Reply To: Anxiety when my boyfriend goes out

To marry someone, you have to both like and love them exactly the way they are today. You can’t marry someone expecting to change or fix them — that rarely works. Nor does marriage generally cause relationship problems to disappear. I had multiple friends who were relatively satisfied in their relationships, married, and were divorced within a year or two. The reason seems to be that people marry with expectations, maybe simply that the good will become permanent, but often that problems of separation or work taking away from the relationship will be fixed by marriage. In one couple, the woman worked a couple miles away and they had a weekend relationship. He assumed she would live where he did post-marriage. Didn’t happen. Split. Another couple assumed marriage would lead to children. It didn’t. Split. In another, marriage did not make finances simpler. The desire for larger quarters caused financial stress and antagonism, which led to a whole lot of problems and divorced.