DP of two years still isn’t sure about marriage

[swingle]

DP and I have been together for just over 2 years and have lived together for over a year, we are both early 30s. The relationship is fantastic and we’re both very happy, but it recently occurred to me that whilst we speak about future plans, DP never speaks about marriage or when that might be. From my point of view, whilst two years isn’t a huge amount of time, I feel it’s been long enough for me to know with absolute certainty that I want to marry him. We’ve both supported each other through a huge amount over the last two years, including close family deaths, new jobs, house renovation and so on, so it’s not as if we haven’t faced challenges during our relationship either.

Decided to have the conversation with DP about marriage and he seemed like a deer in headlights, asking if I was saying I wanted to get married right now. We spoke more about it and essentially, DP feels we both need to experience more things together before he feels ready to marry and that “perhaps in the next couple of years” he will want to. To me this felt like such a wishy washy response and I’ve been left with more questions than answers.

AIBU in thinking that two years should be long enough to know for certain whether you want to marry someone, especially at our age? I respect myself enough not to wait around if someone else doesn’t feel the same.

2 years isn’t long enough to decide whether someone wants to spend their entire life with you, imo.

Surely you want him to be sure rather than rush into it, regret it and end in divorce??

I think 2 years is borderline. Anything under 2 years i'd say is reckless. It's really not much in the grand scheme.

I'd give it another year and reopen the discussion then.

What are the things he wants to do first? Did he say or was that the wishy washy bit?

You did the right thing talking about it.

Are children on the cards? If so do you want to be married first? That gives you a bit of a time frame to consider.

If marriage is a deal breaker for you, was for me, I’d give this some thought because his apparent panic would put me off.

I think 2 years is still while you're getting to know each other. And if you're both early thirties then I say back off, but you've already asked so he's probably freaking out now, think you were just having a nice time together.

Do you have 'a life plan' that you haven't let him know about?

I think it depends a bit - ultimately it depends what marriage means to you both.

I'm 53 and have been with my partner 2 years, and it is possible I would want to marry him in a few years, but I also might want to carry on as we are. I don't want to be married at the moment. It doesn't mean I don't want to be with him.

Are you thinking purely that you want to get married as a commitment, do you want to be married and then have children, what is attached to marriage in your mind? These are all legitimate things to want BTW.

I think I would have some more conversations with him about how you both see the future, and just generally give it a bit more time. But yes, if he doesn't want to get married and you do, one of you isn't going to get what you want and I would consider leaving if you see the future very differently.

I think key is do you want children? If you do I think you need to be upfront. So if marrying before children is what you want spell it out. Also don’t assume he appreciates potential drop in fertility as you age especially if you want more than one.
I’d give him chance to digest but have a conversation again in a couple of months and see where he is at. Christmas perhaps a good time - how would you like Christmas to be in 5 years if you say married with a baby and he says backpacking in Thailand you know you aren’t on same page.

It depends on age.

Teens, early twenties? I think it's okay if at 2yr into a relationship you don't know whether you want to get married to that person. You might just not be at an age where marriage feels appropriate.

However... once you're into your late twenties/thirties, in my opinion, you know whether you're interested in marriage and whether you see yourself marrying. You've seen friends and family get married and start families. And two years is enough to know whether you want to marry the person you're with imo, even if you don't foresee it happening for a little while longer.

DH said he knew he wanted to marry me from very early on, proposed on our third dating anniversary. That felt like an appropriate length of time to us to not be rushing into it but not delaying pointlessly. I wouldn't personally want to actually marry someone before a 2yr anniversary, but I knew at that point whether I wanted to marry him or not.

I'm sorry to say but I don't see that you have similar goals if you're in your thirties and he's all shocked and surprised at the mention of marriage while you're already thinking you'd love to marry him. It seems a bit odd to me that it hasn't occurred to him and it wasn't a great response, he sounded very defensive and like he sees it as a threat rather than something wonderful.

'Perhaps in the next couple of years I might want to marry' isn't going to be enough for you imo, if you want to marry. As a woman in your thirties, if you want kids (don't know if you do or not) you don't really have the luxury of waiting and seeing whether this man fancies marrying you or not as two more years is a lot to gamble on someone when it could easily end with nothing and then you're starting afresh again.

Trust me on this: you want to marry someone who's excited by the idea of and keen to marry you. Not someone you have to persuade into it or who seems uninterested.

What exactly does he need to experience that you can’t experience while you’re married?

Do you want children? That's the crux of the decision IMO. If you don't, there's no hurry. You can give him a couple of years to make up his mind. If you do, it's a different matter as him deciding it's a no in 2 years' time leaves you nearing your mid-30s potentially single. It's understandable it hadn't crossed his mind because men don't have the same biological pressure.

Like you I felt (and still feel) that 2 years is long enough to know whether you want to commit or not. I am surprised at the posters saying they think it's early days, I don't think you are likely to learn much at 2+ years that you didn't know already, especially after living together for one of them.

I was in a kind of similar position at 32 although I wasn't bothered about marriage, I wanted children. I gave my DP 6 months to decide as I didn't want to waste any more time if it wasn't going to happen.

I think you're still in borderline territory, though if you want DC that's a complicating factor. If you do, I wouldn't give it that much longer.

Also if you've renovated a house, is it one that you jointly own?

Neither of you are being unreasonable

The idea of marriage may grow on him over the next year or two, or it might not. Impossible to predict really but especially so for people who have never met either f you. Have other couples in your friendship group started getting married yet? That can influence things one way or another and may make him realise that he does want to marry you (or equally it could make him realise he doesn't).

Do you have any trusted friends IRL who know you both as they may have more insight as to his true feelings/intentions?

What isn't clear from your OP is what conversations have already been had about life plans from the pair of you. I hate any kind of game-playing, and I think the older I get the less time I've got for cryptic conversations and treading on eggshells in case I were to scare someone off. You're both adults. Surely you've both already discussed what you'd ideally like your lives to look like?

If not, then now is the time to do so. My husband was considerably younger than me when we first met and many friends assumed he'd be scared off / intimidated by commitment, but even in the early months he was mature enough to be able to say 'look we are just getting to know each other right now but in the not too distant future I'd ideally like to have a family' etc, and then after a couple of years we got engaged.

Your partner being scared by this conversation at the age of 30-something and after two years together is not a good sign imho. I've been there and had a guy waste my time for a number of years suggesting he'd think about getting married one day down the line when we had experienced more things together, when in actual fact he was never going to commit (numerous subsequent non-committed short-term relationships after me and no children now aged 50).

No-one has to want to get married, but you do have to be in the same page up start a life with someone, so unless you are clear about that then I'd be very careful.

What is the housing situation?

I would usually say 2 years is when you know you have a future or issues start to emerge.

I think his vagueness would be worrying. He must have thought of marriage. Are his friends married?

I'm a firm believer in 'when you know, you know', within reason and making sure you're sensible 😂 My husband and I bought a house together 9 months after meeting and were engaged a month shy of being together 2 years (had lived together for a year by then), then married the year later. 3 years on we've just had our first baby. Nothing felt rushed, it all felt quite natural and we've turned out to be a pretty good team and still feel as though we'll be together til we're old!

I will go against the grain here and say that after being together for two years and living together for one he should know by now if he wants to marry you or not.

That doesn’t mean he is ready to marry you right now of course - If he hadn’t given it much thought before now then I can see how he might have felt a bit blindsided by the conversation, but now you’ve brought it up he needs to give it serious thought. Like a previous poster suggested, I’d give him 6 months to think it over and if he still isn’t sure I’d move on.

Fortunately you are young enough to seek out a new relationship and have children (if you want them), but the next decade will fly by and there’s no point wasting your fertile years on a relationship that goes
nowhere.

Absolutely this.

Unfortunately, I think a lot of women are socially conditioned to avoid talking about commitment with their male partners for fear of 'scaring them off' or 'coming on too strong'. The whole social norm around marriage for example, women are expected to wait passively for the man to decide he's ready, he proposes rather than it being a mutual decision, and then you can marry. A woman saying to a man 'right, I'm ready to get married, what about you?' is frowned upon. So a lot of men have the idea that it's their decision and they can hang around for months/years before making a decision.

So I'm not surprised that people get into serious cohabiting relationships without having talked about what they want from their lives, and when. Marriage, kids, where to settle down, and so forth. That is all so important to talk through before moving in together, you'd think!

Similar position here, I was 28 and DH only 24 when we met but I was clear in the first date or two that I was keen on having kids within the next few years and only wished to get into something serious with a partner who was looking for the same things. But then that's because I felt I was too old to drift around falling into serious relationships, giving exclusivity, with people where there really wasn't going to a future. By 28 it was time to either stay single and look for the right person or only consider a relationship if we were both on the same page about the future. No pressure, not saying 'new guy, I want your babies!' just saying 'I'm looking for this within the next few years, and I'm only interested in dating someone who actively wants the same'.

Curious to know what discussions OP and her boyfriend have had around marriage and children up until now.

As a pp said, the key thing is if you want kids. That`s the crux of it

You mentioned house renovations, do you own a home together? If so that's a big commitment so surely you must have had some conversations about what you want your future to look like at that time? It's possible he doesn't believe in marriage or doesn't see it as necessary, but felt put on the spot hence vague mutterings about "perhaps in a couple of years". But that doesn't mean he doesn't imagine spending the rest of his life with you. How much it matters depends on your priorities. You need to have an honest conversation with him, which goes both ways, and try to find out how he really feels rather than him saying what he thinks you want to hear.

I think a couple of years is a decent amount of time to have discussions like this
I was with my partner for around this amount of time when I started wanting to know what our future plans were
We were looking at places to mortgage and something in me didn’t want to take this step before discussing children or marriage

I think if you are wanting children in the future I would need an answer on this after a couple years together due to fertility declining after a certain age. I worried I’d be with someone who didn’t want children and found out too late.

I would tell him that you see marriage in your future (next 2/3 years or whenever you feel like you’d see yourself married) and that it’s important to you. Then see what happens over the next year or so, if you’re still in this position next year then maybe go from there and make a decision. IMO you want your partner to propose and marry you because he wants too and not because you’re on at him and he feels like he has too otherwise you’ll dump him (not saying you’d do this)

My partner never thought about marriage and didn’t want children before he met me. We had a discussion before we moved in, he said he wants kids with me but not yet. He wasn’t sure on marriage yet. We have lived together 1.5 years now, married on our 4 year anniversary and have a baby on the way.

2 years is plenty of time to decide if the other person is the one they want to be with. Not being sure suggests an element of being in a place holder relationship or the other person never wanting to marry, but not being open about it. I would push for honesty. but that's just me.

and that “perhaps in the next couple of years” he will want to.

This is a holding response. It’s a bit more honest than the threads you see on here of “we’ve been engaged for x years but he won’t commit to a date”, but it is what it is. And, harsh though it sounds, it’s not the overwhelming “yes, you’re the one” you were hoping for.

As others have said, the crux of the matter is whether you want kids. If you do, I’d have a conversation on that basis - “that’s fine, but I definitely want to have kids and 35/36/37 (or whatever) is my cutoff. So let’s talk about this again in 3/6/12 months and if you don’t want to get married, then I don’t think this is the relationship for me in the long term.” You don’t immediately burn your bridges, but you take back control of the timeline. “Perhaps in a couple of years” is indefinite; the last thing you want is to be strung out until you’re 40 and then see that he’s not for keeps.

You are certain you want to marry your boyfriend and nothing wrong with that. Your boyfriend isn't nearly as sure as you and wants to wait to see if he does want to marry you in the future.

It is up to you whether you can live with that uncertainty. You do sound overinvested, or at least much more invested than your boyfriend is.

It sounds to me that you've both had a busy few years with close bereavements, new jobs etc.

Tbh, I'd wait for the dust to settle and experience a more relaxed/typical type of relationship for a while.

As PP have said, I wouldn't be having any DC out of wedlock.

I get you. I knew I wanted to marry my dh well before 2 years were up and we freely talked about 'when we are married' and 'when we have children's during that time. When you know, you know. But I still had to wait another 2 years before he would agree to marry me. The difference was he was in his early 20s when we met and was still only 26 when we married. I'm not sure your dp has the excuse of youth on his side.
I also agree with others that it depends on whether you want children or not. I wouldn't personally recommend anyone has children with anyone who won't commit to marriage. So if children are important to you, he needs to either shit or get off the pot.

Perfect age and time, it doesn’t get “better”. It’s up to you if this is a deal breaker.