The Marriage Pressure Is On

[LAtoJapan]

I have been with my girlfriend for about a year and a half. I am 30 and she is 27. We get along great and from April we start living together. I am living/working in Japan now and living together before marriage is pretty out of the ordinary. I have already told her and her parents too that I intend to marry her someday but I want to do a few things first. I want to live with her so that we can get used to each other and our habits. Also I want to find a steady job as I work a lot of jobs now from Monday to Saturday from morning to late night. Plus she needs to visit my hometown in the U.S. so she can see where I come from. The future is unknown whether we will move to the U.S. or I will stay in Japan so I would like her to get used to the U.S. way of life.

She sees a lot of her friends recently getting married and/or having babies so she is extremely jealous of them. Am I just making excuses not to get married to her or is there something that I can say to soothe her? I think living together is a big step for us and it is the first time for me to live with a girlfriend but some may look at it as a tactic to delay marriage, I don't know.....

[lastwish]

Hmmm...she is approaching her 30s. Maybe give it a year or so to get used to things?

[vashti]

Hmm.. I don't know if you are stalling or not, but I want to say something about the living together bit. If you two are sexually active, and spend the night with each other at one another's place with any frequency, then I don't see what you expect to learn if you live together first. i mean, if you are a slob, she probably already knows it. If she takes up 3/4 of the bed, you probably know this, too. Selfishness, money issues, all of that - you should already know about these things by now. Obviously, if you are having sex, you know if this is working out or not. Minor things can be negotiated later.

And yes, an awful lot of men use living together as a way to delay getting married.

Personally though, I don't see any real reason to get married unless you are planning to start a family in the near future, but you shouldn't be wasting years of her life if you aren't thinking you will marry her in a reasonable amount of time. There is a shelf life on her ovaries, you know.

[girl68]

I agree with Vash on this one.

[sookie6]

I thought japanese culture was quite conservative.

Do you not think that by living together you have already commited to marry her at least towards her family.

If you decided to leave the relationship now she would probably be very uncomfortable with that in respect to her parents, friends and othe family.

I might be completely wrong though about Japanese society.

All the details you want to sort out before mariage are not so important that they keep you from getting married.

Just set a date at least and make an announcement to everyone.





PS: if this last line stung...it means you don't really want to marry her.