DW Community Catch-up Thread
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And you’re not 26…I feel like at our age, this is a completely appropriate topic of conversation. And agreed on the topic of it being more general than with or two each other.
The Cockney was married many moons ago and doesn’t want to do it again. That was tough to get through but we did!
I actually asked my boyfriend about the kids thing when we were still friends with benefits, though it came up organically and it was more like “you probably don’t want to have kids do you?” and he said “I do see myself as a father some day!”. Since then we’ve discussed it several times. I’m still kind of ambivalent about it, but I think it has mostly to do with practical hurdles (depends on whether at least one of us is willing to switch to a more family friendly career). Anyway, I was lucky it came up early but if not I would probably have asked him.
With marriage, I’m kind of flexible, so I didn’t need to discuss it early on. He’s anti marriage symbolism but could see himself getting married for practical purposes. I think now I’m moving towards wanting some kind of official framework (like giving him the power to decide if there’s a medical emergency), but it doesn’t need to be marriage (which anyway at the moment would be a bureaucratic nightmare because we live in different countries and our tax issues would complicate massively if we were married).
I brought up kids (no thank you) and marriage (yes please) three weeks in with my now husband while we were at breakfast one day. Completely out of the blue after I’d decided on the latte and bruschetta. He was a little taken by surprise but took it in stride because he wanted those things with me too. What do you have to lose by talking about it? If he runs he didn’t want that with you and was never the right guy or is a massive scaredy cat you wouldn’t want yourself.
I also talked about those things pretty early on (like a few months in). And I am under 26! Haha. It definitely helps if the other person has dropped some hints so you sort of know where they stand before the real talk, but even if not, might as well just go for it — it’s better to know if you’re totally not on the same page, so then you can move on (even though that situation still sucks).
I think it’s cool to talk about those things early on. I think I was pretty upfront about wanting 1 billion babies (well, at the time it was a max of 5) and since then we’ve always used a joke to open that conversation. I think that’s the sort of thing you can bring up in “i see myself in the future…” sort of conversation that also includes things like travel and career goals.
On another note, we started our marriage/engagement timeline talks last night. We’ve had the “yes we are on the forever train” talk before, but never with any timelines or anything. But last night was the first “so, do you have a timeline in your head?” talk. We agreed to postpone it until after the holidays as the last few months have been crazy between me moving, me working and looking for a new job in a new city, us getting a puppy, and just generally getting used to not being long distance again!. After Christmas there will be more stability in our lives to talk about this. We’re probably 1/2 to 2/3 thru Wendy’s list…but..how did your conversations come up? I will always be the one to initiate these types of things but I suck at it.
@snoopy128, that’s great that you’ve started talking about engagement/marriage timeline! I was so nervous bringing it up with my boyfriend a couple of months ago, just because it’s such a huge thing to talk about. He agreed that he sees us getting married, but wouldn’t give me an idea of timeline. I’d love to get married within the next year, I think he’d probably rather wait until the following year. His work is up and down in that he gets hiatuses where he is technically unemployed. He worries a lot about money during those breaks, and recently he made a comment that he wished he had a steady job so he could plan life better. Right now he’s been out of work for 3 months, so I don’t plan on bringing it up the timeline again until he gets back to work.
Yeah, I’m the one right now with the up and down job, but hopefully that situation becomes steady soon (waiting for a phone call about 3 jobs right now…..any time in the next 10 days…). I actually don’t have much of a timeline in my head, other than the fact that my IUD comes in out 4.5 years and it would be sweet if our lives were in a place then to start trying for a baby. He also started proactively managing his finances which was one of the things holding me back, so I’m kind of excited to see where our discussion goes in the new year.
It’s just hard to have a big talk. He’s a fan of talks happening organically, but I want to make sure we cover all of our bases!
Ack. Sorry to momentarily side-track the dating thread. My original point in the last post to ktfran was don’t be afraid to bring it up. Even if you need to bring it up in a joking way first. We used to joke whenever we passed a baby or dog that were going to steal them. Or I’d be like “I can’t wait to have 10 babies!”. Or when someone we knew got married I’d point out an aspect of the wedding I really liked “oh, they had nice hand-drawn invites, I think people would die laughing if I tried to do that”. You can bring it up in ways that aren’t “us” or “ours” ways, but that show you want those things and have had some thoughts. Eventually you can segway the joke into something more serious (as my boyfriend had to do to make sure I didn’t actually want 10 babies one day).
I agree with everyone that there’s nothing wrong with casually feeling out where someone stands on marriage/kids/etc in the first few months. Of the men I’ve dated, the ones who eventually wanted kids were typically the one to broach the issue in the context of discussing general life plans.
And back in the not-dating realm, the guy I mentioned a few pages back contacted me to say he’d still really like to visit me for a few days next month. Part of me would love to catch up – we hiked 1,500 miles together and shared a lot of adventures and good times. That said, I know that visiting now will just worsen the sting of rejection and that it would be better not to see him.
Thanks everyone for the advice! Things with they guy really are going well, but at the same time, I’m still a little guarded, as it’s in my nature. Thank you for letting me come here and work out my thoughts. Especially since my company slashed insurance for next year and my therapy sessions will be limited. Sucks. But I have DW!
