Dear Carolyn: “Ryan” and I got together eight years ago, at the tail end of college. I moved to D.C. to be with him while he started law school and have built a career and a little community for myself here. I believed we would eventually get married, but after asking him about it a couple of times last year, I think he does not want to deal with it anytime soon. But I am 30 and want kids. I told him I should probably move out and explore my options, and his immediate response was, “No, we can talk about marriage this year. We will probably get engaged next year.”
My gut tells me this is just an effort to preserve the comfortable life we have together, but I am tempted to accept it, because eight years feels like so many sunk costs. I have friends who complain daily about the dearth of available dating options. What to do next?
— Sunk Costs
Sunk Costs: Can we time-travel backward to that conversation so you can respond this time on the spot, “That’s bull[something]”?
Because it needed saying. Still does, but maybe in a different way now that some time has passed.
This is your life and his together. His even thinking it’s up to him to control the calendar is bull. “We can talk about it this year”? Oh, we can, can we? Or you can stuff it somewhere really uncomfortable, how about that.
And it’s bull in the utter bloodlessness of it all. Are you emotional partners, the closest people in each other’s worlds, the sole occupants in the innermost circle of intimacy? Or are you contestants in a suspenseful contest, strategizing to see whether you’ll win a marriage certificate and a baby and still keep most of your personal goals intact.
I urge you to get some air here, to create an opportunity to be somewhere else, out of the shared home, to be yourself on your own terms for the first time in eight years. See for yourself who and what you have become during these crucial developmental years. Taste the foods you stopped eating because you’re with him, watch the stuff you stopped watching because you’re with him, wear the things you stopped wearing. I say this not as an indictment of him, but as a nod to the reality of shared living. Let yourself see clearly what you lose when he’s not around, and what you lose when he is around.
That’s when you’ll start to see whether you even want to marry him.
Time invested, by the way, as an argument for putting up with unhappiness? I just can’t.
Readers can’t, either:
• I waited for marriage for two years and three proposals. He said getting engaged was “a goal,” and accepted my proposal only after I moved out. I did NOT go back to him. I started dating someone new on New Year’s. I’m excited and hopeful like I haven’t been in years. Don’t cling to less than you want.
• “Sunk costs” mean you should NOT consider what you’ve already paid. Example: You buy an expensive food. If you hate it, then you shouldn’t eat it, whether you paid $100 or $1.
Write to Carolyn Hax at [email protected]. Get her column delivered to your inbox each morning at wapo.st/haxpost.
