15 Married Women Forgave Their Partners

6.

“When we moved in together at the one and half year mark, I told him that I saw moving in together as a definitive step towards marriage. I let him know that I wasn’t comfortable living together long-term without being engaged. For me, that was about a year. I asked him what he thought about it all and he agreed, so I thought we were on the same page. I didn’t see how we’d run into any issues. And yet one year went by, then two, then three. There was no proposal, and every time I brought up marriage, he would stonewall me. He completely shut down and stared into space — I couldn’t say a word. He would sit there on the couch and literally be comatose for hours. We couldn’t talk about it at all.”

“It was so frustrating and upsetting — why would he lead me on like this if he wasn’t serious about marriage? Why can’t he just talk to me like a normal person? How long was I supposed to put up with this? Truthfully, I spiraled into a pretty deep depression for a while. It was some of the worst times of my life.

He finally agreed to go to therapy, and it turned out he had bad anxiety from his parents’ nasty divorce. That explained why he completely shut down when the topic came up. Therapy and medication turned things around — we got engaged about a year after that, and married this year.

But yeah: It took every last ounce of patience I had to stay in this relationship during those times. I’m still not happy with how things played out — it’s not something I look back on with fond memories. I also had a lot of childhood trauma that I worked through on my own as a young adult because I knew it was a problem that I needed to address. 

If I had to do it all over again, I would refuse to move in together without being engaged first. I think it would have been better if he worked through his childhood trauma mostly on his own.”

—u/dream_bean_94