AIBU - to feel bitter that DP took so long...

[Beaverfeaver]

...to pop the question?

Been together 11 years now. He asked me to marry him about 18 months ago now.
I always knew he would eventually, just took longer than I would have liked. Obviously I am over the moon that he did ask me and we are getting married in 6 months time.
But sometimes I get horrible feelings/thoughts creep into my mind when other aquaintances(not friends) get engaged in a much shorter time than us, and then again when they have a shorter engagement (ours is over 2 years at the request of DP, I would have had it sooner).
It was hard enough to get him to book it then and he would have been quite happy for it to have been 3 years if he could, and it was actually the vicar in the end who told him that it's not a great idea to have such a long engagement.

I feel like I am a horrible person for thinking this way, and I know DP thinks I am mental for getting annoyed that other people get round to these things much quicker, and says that I am being competitive about it, but it's not that I'm unhappy at other people doing it, it really is just that I still feel bitter that he took so long to ask and now I am waiting for a wedding to happen too.

Am I brig unreasonable to think like this and will I stop feeling bitter soon?

My next concern is that if he takes so long with this, will he want to wait another 10 years to start a family with me?
I have voiced this concern of mine o him and he says I am ring silly, but that he has no idea when he will be ready for children and I just have to accept that it could be 2, 5 or 7 year or how ever long it takes.

I wish I didn't worry about these things

DH and I got together at 17, moved in together after going to different unis, and merrily pottered along with jobs, holidays etc. till eventually we started to think it might be lovely to be married - hadn't really thought about it before. DH proposed and we married a little more than a year later - so I totally get the long relationship before marriage! We were almost 32 when we married.

Since then we have very much stayed on the same page in terms of what we would like for our lives together. We had already talked about having children and I had DD1 at 35, now pregnant with DC2 and will be 37 when he/she is born.

So we sound similar in terms of timescale for long relationship / children in our 30s - you are far from running out of time, but I wonder from what you say whether you and your DP are still on the same page as you have been previously? It's very hard when you get together young and do so much of your growing up into adult life together - I think it must be inevitable that people suddenly find they want different things sometimes, drift apart in terms of their goals? It's a scary thing to realise and hard to face.

I think if having children is very important to you then a conversation is definitely in order - it's not fair on you to be in the dark over his desires for the future. He can't skirt this issue, it's serious stuff for your relationship.

I am going to be a bit of a voice of doom here, but I really think it might be a wise move not to rush into things. You got together when you were very young, and as people get older their goals, priorities and ideals can change considerably.

There are few comments you have made Op, where you disagree over things, and rather than compromise it sounds more like one of you has to get their own way.

An example being, you dont like flying, he wants a long haul honeymoon. Who wins on that one? He may at some point decide he doesnt want to be held back all his life from seeing the world. I will be honest, I would find it hard to contemplate a future that meant I could not go and see many places in the world as travel means a lot to me.

I wanted to say what maybenow has just said.

there's nothing wrong in waiting while you've got time, as long as you are SURE you won't be ultimately let down

^this, exactly this

The stuff he's saying about children sounds (sadly) fairly typical of men in their late 20s, my DH was similar at that age, wanted children sometime, but not in the imminent future, wanted house, better job blah blah blah first. I was confident that he'd come round to having DC around 30 rather than 35, and he did.

I know a few women who have spent their late twenties and early thirties with men fobbing them off, then splitting up mid-thirties, that is really shitty.

I hope that after 7 years of living together that we are far from rushing into a marriage.

We both compromise when needed. I wanted a pet when we moved out as I had grown up with dogs all my life and he had never had a pet. He didn't like the idea, but compromised and we got a cat which he adores.

We got engaged very close to my older sister getting engaged. They booked their wedding for 10 months later, so we agreed that we wouldn't start planning the wedding until their wedding had passed.
Then we chose a summer wedding and so had about 14 moths of actual planning time.
I would have been quite happy with a winter wedding though.
To be honest, I am just try easy going on most things. I don't care about a wedding in that it has to be a certain way, I just want to be married.
I don't want to put my foot down on trivial things that dont matter to me when that matter more to DP.

It is just now, that I think to myself that we should have done it sooner. More for the fact that the sooner it is done, the more we can do, rather than wedding planning. I am not a natural wedding planner and don't really enjoy it one bit and have so far done everything on convenience where I could.

We sometimes wish we'd done it sooner too, not least because introducing a small person into our longstanding twosome has been quite the culture shock!

But, in reality, we know we did it at the right time for us and you can't turn back time anyway so it's no use wishing :)

I wouldn't worry about the things you can't change beaver, just focus on the future.

Well, I think you need to decide what time frame for DCs works for you. Tell him you want to start TTC in X number of years (how about, when you turn 30?), ask him what he wants in place before that happens, and how you are going to start getting that happening by that timeframe.

Take control, don't wait for him to make the decisions about this. Make it clear (once you've decided on your time frame) that this is not up for discussion, so if he's not prepared to work with that, then does he see your relationship having a future and should you be thinking about marriage at all?

I was happy to wait as long as it took DP to feel ready to propose, and we had had a discussion a year or so into our relationship where I told him that he should ONLY propose if he was ready to start planning a wedding and that I would not be in a long engagement. Basically, if he proposed, he should expect to be married within 2 years of that.

It took him 7 years to propose, and apart from one beautiful holiay to Rome about 4 years in (which would have been a stunning place to be asked), I was content to wait. He knew my feelings, and I never felt concerned. I'd rather he ask in his own time and it be something he made sure was the right decision. I feel very strongly that it is this delay which has resulted in the smoothest transition from couple to married couple imaginable. It is my genuine opinion that after two years together, while it may feel right for someone else, me and my partner had not 'been through enough' to KNOW it was for life. It is, I think, these shorter times beore marriage that may result in a difficult first year, where neither party is sure of 'how' to be a married couple.

On the kids thing, I think you should try to establish with him a time when you re-visit the topic and maybe make a more certain arrangement. Once I felt ready to start trying for a baby, I brought it up with (at the time DP) who spent a week or so considering it, and said he was really daunted by it. We decided then that in exactly one year from that day, we would re-visit the conversation, but I wanted him to seriously consider trying once we got to that deadline, and stressed that it would probably take a while to conceive. We hit the 'magic date' a year later, and it was him who reminded me! He'd had the space to really think about it without any pressure from me, and had done well! Decided to start trying that day, fell pregnant within 6 weeks.

I'd like to apologise for the mammoth post, but your OP was so similar to my situation, I thought it may help to go into detail

Good luck with working out the right plan of action with your DP

I really think you are worrying about nothing!

You are a great age to be getting married. You have had time to get to know each other, you've bought your own place....really, what's the problem? He's enthusiastic about the wedding planning and has just said he doesn't know when he will be ready for kids. Don't rush him. Enjoy married life for a couple of years.

It sounds as though you have a great relationship. Women are usually ready before men to get married, have babies etc. It's about maturity and they do say boys/men take longer to get to that stage. It's important that you both want this together.

Stop overthinking things!