Hi everyone,
I’m brand new here so hi and a friendly wave to ya!
Here’s what I need a guy’s opinion on. Roughly three weeks ago I asked my boyfriend how he felt about us getting married next year around this time. (We had both been hinting around a bit here and there about us getting married for a couple of months so I thought it was a pretty safe thing to bring up.) He said he liked the idea and that he was “very happy with me”. We even spoke a little bit about possible dates. Over the next couple of weeks a couple of other things were casually mentioned and nothing seemed to be amiss when they were spoken of. It seemed like we were doing some pre-planning type things so I thought everything was cool and we would slowly transition into a engaged status and eventually tell people, etc. Suddenly a couple of days ago he asked me what all I thought would be involved in planning the wedding so I pulled out my iPhone and began reading a basic break down that an app I had on there had created for me.
He started to look extremely uncomfortable and I immediately knew something was wrong. Even though he continued with the conversation as though everything was fine I knew everything was NOT fine. I went over to him and gently told him that if at any time he felt like he didn’t want to do this or he wasn’t ready or whatever to please tell me. He said he was suddenly extremely nervous when I began naming all the stuff that had to be done and that his heart had begun to race. He said he needed some time to think about WHY that had happened and he couldn’t really tell me right then.
I had to go to work in just a few minutes and was not pleased at all to have to leave right in the middle of this and was feeling a lot of stuff at once. I was trying my best to focus only on the fact that I was glad he was being honest but I began to feel angrier and angrier the longer I sat there with his stone face and his complete silence. I think I felt angry because I felt stupid, and like this was coming out of nowhere. Like I thought everything was fine and good and that we had moved to this point together when in reality just the IDEA of marrying me caused him extreme anxiety. It was hard not to take this personally and I found that very hurtful.
Because of my sudden anger (which I was doing my best to hide from him since I didn’t want him to feel bad for his feelings) I was only able to wait about 30 minutes before I had to call him on my cell (on my way to work) and ask him what the &*^% his deal was and would he at least TRY to tell me what made him nervous because there was no way I could work all day without knowing what he was thinking. That conversation really didn’t go well since my anger got the best of me and I basically said that I didn’t think he was ready and that I was an idiot to think he would ever be ready, and let's just forget the whole thing, etc.
When I got home from work that evening he said that he felt like we were putting the cart before the horse because he had not even asked me to marry him yet and wanted to know if I wanted a ring. When I said that I did he said that he wanted to go looking for rings this weekend and then he wanted to hold on to the ring until he thought of a cool special thing he could do as a proposal.
I’m really confused by all this. We are both VERY practical people and it never occurred to me that he would want to do a traditional proposal with all the trimmings. I’m trying to figure out now if I just totally pegged him wrong (that he’s far more romantic than I thought) or if this is some kind of stall tactic because he’s not really ready to get engaged or married but he thinks getting the ring and sitting on/hiding it (for however long it takes him to be ready to give it to me) is going to make me feel better; like it’s a pacifier of sorts. There is also an issue of control that I can’t put my finger on that makes me slightly uncomfortable as well. Like he has to be the one to initiate all of this or he won’t feel like a “real man”. I’ve never done well with traditional gender roles so there’s something mildly offensive about that to me. But at the same time part of me thinks it’s very sweet that it seems to mean so much to him that we go about this in what he seems to think is the “right” way.
Any ideas you have on where he could be coming from would be great! Am I just being weird and difficult? ^_^ Oh, it may be important to know that we’ve been together for a year and a half and lived together for 6 months.
Thanks for reading this long and detailed thing and for any ideas!
- Scarlet