Could You Date Someone Who's Been in a Long-Term Relationship?

How do you feel about dating someone who's been in a long-term relationship?

Everyone sees long-term relationship history differently. When people find out their current boyfriend or girlfriend has been in a long-term relationship, some take it positively and some take it negatively.

Those who see it negatively mostly cite worries like: they were with someone else for that long, can they really forget that person? Won't they think about their ex even while they're with me? Basically, a worry about whether they can win out over the ex's presence. A client I met not long ago had a similar worry about her boyfriend. He had dated his ex for 8 years, and her relationship with him had just passed the 3-month mark, so the worry isn't hard to understand.

But what matters more to us is that having been in a long-term relationship also means they're capable of a long-term relationship with you.

Long-term relationship experience tells you two big things.

1. A desire for a stable relationship

Having been in a long-term relationship means that person had a desire for a stable, long-term relationship, and that they've put in the effort to make one work. It's naturally easier to build a lasting relationship with someone who wants something long and stable than with someone who prefers short, casual flings. At the very least, you need to be able to talk about the relationship on the same wavelength.

Someone who's fine with short, casual relationships is likely to give up easily when they get frustrated or discover something incompatible about their partner. If it's not this person, they'll just meet someone else; they'll just start another relationship.

Only when you want similar things from a relationship can you dream of the same kind of love and grow the relationship together, and there's a world of difference between being with someone who knows that a stronger relationship takes effort to work through conflict and lots of conversation, and being with someone who doesn't.

If you dream of marriage in particular, you need to be with someone who knows how to value the relationship you have now and can picture a positive future.

2. Problem-solving skills

As a relationship deepens and the time together grows, all kinds of problems and conflicts are bound to come up. Two different people have come together, so conflict is completely natural. What matters in keeping a relationship going isn't whether there's conflict, but whether you can resolve it when it happens, and how.

Being able to stay with someone for a long time means they've experienced a wide range of conflicts within that relationship, and to keep it going, they must have worked through those conflicts together with their partner. Some of it is emotional conflict, but over a long relationship, real-life problems like career and family issues come up too, and there's a good chance they've resolved those kinds of problems within a relationship as well.

If you also dream of a stable, long-term relationship, being with someone who has already experienced one can be a good choice, so there's no reason to avoid someone with long-term relationship experience.

Not everyone with long-term relationship experience is good at solving problems, but keep in mind that it's a fact that someone with that experience is more likely to handle it well than someone without it.

But what if the problem isn't them, it's me?

Your own problem-solving skills may fall short compared to your partner's. Someone with stable relationship experience probably has some ability to keep a relationship going, but at the same time, because they've experienced a good relationship, they may also have expectations of what a good one looks like. That means when conflict comes up, they may quickly conclude, from watching how their partner handles it, that this person isn't a good fit for a stable relationship.

For us to have a stable, long-term relationship, we first need to be good at solving problems ourselves. If you feel your problem-solving skills are lacking right now, and especially if you've struggled with resolving problems in past relationships, there's a good chance you're the one who needs to change first, so I recommend submitting a diagnosis questionnaire.

There's also a simple test for problem-solving skills in relationships.

On the flip side of long-term relationship experience, if someone is no longer young and every relationship they've had has been extremely short, there's a chance they have little real desire for a stable relationship or lack the ability to maintain one. If the person you're seeing has only ever had very short relationships, or if the one with no long-term relationship experience is actually you? There's a good chance you'll run into trouble keeping the relationship going, so take this opportunity to reflect on your ability to maintain a relationship.