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What If This Were Enough?
What if you stopped waiting for the next big step and just took this moment as enough?
For a long time, when I dated it was all about the goal: marriage. Every date I went on was with the idea in mind that I wanted to get married. I wanted a lifelong relationship. From the very first date, I was assessing his potential as a husband, as a father (or stepfather, after my divorce), and whether I could see us together in 10 or 20 years.
I wasn’t looking for a marriage proposal on the first date, of course, but I needed to know that he was on the same page. That marriage was what he wanted too. And if he didn’t want that, then I didn’t see a point in continuing to see him — no matter how great he was otherwise.
I imagine I may have missed out on more than one truly incredible guys by doing that. I know that I ended up in more than one bad relationship by doing it — by using a desire for marriage as essentially my only metric for whether we were compatible, I frequently ended up dating guys I wasn’t otherwise compatible with.
And it also meant I stayed in those relationships far too long. Because marriage was my ultimate goal, I saw the months and years I spent in those relationships as an investment toward marriage that I couldn’t let go of. I needed to reap the reward of…
