Hear me out:
The only, absolutely only reason why people don’t generally marry on the first date is to figure out whether they DON’T fit together.
So if you manage to figure out that the relationship is not going to work out before you get into real commitments (kids, mortgage, …) you successfully avoided trouble.
I see it so often that people think that dating is already a strong commitment and that ending a dead-end relationship is a failure.
There is no shame in realizing the relationship is going nowhere and ending it.
I’ll add a caveat.
Relationships take work. If you’re in a relationship and feeling “meh”, that doesn’t mean the relationship is “meh”. It means one or both of you aren’t putting enough work in for one another.
Relationships taking work wasn’t my point.
My point was staying in a relationship that you really hate to be in because you feel committed even before commitment happened.
I’m specifically talking about the dating phase, not about having been together for 10 years.
I’ve seen it quite a few times that people were like “I really don’t want to marry that man/woman, but I said yes so now I have to.”
That’s why I labeled my addendum as a caveat. I wasn’t addressing your core argument. I was trying to help people who night read it with the wrong perspective get the right ramp to what I think you were saying.
I think it’s just as common right now that young folks get in a relationship and after like 6-18mibths feel bored and think that’s a red flag.
Y’all, every relationship is different, sometimes wildly different. It’s true that every relationship takes some work. How much is dependent on the relationship itself.
The relationship shouldn’t take much work at all. There are things tangential to the relationship that do take work, like finances and health issues, and all that other stuff, but if it takes a lot of work to just keep a relationship going then it probably needs to end.
That’s not true at all. I know a lot of married couples that feel like roommates and their marriages are easy. My wife and I make time to go on dates, plan vacations together, trade hobby time for bonding time. It’s not “easy” but if you’re implying this should all be second nature and not feel like work, then I think you’re a being a bit delusional.
Thoughtfulness and effort are not free of time and labor.
Not everything that takes effort is work.
If you want to do those things and it takes effort then it is just effort. If it is an obligation because the relationship will collapse if you don’t put in more effort than you want to put in, then it is work. People have different levels of effort they want to put into a relationship, and if there is a mismatch it will create work for one of them if they drag it out and that is going to put a ton of strain on the relationship.
A little work is fine as long as the overall relationship is good, but if most interactions are work then it is a terrible relationship.