I’ve been with my boyfriend for almost four years. Things were going really well for the first year so we agreed to live together. After about a year of adjusting to our joined lives in the same home, I started thinking seriously about marriage. When I mentioned it back then, he made it seem like a probability, so I decided that I wanted to show him that I could be a great wife and mom someday. I started taking on nearly all of the housework and cooking in addition to working at my job. I made a note to him a couple times that I wouldn’t mind staying home to raise kids and be a better homemaker if that’s what needed to be done. I made every attempt to be affectionate and attentive to his needs, give him space when he needed, show him love, be a great lover in bed, communicate well, make his favorite meals, find common interests, helped take his stress away, take an interest in his family and I invited him into mine.I wanted to show him what the future could be like and he has said how much he is into it but now he’s acting like he’s not very interested in marriage. He says he wants to be with me but we don’t have to get married. I don’t know why he is now acting disinterested but I don’t want to have any children without being married, and when I told him that he just became quiet and then changed the subject. I’m not sure how to handle this moving forward.
I understand this is difficult for her, but it sounds like she’s doing entirely too much to prove herself to him. She’s made all this effort, and in the process has become overworked and underwhelmed.
My first question is, why should he marry her when she is already giving him all of the benefits? What incentive does he have? She’s already cooking for him, giving him great sex, and doing all of the housework, so what more does he really need? He has no motivation to get to the altar because he’s already getting all the perks.
It’s like the old saying, “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?”
While it’s natural for us women to want to care for the man we love and take on this role to show how great things could be in the future, it’s important to be careful of giving too much away too soon.
Believe it or not, I used to be a similar way. I would give of myself freely in all aspects, become so hardworking and accommodating, only to be taken for granted. I tried to move mountains for some who wouldn’t lift a finger for me.
The truth is, this isn’t attractive or respectable to most men. I also learned this first hand.
I would advise this girl to take a step back from everything she’s doing and be honest with him about how she feels. Tell him that all she needs and desires is his full commitment like she wants to give to him. Additionally, he needs to understand that everything she does for him is what a wife does for a husband, not what a girlfriend does for a boyfriend.
Let him know through actions, not just words, that if he won’t actually say, “I do” then the benefits of having a wife will stop. In this case, he will either rethink his position on marriage or he will leave.
My other question to her is, what amount of sweat is he putting in? How has he been proving himself to be a great potential husband or father? Or has this been one sided all along?
Definitely don’t let your relationship slip into that territory, at which point, she should ask herself why she wants to marry him in the first place.
With all of the giving that she does, I have to wonder what she is getting out of being with him.
This reminds me of when I flew back to Indiana to visit friends and family earlier this year. I caught up with a best friend and met her boyfriend for the first time.
One night, her and I went out for drinks and she confided in me that he was putting off the topic of marriage. As she started to become emotional, she confessed, “I already do everything for him. I cook, I clean, I do his laundry, I run his errands…” she tried to continue on down the list and I had to interrupt her. I said, “Woah, woah, woah, just stop. And I mean it, you’ve got to stop doing all that right now.”
This guy had zero incentive to go through with getting married, and while many guys may like being taken care of like that for the time being, they eventually won’t understand how to respect or appreciate these efforts from a woman before there’s even an engagement.
It’s true that relationships aren’t 50/50. They are 100/100 which means both partners should give their 100%, but there needs to be reciprocation. No relationship should end up with one person doing it all and the other benefiting the most from everything.
At the end of the day, a man wants to qualify himself to a woman first and foremost before she qualifies herself to him, not the other way around.
He wants to be the one to have to work hard to earn your affection and commitment. He loves being the one to prove that he can be a great husband and father, and only then you can show him what a potential wife and mom you can be. If you take that from him by giving it all away for nothing, you’ll have a one sided relationship that will end in disappointment and resentment.
So don’t be a wife to a man who won’t say, “I do.”
Don’t be a wife when he isn’t yet your husband.
— Ash Pariseau
This is excellent advice, Ash.
A woman shouldn’t be afraid to give but she can’t be the only one to give.
Relationships and marriage, both give and take.
Thank you, and that is definitely true.
“He wants to be the one to have to work hard to earn your affection and commitment. He loves being the one to prove that he can be a great husband and father”
100% truth.
We can’t truly appreciate what was handed to us on a platter.
I wish more women understood this.
This is just what I had to explain to a guy on twitter.
Oh boy. I don’t use twitter very much.
Zach, in your opinion, to what extent do men want to know that she’s fully worthy of his commitment? How do men test this?
Long term?
Is this the person that:
1. I want to come home to at night?
2. I want to wake up next to in the morning?
3. I want to grow old with?
The scary thing was with my ex, I knew she wasn’t that woman but I thought if I asked her to marry me, she’d finally trust me and become that woman.
My wife’s 9 years younger than me. I had serious reservations about our long term stability but when I asked myself those 3 questions, they all came out, “Yes,”
That’s good to hear Scharnhorst. 🙂
Just the fact that she has standards and ground rules that she sticks by is a good sign that she’s worthy of commitment.
It’s a red flag when women are willing to give too much too soon, especially if they dealing with below average Joe.
Thank you for confirming, and I agree. Having standards and boundaries is one thing but enforcing them is another and seems to be where a lot of women today fall off.
All good points! Agree completely.
For example, I know that the Bachelor/Bachelorette franchise gets a lot of bad rap and all that (lol it’s a guilty pleasure for me). But interestingly, the Bachelor has a success rate (the ones that stay together and/or actually get married) of about 4%, while the Bachelorette has a success rate of about 36%. In fact, the very first Bachelorette has been married to her guy for over 10yrs and they have two children (longest lasting couple in the entire franchise). There’s a lot of speculation as to why that is, but I think the main reason is who is qualifying themselves to whom. Men respect and hold in higher esteem, women that they had to compete or work for, and are more likely to work to make that relationship work. It’s like he values you because he’s won you. You made him work for it. The reverse isn’t true, because if you were competing with other women women to get him, he got you on a silver platter, did not have to work for you and the subsequent relationship is less likely to be successful.
Personally, my best relationships are ones where the man had to work to get me. I reciprocate his love and efforts wholeheartedly because he works everyday to keep me, as I’m the prize that he won over other men. Never give wifely benefits when he’s keeping you as a girlfriend. That’s a well known mistake that’s as old as time.
Thank you for your comment, Taylor and providing those stats on the show. That’s very interesting and I think you are right.
I’ve tried to be the one pursuing before, and I think it was off putting to them.
I don’t watch that show but that’s very telling.
This so much, girl! I am in love with your blog rn.
Thank you, Jayda! I’m glad you are enjoying.
Some of those red pill types wouldn’t like the sound of this idea. They’d rather have a woman move in, do all the house running and not marry her, talking about how bad of a deal marriage is for men.
Well they can dislike it all they want.
Great message here, Ash. Following this blog.
Thank you Jules.
The things is doing are really sweet.
Is she supposed to stop doing them now, as a form of punishment for not marrying her. Or to manipulate him into marriage, making him hope those things will come back?
What is the point of marriage in modern culture?
Hi Scott, thank you for commenting. I think the part where she messed up in this scenario is moving in together with him before at least an engagement and wedding plans underway. Being engaged first would have avoided getting herself into the lopsided situation she’s in. If marriage is that important to her, she needs to make it clear that it’s a deal breaker for her. He can either agree to marry her or let her move on to someone else who will. The goal here is to neither punish him or manipulate him. It’s to asses where each stands and decide whether or not their vision aligns and makes sense for them to move forward together.
It would be interesting to see a followup now that several years have gone by.
Hygiene is important. Slobbery isn’t a selling point for marriage, but no man marries a woman just to have a housekeeper.
Housekeepers are far cheaper than a bad marriage.
It sounds more like she is trying to guilt him into marriage. “I do all these things for you…why don’t you marry me?!?”
That ship sailed long long before she wrote this…he obviously does not want to marry her or he would have asked the first year. This is just wasted time for both of them, or ultimately an unhappy marriage.
Hi Liz, thank you for commenting. Yeah, I suspect he was never that interested in marriage to begin with. In that case, either he lead her on in the beginning stages of their relationship where she believes it could be on the table in the future, or she foolishly overestimated his interest. I’m thinking it was likely a combination of both. Like I told Scott in another comment, she would have been wise to wait until at least an engagement before moving in and settling into a routine of common wifely duties.