My (25F) bf (31M) doesn’t want to get married

18 comments

1. If you do want to get married, then it’s time to walk away. In my experience, some people make it work but it often doesn’t last forever. And breaking up several years in is going to be a lot harder than 2 years in.

2. If marriage is something you want for ANY reason, you would do well to end this relationship and move on.

   If he married you because he feels pressured to do so…. that resentment will fester.

   If you remain unmarried because he is unwilling, the feelings you have now will fester.

   You should be with someone who wants to be with you just as much, and two years is long enough to know if you can build a mutually satisfactory future

3. It sounds like you’re upset because you weren’t really for or against it, but you still felt like you had a choice. Now, the choice has been taken away from you and it’s caused you to do some digging, just a little too late (not your fault, just how it worked out). It would be one thing if he said from the beginning he was firmly against marriage, or if he said “I know you don’t really think much about marriage but I’ve been thinking about it and wanted to share my thoughts with you before making any decisions.” But he told you 2 years into dating you that he never wants to get married, with no room for negotiation. That would be jarring for anyone who wasn’t on the exact same page.

   In a relationship, you don’t get to make a decision like that one sided and expect the other party to just accept it. At the end of the day, you may not feel strongly about marriage but the fact that he decided this for the both of you is the main thing giving you pause. Take away “get married” and replace “I don’t want to ____” with any other major relationship decision. Maybe deep down you do want to get married, and if you do then it would be valid to walk away; two good people can be incompatible and want different things.

   But I think the bigger issue is that he seems to not care about your feelings or perspectives about issues that affect you both. And that’s where I think the anxiety is coming from. It’s not just that he’s against marriage. It’s that he kept that from you for two years and presented it as a non-negotiable you just needed to accept. That’s so, so unfair.

4. He is showing covert commitment phobia. You’re still young. You’re going to meet so many men in your lifetime. And you deserve to be with someone who will take your relationship to the next level because they want to be with you. If marriage is the end goal of a relationship for you, you should break up and start seeing other people who share values similar to you.

5. As a woman in her mid 40s, I know several couples who were together for decades, unmarried. Some recently married after more than 20yrs together. In the case where she wanted to get married and he did not, it was kind of sad to see weddings where the parents have now passed away, no excitement, living in limbo for so long. Then, I know people who split after decades of being together unmarried. Honestly, a split after being together for a long time, is not that much different than a divorce, as long as both people are able to support themselves. If one person was more dependent on the other, than splitting after a long relationship can be more detrimental than divorce

6. It’s all about why you want to get married and why he doesn’t.

   There are methods of effectively creating the same legal status as marriage without marriage (mostly – more or less depending on where you live). Having someone as your beneficiary in insurance and retirement accounts, emergency contact, powers of attorney, etc. Really the only thing you can’t cover would be filing joint tax returns.

   So if that’s your issue with it, there are work arounds.

   I don’t want to get married either, even though my partner and I have been together wonderfully for 15 years. (Though its not so much an objection to being married so much as a “eh, seems like a hassle – even if we do a justice of the peace formality thing people will badger us with questions about when we’ll have a ceremony/reception …).

   This should be a *joint* decision, not the one-sided decision he is making it out to be.

7. I think you are shocked because deep down you’d like to get married. In this case I think you should move on. You still have time to find a man who wants to get married too. Don’t wait for the perfect moment to breakup. Just do it . Tell him because you may want to get married. Simple as that. You don’t want to be with someone who has a negative outlook on the relationship. Seems like he only sees the end.

8. It kind of seems like you’re ambivalent about getting married yourself so I’m not sure what the issue is. Are you merely concerned about the legal kinship that marriage produces? It is true that, legally, things are a lot simpler if you’re married. But, like he said, he can designate you as an emergency contact (and vice-versa), you can name each other as beneficiaries, grant each other power of attorney, etc., all regardless of marital status. About the only thing you can’t do is claim each other as dependents for income tax purposes (unless one of you has no income and is totally supported by the other.) It is generally more advantageous to file a joint return as opposed to two single ones. If one of you is the sole source of support then the working one can file as head of household which is better than filing as single but still not as good as filing a joint return as a married couple.

9. Sounds like you’re a bad match

10. Some men don’t see value in a marriage until you’re too invaluable to lose. He doesn’t see you that way. Can you live with that in your relationship? Only you can answer that.

11. **Lukewarm take**: he’s just a standard early 30s straight dude who is unwilling to commit long-term to you

    Pushing 30, he got with someone who was right out of college and I’m guessing he didn’t expect to have to have these conversations for a while.

    Have you had concrete conversations about your joint plans for the future? Are you both aligned on whether you’ll have kids? Buy or rent? I could be totally wrong here but I would expect very little from this guy.

12. I think you two both need to think and talk seriously and carefully about what you each actually mean when you talk about marriage. If what you’re focused on is the legal protections, he’s partially right that a lot of the most important ones can be handled outside of marriage – but he’s wrong that it’s anywhere near as simple as “oh, you’ll just be my emergency contact!” It may be very possible that you can both have what you want inside this relationship, but doing so is going to require a commitment to spending time and money with a lawyer to set up things like medical powers of attorney, wills, living wills, making sure you’re beneficiaries on each other’s important financial accounts, etc.

    But for some people (and I’m not one of them, so I can only speak as an outsider here), marriage is more about the public commitment, the celebration with the community, etc. If *that’s* what you’re after, then maybe it’s achievable with a big community-focused commitment ceremony plus that lawyer visit. Or maybe it’s not. It really depends what marriage means to you, and what it means to him, and what you’re both trying to achieve or avoid, and frankly it doesn’t sound like either of you have thought about this enough to have that conversation in a sensible way.

    It’s probably time for both of you to take a big step back, stop watching online videos about marriage and worrying so much about what other people will think about you if you do or don’t get married and/or divorced, think hard about what *you* each actually want and don’t want out of your lives together, and then come back together and talk more about your future. *All* the aspects of your future, not just marriage – that you’ve gotten two years in and only just figured out that you each feel this way makes me wonder what else you’re not talking about. Two years is definitely a reasonable time to have some long-range conversations about how you envision the next many years.

13. Sounds like your main issue is that you’re seeking out and consuming social media content that is telling you that you should be outraged by something that you’re not naturally outraged by. As a result, you keep going back and forth between not caring and feeling outraged by it. Almost like you have outrage envy.

    You should probably do a personal deep dive and try your best to genuinely figure out how you really feel about marriage. And you should probably do so without the aid of bias social media posts that tell you how you should feel.

    If, regardless of the reason, you decide that you do want to marry someday then this relationship probably isn’t for you. Don’t count on him to change his mind. And it wouldn’t be your fault either because tbh he should have mentioned this much earlier.

14. So, he doesn’t want to commit to you in any meaningful or protective (for you) way? Idk… As long as you keep all of your assets separate, keep working no matter what, don’t have kids, keep yourself from doing the physical/mental/emotional work of a wife, and are okay with all of that… I guess it could work. Maybe.

15. I think you want to be wanted. You were never interested in it until he said he wasn’t.

16. I’m a woman that was with a man for 10 years. He was off a bad divorce and I was off a bad breakup with a fiancée when we met. We both kind of were jaded by the idea of marriage, so we didn’t want to get married. He ended up getting cancer. Since we were only dating I qualified for nothing- no fmla from work, not even bereavement on his passing. I went back and forth with my hr department trying to figure out if I could get fmla for my own mental health, as I got an anxiety diagnosis during that time. So, that experience changed my perspective. I had no protection for myself in the case of emergency. I was entitled to no form of benefits. I spent time and money on that relationship, and while I did receive something in the will, I won’t get any social security benefits when I’m 65. Sorry, but thinking that marriage is a sham is not seeing the forrest through the trees. There’s prenups that can be mediated before hand. Couples beed to spend time expressing their needs, and arrive at a mutual setup that isn’t a disservice to either. For what it’s worth, I know a lady who is going through a divorce now that signed a prenup that super benefited her now ex. People just need to be smart.

17. >I see how protective legal marriage can be

    For women

18. Couldn’t be me. My marriage has come with so many benefits that we don’t get otherwise. And yeah you can spend a bunch of money and time setting up the same thing through a lawyer… but in that case why not just get married? Cost me like $200 vs the 30k of hiring a lawyer and drafting up a bunch of documents. But also this highly depends where you live, no amount of money spent on lawyers and paperwork would have gotten me on my husbands insurance. It’s marriage only, they didn’t give a shit that we’ve been together and lived together for 10 years.

    And if opposed to marriage, he might just string you a long on getting those papers done as well. “We don’t have the time, we don’t have the money, do we really need a lawyer involved? I don’t want the government in my business, we’re young and healthy what’s the worse that can happen?”

    It’s also nice to know that my husband chose me and wanted to be with me so much he went out of his way to pick the perfect ring and propose.