Someone in my team just got engaged!!! Man I'm jealous!

CharlotteMusha

Going back to OP quickly...

My boyfriend and I have been together 3 years in August. (We moved in together after 1.5 years or so)
We discussed marriage and what we thought about it very early on - we both want to get married and would like to be married a few years before having children.
We talk about marriage regularly - or to be more exact weddings

I don't care about an engagement ring, I've said I will quite happily go without (don't see the point in spending in upwards of £1,000 on a shiny ring when that could go towards a wedding!)

I am the only one in my circle of friends (of whom I am one of the oldest) who has not had a baby yet and I am constantly being asked by them when I will be getting pregnant. I keep trying to tell them that we want to be married first and they just can't get their heads around it! Bear in mind that 3 of these friends only got married as they got pregnant very early on in relationships (one just 6 weeks in) and once the baby was there it was the 'next thing to tick off' and it meant they got to have a big party and ask for presents - one friend actually asked for baby items on their wedding list as she was heavily pregnant at time of wedding and they had spent the money they did have on wedding and none on planning for babys arrival!

The girls think I'm mad for not getting my boyf down the aisle or getting myself pregnant yet 'how else will I get him to stick around' being the general mentality, it makes me sad that this is the way that some people think about marriage and families nowadays.

I don't care about the blingy ring, I don't care about getting a wedding date set in stone right this second - I know we will get married one day but I also know that even if we didn't he wouldn't be going anywhere.
Love is ove, commitment is commitment.

securityguy

CharlotteMusha wrote: »

don't see the point in spending in upwards of £1,000 on a shiny ring when that could go towards a wedding!

Wouldn't paying off your credit card be a better use still? #justsayin

Dunroamin

pigpen wrote: »

Sadly we are not all blessed with psychic abilities to predict the future. I doubt many people enter into what they feel is a forever relationship expecting that 20 years later that it will all fall to pieces.

That's not what I either said or meant. By referring to him in such a derogatory way implies that he was a bad husband, not just that he got bored with the marriage and left.

Dunroamin

littlerat wrote: »

My parents were married from their early 20s for 19 years - my Mum died, there was no reason to think it wouldn't have been for live if she hadn't.

I've also seen plenty of people who got married (often for a 2nd or third time) much later - those have ended. I doubt age at the time of marriage makes that much difference to the outcome.


I do sometimes wonder why people divorce so much now, if people maybe don't work at marriages as hard? Not saying people should have to stay together, and obviously the fact people no longer end up obliged as often to stay in abusive marriages is great, but it's odd that when people seem to be together longer before marriage and kids, the marriages are lasting less.

Actually, statistically it does. The younger a person marries, the higher the probability of divorce.

Dunroamin

duchy wrote: »

To be fair -unless you've experienced your partner hitting that mid-life crisis and having a complete turnaround in their morals, attitudes-everything. It is very hard to understand how someone can change that much and there is an assumption that they were always like that and the spouse was deluded or ignoring the warning signs.

That's of course true except for the fact that women who marry when they're very young are probably marrying men who are also young and this is going to increase the chance of a mid life crisis.

Although I was older, my ex husband was 22 when we met, 25 when we married and 29 when we divorced. If we'd had children we'd have tried to work harder at the marriage but I'm pretty sure that he'd've been off when he hit mid 30s/40s because he'd've realised how little living he'd done before he married. I haven't seen him for 30 odd years but I'm sure that, if he married again in his 30s after a decent period of being young and single, he'd probably stay happily married for the rest of his life because he was basically a good bloke who got tied down too young.

FBaby

I do believe that many people who spent years hoping to meet Mr Right, would rather have met him years before, than spend many years in heartbreak or lonely

I don't! It is a joke of ours that neither have any doubt that had we met in our 20s or even early 30s, we would have actually dislike each other very much. He would have seen me as high maintenance and a pain in the bum, I would have considered him a selfish immature pig!

It is because of our experiences and where we were when we met that we fell in love. We both matured in a way that brought us together. Yes, theoretically it would have been nice to meet sooner and have children together, but practically, I am pretty sure we wouldn't have made it work.

aileth

My parents were penpals, with my dad being in the army in Germany. They wrote letters to each other and saw each other maybe once a month or two. They got married when my dad finished the Army a year later, maybe only having seen each other 5-6 times but writing lots of letters. Her family were extremely skeptical about it all.

36 years and going strong

Percy1983

I do think age of getting married could have a lot to do with things.

IE if I married the woemn I was with at 22 I would probably be divorced now.

I know in our case we have both grown and figured who we are and we don't live in each others pockets, we have to distinct lives with a lovely overlap in the middle, will it last forever? I can't say for certain but I can't see any reason why not.

Percy1983

Person_one wrote: »

Or look shocked and uncomfortable and say "are you asking about my sex life?"

Georgiegirl256 wrote: »

That's the phrase I have in my head, and even though I can sometimes come across as abit hard faced, and have all these wisecrack replies ready, when it comes down to it, when I'm put on the spot, I wimp out and don't know what to say, I can also be quite emotional too I need to be a faster thinker and more quick witted!

My answer is usually, "we're having too much fun practising to ruin it, how about you?"

I will say on a personal front we don't know if we can have children, it would be wrong to assume it will just work (no reasons to assume not right now either). Also we have discussed at and agree if it doesn't work so be it, we won't chase IVF and such like as we have seen friends were it has become there entire life and it just takes over.

duchy

I think it is in many cases sheer luck when you marry young if you grow up together ...or if as you mature you go in very different directions. Starting a family early seems to help - although I'm seeing a lot of my peers who wed and had kids early are now wondering what on earth they still have in common with their spouses now the kids are independent....and are either seperated or struggling after twenty or thirty years of apparently stable and happy marriage.