Just a thought on relationships - do we commit too soon?

[Leopardino]

I was reading Women in Love on the bus on the way home, and I had a thought on the pattern of relationships we see today, and I wonder whether we've lost something that was positive about relationships in the past.

I'll make some sweeping generalisations about how relationships were and are.

In the past, if you wanted to move in with your partner, you had to get married. Before people married, they were largely financially independent of each other. However, when people were married, divorce was frowned upon, and many people stayed in unhappy marriages. Another negative of this pattern is that you may not have known your partner as well as you might today if you'd lived with them for a few years before marriage.

On the other hand, today, many people (perhaps most) move in before they ever think of marrying, but by doing so, couples are far more committed to each other financially (they pay joint rent, or may have joint mortgages) before they're formally committed. In doing so, there's a danger that people sleepwalk into commitment. Inertia can set in, and it becomes difficult to leave an unhappy relationship.

So, I do wonder whether by losing the stigma attached to living together (a good thing), we've sleepwalk into unhappy relationships, rather than positively choose our relationships as people did when they married in the past.

Any thoughts?

I'd never live with a man I think I'd like to marry, because I know that living with him would probably make me long to be married. I bond through spending time with men. (Men - IME - are usually the opposite! They tend to realise how much a woman means to them when she's not around.)

Cohabiting would never feel like "enough", and I'd start simmering with resentment that I'd seriously reduced my other options, had lost all my elusiveness and had basically become Old Faithful, all without ANY legal support or entitlement in the event of a split. I'd be angry with the bloke but that'd be daft, because I'd have been the one to walk into that situation.

So I won't do it. It's not that hard to say, "I'd rather be married than just live with a man." If you think he'll chuck you if you say it that baldly, then that's all the more reason to say it.