Waiting For A Marriage Proposal? Advice You Need
Waiting for him to propose marriage? How to deal when you're waiting to get engaged.
Cathy Torkelson, 34, had a good job as a legal consultant, a loving boyfriend and supportive friends and family. She was a good girlfriend in what appeared to be a solid year-and-a-half-long relationship. Yet, internally, Cathy was anxious, irritable, moody and unable to concentrate. The cause? A persistent question: why hasn't he proposed? Signs He's Serious
Torkelson's questioning became "all-consuming," and eventually turned a normally independent, rational woman into a nervous wreck.
"I got in a depressive state where all I wanted to do was crawl into a ball and cry," she explains. Her boyfriend was committed, attentive and she knew he loved her, but because he hadn't asked her to marry him, she doubted her self-worth. "It made me feel like there had to be something wrong with me."
Sounds crazy, right? But despite all the gender-role changes over the past decades, men asking women for their hand in marriage is a tradition that has remained strong. And for a woman who wants her man to get down on one knee, waiting for that one little question is stressful and nerve-wracking. But can waiting for a proposal actually drive you crazy?
"It creates feelings of helplessness and passivity, which we know are correlated with episodes of depression," explains psychiatrist Dr. Renée Bibeault, a specialist in women's mental health in Kirkland, WA. "Anything that inspires feelings of not being in control of your own life, particularly with something that has enormous impact on you such as marriage, takes an enormous toll emotionally." Marriage. It's Complicated. Is It Worth It?
How long is to long to wait? My boyfriend and I are an older couple, he's 53 and I'm 46; we've been together for four years, two in a long distance relationship and two living together and we both have children from our previous relationships. We both had really bad first marriages but the discussion of remarriage happened very early, he asked me the second time we talked and I responded yes definitely and there have been other discussions throughout the years. I've known since our first conversation he was the man I wanted to spend my life with but he has this timeline for his education that he wants to complete first, he's currently in a masters program and has been laying hints of a PhD program. His family has a habit of referring to me as his wife and I politely remind them that requires an additional commitment on his part. He’s a wonderful man; he’s kind, loving, faithful, funny . . . but I’m getting frustrated. If this is all he has to offer it’s not what I want or need. How long is to long?
I think if you've been living together two years, it's more than reasonable to ask him what he thinks about marriage. Ask him if he wants to wait until he's done with his PhD and if so, why? I don't think it's good to give people ultimatums, just bring it up nicely. Find out what he's thinking about the subject.
My personality is such that "time" is an entirely different concept for me than most people.
Best time lines in a relationship is where spend 1-2 YEARS getting to know each other, and then deciding how long wish to be together. Many times, this causes me to quickly be placed under "just friends".
Then there is the "Ego" of support, Yes I DO feel the need to know how I will be supporting a family.
As a potential partner, IF you wish to ENCOURAGE me to ask, help me find ways to Enjoy Life and get past Life's Hurdles. Could also try to get other friends to intervene and prove what may be loosing.
NO MATTER WHAT, do NOT give me ULTIMATUMS. Any form of Ultimatum, intentional or not, WILL trigqer my danger survival instincts. These instincts are VERY deep rooted, as they have saved my life many times since birth.
I don't really understand these relationships where people need years and years. I got engaged after 9 months, engagement was exactly 1 year, in which we lived together, and it seemed to be the right length of time and level of knowing each other. what exactly are these people doing for years and years?
For some reason I had the idea that you had to be together for five years before you got married. I was very cautious about getting married.
One day I woke up and realized it had been five years. I told my sweetie that now we were going to have to decide what we wanted to do. It wasn't an ultimatum. I was trying to make up my mind, too. It was a way to bring up the subject, though. We were slow, and took another year to make up our minds and a year to get around to doing it.
I don't actually recommend being as slow as we were to most people. It was what we needed.
I do think it's a reasonable thing to bring up the question after a few years.
