’ve spoken much more extensively on the topic of children, how many we want, hard boundaries with parenting styles, and that kind of thing, and we are on the same page. Neither of us are ready to have kids yet,” she shared.
However, it’s important for her that she and her boyfriend get married before having children.
Plus, she does hope to have a celebration of their marriage with their loved ones, and she wants to have a smaller wedding.
She also pointed out the stability that she’d feel with a legal marriage, as well as the fact that things would be less complicated with paperwork and insurance if they had children someday.
It would make things easier if she and her children all had the same last name as her partner, so this is another benefit of marriage, in her opinion. She brought up that complications could arise in court or on a governmental level if anything awful happened to her or her partner, and they weren’t legally married.
What advice would you give her?
You can read the original post on Reddit here.
If true crime defines your free time, this is for you: join Chip Chick’s True Crime Tribe
In 1978, This Mom Of Three From Nebraska Mysteriously Vanished After Visiting A Local Bar
This Towel Rolling Technique That Will Make Your Bathroom Feel Like A Beautiful Five-Star Hotel
Sign up for Chip Chick’s newsletter and get stories like this delivered to your inbox.
More About:Relationships
