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.
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.