The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
If you expect to find a woman who would never frustrate you, will be perfect in every regard, who would never do anything to piss you off and do everything exactly right and exactly like you want it - that's not going to happen. People are imperfect, and they are imperfect in a myriad different ways. There's no way a real person would be exactly perfect complement to all your wishes. The real test is whether you want to stay together despite all the rough spots. When it's obvious to you that what you're getting out of the relationship vastly exceeds the blemishes.
And yes, a part of you wants excitement and novelty. But you can find it in other things. Part of you would be scared at the thought of spending the rest of your life (or at least a very very long portion of it) with the same person. But if you feel good around this person, maybe it's not that bad an idea, actually? As a person who's been married for over 20 years, you can't keep the excitement of the first years on the same level, but you can transform it into different forms and different things. Of course, it's on you to decide if this relationship is what you actually want. But you should also be realistic and not expect things that can not happen, and be ready for work and frustrations which are a normal part of life and relationship. Don't be afraid of doubts, but also be honest with yourself and recognize what your true feelings and needs are.
I am reminded of this line from The Wise Man's Fear:
"Anyone can love a thing because. That's as easy as putting a penny in your pocket. But to love something despite. To know the flaws and love them too. That is rare and pure and perfect."
I loved this line when I read it, because I think it nicely encapsulates what marriage needs to have. You need to love someone, warts and all, or it simply isn't gonna work.
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Let me ask you the question others have asked only implicitly: was there a woman in the past, whether your affection was required or unrequited, who you felt was truly interesting, truly desirable? It’s not about her, and you make that clear enough. But it might be about the idea of her.
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you have a catch, friendo
my only caution is, as a long distance thing you kind of still are on your best behavior when you're around each other and aren't really experiencing what the other is actually like on an every day basis
so, I might not consider engagement until you've spent 6 months together in the same place
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That's the only way to be. You should always, after maybe a month, be considering marriage, and if there's not a realistic path to marriage breaking up.
Certainly when you're at the point where you're ring shopping, if you're not gonna pull the trigger you should break up.
The alternative is weighing engagement versus wasting her time.
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You could be describing my wife there. I am very happy to be married to her.
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Short answer: Yes, it's human to think about these things.
Longer answer: For what it's worth, I had similar feelings, occasionally, before getting married. Almost 10 years in now and it's good stuff.
My experience with all relationships and partners is you have to choose what's important to you. Nobody rolls nat 20s on all their stats. Do you want a sharp-tongued, aggressively driven woman? Prepare to be exhausted fighting about stupid shit and being emasculated every once in a while. Do you want a demure mother of your children? Prepare to have to be exhausted leading the household all of the time. Do women want a ripped god? Well then he'll be eating like a bird and working out all the time. Do you want material comfort and money? He may not be as attractive as the former.
Consider those pros and cons and what is truly important to you. Bluntly, I am primarily driven by sex and did not optimize enough on this parameter when selecting a partner, and overshot on almost everything else. What is the evergreen desire you want out of your relationship? And for the love of god, shuck away the confines of what "the culture" demands of you. You are under no obligation to get married because you've dated for a while, and you're under no obligation to marry some uber-female who puts you in your place all the time.
Is there a defined end date to the long distance? Have you dated in-person for most of the relationship? How is the sex (Note that this is separate from physical attractiveness)? Have you dated someone previously who gave you the "Jazz" you're looking for?
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Gross. This isn't real. You don't want a wife who's like one your your guy friends. You don't want your wife to be a sarcastic, grindsetting bro.
I wanted a manic pixie dream girl, the girl I married isn't anything like that, I had real axiety briefly while dating her about that, I made the best decision in the world.
This is the only objection you've raised that is legit. Also, could a source of you lack of investment be related to a lack of real chemical interaction?
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It's quite sensible; when you know your SO well enough to decide whether you want to spend your life with them, the best answers are "yes" or "no", not "no but I'll waste both our time dragging things out anyway".
Pros: she's confident
"Cons": she's not brutally driven
Pros: she's intelligent
"Cons": she's not sharp-tongued
It is definitely possible that you're not the kind of person who can be happy forever with her, and I certainly don't know you or her well enough to say you are ... but it says something that you were trying to lay down criticisms and your top three were one triviality plus two humblebrags.
Jazz gets a lot of value out of tension and dissonance, but like any music the trick is the balance between tension's creation and its release. If you've got a partner who consistently relieves tension, then finding tension elsewhere (e.g. from your own hopefully-not-quite-brutal drive to self-improvement) is going to be much easier and more productive than the alternative of demanding/creating tension in your closest relationship.
(not to be mistaken for the alternative of creating tension via your closest relationship - I wonder if humans are ill-adapted to handle a "feels like coasting" malaise phase because historically we'd have all the tension we could want from the "when will baby start sleeping through the night and my brain fog go away" phase sooner)
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Honestly, sounds like you have been mind-killed by modern media. Real, actually living women are like this. From this comment and other comments sounds like you have a great catch.
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Hah I'm in the same place except... definitely some problems/red flags. But they came up after I proposed.
What are they, if you don’t mind sharing?
DM me if you're curious
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Im younger, less long distance, not about to engage, but otherwise in the exact same boat. I have nothing helpful to say sorry. My current thinking is that this is just something introspective people have to suffer through.
Sometimes i whish she gave me a reason to break up with her. Maybe i need to be challenged by my partner in order to have something else to pour energy in. I love putting energy into the relationship.
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I've never experienced this, but I have experienced similar internet threads.
You're probably not going to have a deep intellectual connection with a woman. The idea that your partner should be your best friend, soul mate, sexual muse, etc... it's a bizarre modern fetish. Get more male friends and focus on the unique things that your partner provides which friends cannot. Cherish the differences between men and women. But don't ask her to be a man.
Long distance is a problem. I'd try to solve that immediately.
If she's someone who is easy to be with, who wants kids, and would be a great mother, then you are like 90% of the way there.
I've had deep intellectual connections with several women over the years. Probably more women than men, if I'm honest. None of them were sexual relationshipa, however. I also don't know if any of them would have been the type to post in a forum like this. Sorry it always seems rather shortsighted to me to make these kind of pronouncements. I will concede that one might not want a romantic partner to also be someone with whom one has constant deep reflective talks.
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Yeah I'd say just go for it man. Moving in will make a lot of things clearer.
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Yeah, sorry, this sounds like a no-brainer. Don't fall for modern soul mate propaganda. Especially if you're here, chances are you're prone to over-thinking and to be over-critical. Objectively, the things you worry about are absurdly rare in women, to the degree that any women exhibiting these traits will most likely have something wrong with them. If you want kids, you ought to want a great women, not an even greater man with tits.
Also, I know it sounds unromantic, but long-term what matters is to find a person you can respect, whose quirks you can tolerate each day again and again, and who is attractive enough that you like having sex (and vice versa, of course). Love at first sight, deep intellectual connection, sharp humor, extreme attractiveness, spontaneity, all those things that romantic movies push are certainly nice extras, but don't really matter much in the long run.
Or to put it in a bit more romantic terms: It's not the love you start with that matters, it's the love you learn.
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So... what are you holding out for? Just move and if doesn't work out so be it.
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