It’s more that it doesn’t make a lot of sense. You’re not even beginning to know someone after three weeks, and while mutual friends may mean it’s less likely he’s got a secret wife in the attic or whatever, they’re not in a relationship with him. Someone can be a perfectly good mate to go to the pub with and an appalling, dysfunctional boyfriend.
Peiole will say ‘Well, I knew immediately with DH’, but that’s just luck. Other people who also ‘knew immediately’ ended up breaking up after a year or twenty.
My last relationship before DH was very intense from the beginning, despite me being cautious and a realist. A total connection. I would have said I was utterly in love after six months, and he’d proposed. But after almost exactly a year, I ended things. Knowing him better didn’t invalidate his kindness and cleverness, his interesting mind, and the sex was great, but it was contextualised by his passivity and routine-boundness. In a new relationship he’d been temporarily more adventurous and spontaneous, but after a few months more, it became clear he wanted a much smaller life than I did.
We’re still in touch, years later. I’ve moved jobs, countries, married, had a child, changed career, published a couple of books, renovated an old house, made a garden, made a lot of new friends, taken up climbing, started a podcast etc. He’s doing exactly what he was doing when we were together. I’m not sneering. It suits him, but it wouldn’t have suited me.
Which is a long way round of saying that I couldn’t have known all this about his deepseated tendencies when we were together only a few months, and he was still being artificially stimulated into matching my energy.