I felt like venting after feeling frustrated over this. It seems like once you hit a certain age, marriage is a very popular topic. It makes sense, since a lot of people get married in their 20s-30s. However, I am surprised more and more by how people can make a situation relate to marriage when it really isn't even called for, just to make it relate to marriage.
Let me back up for a minute before I get into this. My boyfriend and I have been dating for over 5 years now. I usually get one of two reactions when I tell people this bit of information. They either say, "Wow that's great!"(translation: I haven't been in a serious relationship for that long, good for you) or, "Wow that's a long time!" (translation: Why aren't you married yet?).
It seems the longer I am in this relationship, the more I get the latter of the two. People only hear that we've been dating for 5 years, they don't think about how I was 18 when we first started dating. Now, some people may think it's a great idea to get married that young (and it may work out great for them), however I am not one of those people. If my boyfriend asked me to get married at 18, I would have looked at him like he was a crazy person. Lol.
Right now my boyfriend and I live together. We take things in baby steps and didn't move in together until we had dated for 3 years. It worked out well for me because again, I was young when we first started dating. Moving in with him was another big thing because my parents didn't accept it right away. That was expected, but what I didn't expect was all of the negative comments from friends. People would say things like, "You guys are going to fight all the time!" and, "He'll never ask you to marry him now that you guys live together." I can see the concern for both, but I was surprised that they didn't feel our relationship was better than that after 3 years.
As of now we've been living together for 2 years now, and we haven't killed each other, lol. Sure there are some bumps when we yell about stupid things like whose turn it is to do the dishes... but no huge arguments. I love living with him, and I think it was a great decision. Looking back, I now see (and hear) from these friends about how they are constantly yelling and screaming with their significant others or husbands. I wonder if they were really ever right for each other to begin with. No wonder they gave me the advice they did, if that's what they live with!
So now that my boyfriend and I have been living together for 2 years, people wonder what the next step is for the two of us. We've talked about getting married, and we probably will within the next few years or so. It's funny, I take the concept of marriage very seriously and yet some people can go up to someone they have been dating for 5 minutes and talk about how they are going to have kids someday. While we've talked about marriage and kids and all of that, we waited until we lived together to really talk about it seriously. With divorce rates as high as they are, I think we owed it to each other to only talk about it seriously.
Now the topic of marriage has been brought up a lot lately from friends and family, which I understand (and expect to some degree). What cracks me up is people I barely know that work with my boyfriend or people I barely know from school will start asking me all these questions! Here is some of the recent advice/questions I've received:
"Why aren't you married? You should just get it over with. Rip it off like a band-aid." <-- How romantic!
"You haven't bugged him enough to ask you to marry him yet." <-- Nagging is the answer? Who knew!
"You can't tell him what to do until you have a ring on your finger." <-- I always wondered why guys were scared of getting married... there's the answer!
"Start dropping lots of hints... like showing him what rings you like." <-- Pretty sure that's not a subtle "hint" lol.
"Tell his friends to start bugging him." <-- Great idea. Why not ask his family too? Creepy.
"Getting married will help your financial aid!" <-- True, but that really isn't the first thing I think of when I think about the reasons I want to get hitched, lol.
I've gone to friends and told them about troubles only for them to somehow loop back around to the problem REALLY being about the fact that we aren't married yet. Example:
Me: "I don't think he listens to me."
Friend: "Well you can't expect him to until you guys are married."
Me: (thinking) Wtf?
Stuff like that. What's also humorous to me is I have a lot of advice from people that haven't been in a serious relationship ever, or people who are single, or people who have only been in bad relationships. It's like, really? You want me to take advice from you?
But you can't say that... cause they are your friends... and that would be rude... etc etc. Lol.
All this talk about marriage makes me not want to talk about it at all anymore. I don't even want to hear the word. Isn't that awful? Just typing it makes me go, "Aw that's terrible..." Lol. It's like, God forbid things happen naturally. You gotta nudge a little...and by nudge a little I mean throw some gas into the flames! Lol. I don't know, it's just crazy to me.
So if anyone out there has any other really funny advice they were given to them, feel free to leave them in the comments.
