When my partner and I had been together for a while, we sat down and had a conversation about what the relationship was going to be. I have some fairly clear memories of that conversation, which is odd for me since my memory is garbage, but still.We were sitting on a bench at our local botanical garden in the spring.
The weather was nice, it was getting into the late afternoon, and we had been on our way to the car when we stopped to sit for a few minutes. Somehow, the topic of our relationship came up.Without getting into too many details, we covered a lot of deep topics in the ten or fifteen minutes we talked.
We talked about how the relationship was getting more serious, how we felt very good together, and how the whole thing felt natural. We also talked about what we wanted out of the relationship: did we want marriage? Did we want kids? What would happen if we got married and then divorced later?
Well, we were on the same page when it came to kids (not for us), but the marriage thing was one of the more interesting topics that came up because we were both okay with never getting married if it came down to it.
Marriage is a commitment, and while divorce is a thing, it’s much harder to untangle your lives when there is a legal contract involved. We both agreed that we should be fairly sure before we decided to get married, and that if we lived our whole lives having never gotten married, that would be fine.
