I Decided to Break Up in Order to Get Married.
I decided to break up in order to get married.
In my late 20s, a long three-year relationship came to an end.
Only then did I look around and notice that friends who had been dating since college, for five or six years, had broken up too.
On the other hand, some friends were announcing marriages to people they'd met not long after starting their careers.
What exactly makes someone "the one you marry"?
At this rate, won't I just end up getting married "because we've been together so long" or "because it's time to get married"?
Is it okay to decide on marriage that way?
It's a worry shared by everyone in their 20s and 30s.
At first I didn't know who I should marry either, so I just kept the three-year relationship going.
But once I started working as a relationship counselor, it gradually became clear. So I broke up.
How to set the criteria for the ideal type you'll marry, and how to find them, deserves a column of its own later,
so today, for those weighing marriage with the person they're already seeing, I want to ask the questions a relationship counselor believes you absolutely have to ask yourself.
Do you really want to meet someone you'll only date and then break up with? Or do you want to let the years slip by?
From the perspective of evolutionary psychology, men's and women's value in the marriage market generally move in opposite directions.
For women, value peaks in the late 20s to early 30s, and if that window is missed, marriage becomes possible only by drastically lowering the bar on specs, looks, and personality alike.
For men, value as a marriage prospect rises from the early 30s into the mid-to-late 30s as they build up wealth and status.
What does that make you feel?
Here's the story of a client couple of mine who dated for ten years, starting at age 20.
This couple, who began their first relationship as fresh-faced college freshmen, weathered many crises over ten years of dating.
Usually, people decide to break up when their circumstances change,
but this couple made it through even the notoriously difficult military service, and through the early period when the girlfriend entered the workforce ahead of the boyfriend, whose job search was delayed two years because of his service.
They also got through, without incident, the boyfriend's year-long (long or short, depending on how you look at it) stretch of job hunting while he aimed for a position at a public corporation.
By now people were asking when the two of them were finally going to get married, given how long they'd been together,
and the boyfriend would laugh and say, "Come on, what's the rush to get married?"
Suddenly a wave of anxiety hits. If I break up with my boyfriend, "what happens to me? Is there anyone who'd date a 30-year-old woman with exactly one relationship behind her?"
And the even more fundamental question: "Is this person a good person to marry? Since we've been together so long, is marrying him the right answer?"
Why do some people break up after three or more years together, while others decide to marry after less than a year?
Are the person you date and the person you marry two different people?
In the end, the woman in that ten-year couple broke up with her boyfriend after counseling with me.
And... she married a business owner six years her senior who matched her ideal type perfectly, and to this day she occasionally sends me baby photos, saying she couldn't be happier.
How was this possible?
She says, again and again, that Ideal Type Design was an enormous help.
What's Ideal Type Design, you ask?
It's a solution unique to our company that doesn't stop at defining who you should marry, but lets you prepare everything at once: what you need to do to meet that kind of person, and even where that kind of person is likely to be. Getting into all of that would make this far too long, so in the next installment I'll walk you through how this client came to be married.
