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.
You’re not wrong but it still feels bad.
This is why it feels bad. Only one of you didn’t think this was the right partner to reach that eventuality. It’s not wrong to mourn the loss of a future you believed was assured.
One of my favorite lessons from my favorite sex and relationship podcasts hosts (Dan Savage) is his advice about short term relationships being a successful relationship if done correctly. The same ideas as discussed here but more general. If not the only “successful” relations ends with someone in a coffin
Dating is the ‘trial phase’ of a relationship. Marriage isn’t required, but the more solid your relationship becomes, the more long-term commitments you’re inclined to make. Ending a relationship that isn’t working for you (and understanding why it isn’t) is the mature and responsible thing to do.
Congratulations. It usually takes people aging well into their 30s or 40s before they realize this.
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You are correct. So many people stay in relationships when they don’t need to. Or for the wrong reasons.
Absolutely. I had two “serious” relationships and dated a number of women before my wife and I met and started dating. There is absolutely nothing wrong with relationships ending.
That really is how it should go.
I strongly disagree with the point the people don’t marry on the first date as a compatibility test
People go out for just casual fun with no intent of ever marrying and sometimes with no intent of ever exceeding a casual relationship
So if the relationship is the “final product” it can still absolutely suck if it’s taken away
For the point of the argument it doesn’t really matter if the goal is marriage or some other type of long-term relationship.
And if you are going with a low-commitment casual relationship (which is totally fine, of course, no judgement here), then you do that because you don’t exactly expect the relationship to last to the grave. In which case not ending a non-functional relationship purely out of feelings of obligation, commitment or shame should be even less appropriate.
I mean, isn’t the point of low-commitment relationships to have low commitment? If the relationship sours, why feel shame for ending it?
Every relationship would work out if not for all the red flags. It’s the Anna Karenina principle:
All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
This applies to all kinds of situations where success depends on avoiding a wide variety of critical failures, leaving a pretty narrow space of variation among the successes. Rocket launches are another nice example!
I wouldn’t say it’s a positive outcome but if you’re going to break up then better sooner than later.
If you figured out that it’s not meant to be at a point where ending the relationship is easy/cheap, that’s successful. A failure would be pushing it through at the easy/cheap part and having it blow up when you have kids and a mortgage.
A friend of mine was in a relationship that his girlfriend ended after 7 years. Turns out, she decided that it wasn’t going to happen after the first year and kept stringing him along for … reasons? Mostly because she feared that she’d be seen as a failure if she ended it at an earlier time.
I agree, if you re in it for a long term harmonious/compTible match, it shouldnt faze you
Dating is essentially butt-sniffing. The longer you do it, the more familiar it all is. And it is a commitment - for many they’re committing to focus their interest on one person for a bit to see if they want to make it a longer commitment.
That said, I got a great piece of advice after getting out of a long relationship. A friend told me romantic relationships only end in one of two ways: you break up or someone dies. You only have control over one of those scenarios, so how can it be a Bad Thing all the time?
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.
Edit: I’m not going to respond to what followed my post here. Just know that when relationships feel perfect, that is a red flag. That indicates someone isn’t speaking up for themselves, or worse, is being manipulative. People don’t fit together like puzzle pieces.
Disagreements, miscommunications, incongruently overlapped priorities… It’s a part of being a team with another individual. If you’re not ready for bumps in the road, stick to porn.
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.
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 might 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 6-18 months feel bored and think that’s a red flag.
That’s fair, yes.
I think this might both be caused by media portraying relationships weirdly. On the one hand difficulty in long term relationships is displayed as a reason to end the relationship, while difficulty in new relationships is portrayed as something that warrants going to crazy lengths with huge romantic gestures to save the relationship.
In reality it’s just the other way round. If you start your relationship and there’s stuff where the partners are seriously incompatible, that’s a good reason to end it while investment and commitment is still low and there’s not a lot of cost to ending the relationship. On the other hand, if you have a long-term high-commitment relationship, investing more effort in saving it totally makes sense.
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.
