Guys like relationships. We are not all the slick pick up artists out there trying to hit on every girl in sight. Meeting a girl, falling for her, it’s great. Everyone’s happy! However, looking back on my life, after you are together a while, something changes. Y’all start to get a little confused by how your man acts. This happens after the love stage, maybe some kind of living together but it’s definitely before marriage. He loves you, you know that. He wants to be with you. But nothing has changed in a while. It is the same. It brings on questions in you. Where is this relationship going? Does he still love me? Why does he feel he can leave the toilet seat up now? He seems so perfectly ok with this! Why doesn’t he do something?? Can’t he see we need to do something?? God I hate him so much right now, he way he sits there and watches football, look at him smiling at me. I bet he is enjoying this. Jerk!
We are smiling because we really are enjoying this. Guys LOVE this time in the relationship. We are together with you, we go out and we have awesome fun. Plus the sex is pretty great too. Sure all that extra stuff has to come sometime and we do really want that, but we don’t get why it needs to come so soon. Don’t we have our whole lives for that? What’s the rush baby? Well, its probably because guys have approximately zero biological and social pressure to move forward. I’m going to be pretty good at making a kid for the next 20 years and while I don’t really want to be some “grandpa daddy”, my healthy male ego thinks “oh yeah I’m going to be fit and active well into my mid life, I think there is room for another beer now”. If you don’t have parents who are pushing you (tip: moving across the other side of the world worked for me) then its pretty much only your girlfriend who wants you to get serious. So then we start feeling we are going out with a project manager who dutifully informs us this relationship is behind schedule and the only way to make it up is to put in double shifts of nights in watching Sex and the City reruns.
When we are sitting on the couch, using the remote to change channels, we feel like a man. A man in control. In control of a TV but in control nevertheless
I think there exists a lot social pressure on women over 25 in Estonia to settle down and have a partner. If you want to focus on your career, you’re going to have A LOT of people telling you “when you get a cat, you should definitely take one from the shelter”. When I was single I would so rarely meet single women above 25, like older single women of Estonia form a secret society for fear of being outed as witches. When I would go to Copenhagen or Stockholm it would be perfectly normal to meet eligible single women who had great jobs and were 30 or more. I hope for your sake it becomes more normal here, the last thing you want is to settle for some dork because you are running out of friends to have a drink with on Friday night.
Unmarried at 25? GO OUT AND FIND A MAN NOW or this will be you in 2 years, I swear to god the cats can smell your singleness, go go go!!
So don’t let that stuff drive you nuts ok? Pretty much every ex girlfriend who I have spoken to years later, if they were not still (deservedly) interested in throwing a coffee mug at my head, told me they are sorry for pushing me into something I didn’t want to do. Oh what’s that? After 16 years of having adult relationships maybe the common factor in me not being able to move on to something more committed is actually just.. me? Hey, who asked you anyway. Fine.
Artist rendering of pretty much every breakup I’ve ever had. In my younger days I looked older and more like Super Mario
Look, your man loves you and he wants to be with you. He may have a hard time opening up because, while the Y chromosome gives us logic, it also leaves us with the emotional range of a Baltic herring. If he’s reluctant, give him time. Just don’t let man boy child sitting next to you take forever to come around though, let a man not commit forever and he probably won’t. Enjoy the time you have together, you will be surprised how fast your guy will learn stuff if you ease up on him and talk about it a bit. He might even watch another Sex and the City with you.