@swtTea: I know that the OP, Shirinjoon, has posted many times about her conversations with her SO and about how she HAS told him how she feels. He knows. She’s trying to be pariten while he appears to be making excuses at times and dragging his feet. She’s told him pretty much thath she doens’t want to still be wiating come July. I don’t think you can get much more communication accomplished than that. So she’s stuck, now, trying not to harp on it each time they see each other. She’ss tuck waiting for him to make the move. She has to wait on HIM to make the move at this point, or ‘take control’ by leaving a relationship she loves enough to want to continue into marriage. That’s the source of the frustration.
My SO and I HAVE talked. He knows how I feel. He’s a little but of a mystery to me, as his feelings are more in flux than mine are once a month, sometimes. I’ve done my part, telling him how I feel, he’s asked me to wait a bit longer, so guess what: I wait. I can’t positiviely control the situation in any way to make it go more quickly. Anything I do could push down the tower of cards of his positive thoughts about marraige that are being built. I need him to reach a point on his own. I have no control over how he feels – only HE can control that. Again, the only “control” I have is whether I stay in my long-term relationship that I’ve built my entire life around, that no one would tell me to leave if we were already married, or whether I go ‘husband huntng’, violating how I feel in the first place. I don’t want to get married for the sake of getting married… I want to be married to my SO because I love him. Leaving won’t solve that probelm, at all. So, I feel I have no direct control, and have to wait on him, just like many, many ladies on the waiting boards. I can only control myself, and I only have 3 options:
Leave. Give up. Pretty much ‘divorce’ my SO, without any of the protection or repsect the word divorce brings simply because we’ve been together so long but aren’t married. Say to him that I love him so much I want to spend forever with him, so I’m going to leave (that’s what he will take from it) hoping to find another warm body to put a ring on my hand.
Stay, maybe forever hoping he’ll come around – he’s made some recent overtures to this effect, but he’s like a snail, soooo slooow. I can stay, never really 100% knowing that he may or may not propose, and wisk me off to Vegas or a courthouse and ‘make an honest woman of me’, or whether that little piece of me that hopes each and every holiday will get the best of me, hoping he’ll do it, and being crushed he didn’t.
Give up all hope and stay. Resign myself to the fact that I am not meant to be married. Understand that I will be willing to give up on something pretty much any woman I’ve ever known has hopes for, one day. Realize that since I’m mostly happy with him, it shouldn’t matter, no matter the silly, hurtful jokes people make, no matter the fact that I’ll need to jump through a lot of hoops to garner the same legal protections marriage would confer, realize that the man I love loves me, just not enough to give me his name, and deal with it.
These are my current options to regain control, while waiting for him to gain control over things he has plenty of power to do, like fix his finances, finish school and decide whether being married is really the kiss of death that he thinks from seeing his parents’ marriage, or if it just means I could finally be happy knowing he’d actually chosen me ans wasn’t just caosting along in life, happy I’m there but not caring if I’m not.
If your SO didn’t shrink away when you pretty much popped your own questions on him, that’s great. Not all men are so positiviley inclined towards marriage, based on their true age, preceived age, where they are in the lives and their careers, etc. Not everyone has such a relatively simple walk from dating to engaged to married. Many, many men these days ceom from broken homes which discourage believe in the success of marriage, they’ve been told that marraige is stupid because yo’re now tied to only one woman forever instead of being a swinging player, that only old people get married, that you have to have kids right off the bat, … there’s a lot going on that makes it hard for some modern men to wrap their minds around, “If I love her, and want to be with her, I really ought to marry her.”
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