To want to be married?

[BoundForFreedom]

I've been with my dp for seven years and engaged for four. Whenever I bring up marriage he gets aggressive and defensive. I'm starting to think he will never marry me, and that maybe I'm just a stop gap until something better comes along. All around me my friends are getting married and starting families and I'm just stuck here in the same place I've been for the last few years. He's never going to marry me is he?

Ps please be gentle, my self esteem is on the floor.

Op rather than thinking 'I've wasted 7 years' think of how many years you're saving. You'll live to be 80 odd or 90 odd in that context 7 years is very little

Yes this. You could easily have another 50 years with him or more. Leaving someone after a 30 year marriage is one thing, but in the context of spending 60-odd years together, 7 years isn't an investment worth protecting at all. Do you want to spend 50 years with someone who avoids getting married and is verbally aggressive?

I understand OP. This could have been me twenty years ago. So I took a work posting abroad for three months to think. When I came back I asked him for a commitment. He accused me of "putting pressure on him" and turned me into the bad guy. He wriggled and turned it back on me - it was always my fault "trying to force him". We broke up. I left.

Two years later I was with someone and pregnant. Oddly enough we never got married but had two children and a happy partnership for nearly twenty years.

He got married within two years of our break-up to an old girlfriend. They never had children.

Trust your instincts. It isn't about marriage or otherwise - it is about the fact that you don't feel he is committed to you.

He doesn't want to marry you.

Move out, start your new life now. Tell him you'll move back in with him if he marries you.

It might shock him into realising how important this is to you. More likely though, he'll huff and puff about you 'blackmailing' him, then turn on the tears, and then moan at all your friends, and still won't marry you. In which case you've done the right thing and cut your losses while you can.

Frankly from what you've posted about him you're 'settling' for someone who doesn't care enough about you anyway.

By the way, I was in my thirties when I left.

"It's very difficult to contemplate leaving someone when you've invested so much though".

Do not get yourself caught up in the sunken costs fallacy (which is what the above thought really is); that also causes you to make poor relationship decisions. This man won't have done your self worth any good either and staying with him will just prolong the agony for yourself as well as taking longer to recover from.

Move on with your life without this verbally abusive man in it. He does not have to hit you to hurt you. The only acceptable level of abuse within a relationship is none.

You haven't wasted 7 years. It's a 7 year relationship that has shaped you and formed part of your history and story.

But you want to marry and he doesn't. He's proposed and mislead you.

Relationships end and it sounds like this one should too

No he will never marry you. Do you really want him to ??
He shouldn't be verbally abusing you. If you did get pregnant I would put money on the verbal abuse escalating, and possibly becoming physical.
I spent years at a time in the wrong relationships in my 20s, and when you are so embroiled it can be really hard to imagine a different life, but trust me, a much much better life is yours for the taking.
Walk away. It's actually harder to picture than to do. Find a new place to live.A house share might be a good idea.
Find a man with a van. Be single for a while. Have some fun.
Don't worry about marriage and kids, just see who you are away from this waste of space.

When I was in my 20s I had a friend who was 30ish and had lived with her DP for several years, owned a house together, we thought they were perfectly happy, so it came as quite a shock when she suddenly left him, but within two years she was married and having a baby with someone else. I remember her saying to me "don't do what I did and waste your life with the wrong person, I got out on time, but I wasted so many years". It's sometimes easier to stay with the wrong person for years than it is to break out, but in the long run so much better to do the hard bit and break free while you still have time on your side.