She Wants the Title, He Won’t Marry Her – 22 Years Together & Still No Wedding?

All right, we have a new Dear DSO entry on the website and you can submit your own story or question to deardso.com. Go to deardso.com. And if your story or your question is a good one, I will create a video out of it for the whole world to see or audio for my podcast listeners to listen to. Check out the Dad Starting Over podcast wherever podcasts are. Spotify, Apple, wherever. We also have the Help for Men podcast, Help for Men YouTube channel, which I reserve for interviews with important people. Just do a search for Help for Men. @realhelpformen is the handle on YouTube. Just look for my beautiful bald head. Yes, that's me. We have interviews with guys like Orion Taraban, Dr. Robert Glover, and on and on. So check it out. Oh, by the way, if you're watching this on YouTube, do me a favor, give me a subscribe, Give me a like, leave a comment. Helps me out a lot. This one comes from Dave, and the subject line is relationship status titles. He says, could you make a post or repost if you've already covered the topic of relationship titles? My longtime girlfriend of 22 years tends to get caught— whoa, 22, Jesus, 22. That just hit me. Wow, okay. She tends to get caught up in proper pronouns, he says. She will refuse to do some things, parentheses, I see, not sexual. Or say that she will do something that I am against and say we are not married. Or she'll say I would or wouldn't do this or whatever if we were married. Oh, I see. I feel like wife, girlfriend, and partner are interchangeable. What a perfect illustration of the difference between men and women. I've told her for all intents and purposes, if someone's together in a committed relationship, These terms are interchangeable. And don't get hung up on any one specific title. I've also said, please don't use your current title as an excuse to get out of these simple requests. I would love to know what some of these requests are. And he says, your thoughts on this, thank you. Well, this is something that we see a lot in a lot of different ways within relationships between men and women. It would seem, and I am stereotyping here, this isn't every single case, so please don't go there, guys, but go ahead, leave your comments anyway. But dare I say, it's probably more this way than not, which is— and it's a stereotype, we see it like in Hollywood and so forth, and stories where you'll be like, this couple is together for years, in your case 22 freaking years, Jesus, dude, and You got the woman going, "So, when are you gonna put a ring on my finger?" Or, "So what are we?" Or, "You know, my mom and dad were asking like, when are we gonna get married?" Or, "My friends are all getting married," or, "My friends are having kids. When are we going to? When are you gonna pop the question?" And then he'll go to dinner with her extended family and Aunt So-and-So go, "When are you gonna make an honest woman out of her? When are you gonna—" It's, you know, it's a stereotype for a reason. These stereotypes just don't fall from the sky. This is a common thing. Man holding out for insert reasons. Woman pressuring, and woman's extended family and social group pressuring man to, dude, let's go, come on, marry the woman. But you've been at this for 22 years, and you're probably like, I'm curious, how long has this been going on for where she's like, no, I'm not doing that, I'm not your wife, that's wife stuff, no, I'm a girlfriend, girlfriends don't do that, or whatever it is. How long has it been going on for? Is that just a relatively new thing? And what is it with women wanting to quote, "Lock us down," with a title. In our very male— I often explain it like we're more binary, ones and zeros type of thing. We just look at it like pragmatically and just go, what's the matter if the words wife or girlfriend come after your name? As far as title is concerned, it doesn't change a damn thing. I still love you. We're still in this house together, whatever it may be. What's it matter? It would seem that women, I've heard it called, like, have what's called like a security gland within their system. Security, safety, comfort, knowing what will happen tomorrow and the next day and the next years and decades is very, very important to them. Men are more, um, oh, we take on risk more. Maybe that applies here, maybe it doesn't. We are more interested in keeping things Well, a lot of us, not all of us, again, I'm stereotyping here, making, you know, painting with a broad brush here, but a lot of men would love to say, "I want to keep this relationship as fun, sexy, carefree as much as possible." And a lot of men are worried that as soon as I put a ring on this woman's finger, it's going to suddenly become comfortable and boring and we're going to introduce stress and we're going to introduce, you know, nagging and all this other— wife, typical wife stuff. And so I, uh, let's put that off as much as we can. Some, I think probably the majority of men that are in long-term relationships, so it's like young men, they're like, I know I gotta eventually propose to this woman. I'm going to. They may have even like purchased a ring or whatever, but they're just kind of holding off because they're like, oh man, I just heard this horror story from my brother and from my friend and from guys on the internet. And do I want to do this? Is this really I don't know, man. And then eventually they cave and a lot of them report, yeah, sure shit, things kind of changed as soon as we got real committed and moved in together and things became real. And then she got real stressed about the wedding and then she got, after the wedding, she got stressed about it's time to make kids. And then who is this woman? This isn't the woman that I fell in love with. This, ah shit, I should have never married her. A lot of guys go down that road. Sounds terrible, I know, but a lot of men listening to this are nodding going, yeah, sounds familiar. So you can see why some men may want to kind of avoid that. I'm painting marriage with a really negative brush here, but that's how a lot of guys look at it, right? And by the way, there is some science behind the fact, and I'm not just saying this as some dude, and I've said this in countless videos, and I've pointed out that these are— there are female psychologists and authors that point this out. It's not nothing I made up. Which is, yeah, we see within the typical human female that as soon as things get comfortable, stable, secure, uncertainty leaves the building. A lot of sexuality leaves the building, so to speak. Countless men all over the world will point out, "Man, as soon as we moved in together, the sexual activity between us went from here to here." Men are very, very sensitive about this typically. "Went from here to here, and then we got married and it went down to here, and then we had kids and it just fell off." And women are like, well, duh, dude, that's what happens when you get safe and secure within a relationship. You got shit to worry about. You got kids, you got house, whatever. And men are like, I knew it. I should have never married her. Sounds terrible, doesn't it? Men are gauging the quality of their life, the quality of their relationship by virtue of their sexual and romantic connection with their partner. Is that like at the forefront of all this? And the answer is, yeah, pretty much. We want the comfort too. We want a partner to go through life with. We want all this, but at the expense of that other stuff? Oof, that's a tough sell. And I think that word has gotten out quite a bit in the internet, amongst a lot of young men in particular, that selling that comfortable, stable, secure married life is a tough sell because we are engineered to keep doing the fun stuff. A lot of us love to fall in love and date and yes, have, you know, frequent physical activity between us and our partner. And then when all that is working, we'll do anything and everything for our partner. We'll murder for them. But as soon as that kind of starts dipping, we start getting sad and then we mourn the loss of that past relationship. So, Mr. Dave, is that what you're kind of worried about? Why wouldn't you want to marry this woman of 22 years? I'll just put that out there. Maybe that's something you need to answer. You guys watching this, should Dave? It's been 22 years. Should he go ahead and marry her? If so, why? If not, why not? Are things just going to drastically change? It's— dude, probably after 22 years, the comfort and stability and everything is in there already. She just doesn't have that title. And I agree, I'm with you, dude. What the hell difference does the title make, right? Well, to her it makes a difference. To her, probably, and to her social group, it makes a difference. "I'm a wife now. I'm not just some guy's live-in girlfriend. We're something serious." And there's a component of stability and security and safety that goes along with that. And maybe, Dave, you're kind of scared of the subsequent downfall on the romantic connection that usually coincides with that. I don't know, maybe I'm reading between the lines here. But anyway, very interesting situation, not an uncommon one other than the whole 22 years together. I mean, wow. But thank you so much for reaching out. I do appreciate it and wish you all the best.