There is a weird phenomenon that I've never been able to exactly understand. It is one that I have noticed in a large variety of places, among lots of different people, and in many different situations. It is the phenomenon where you will often see a person who was in a long-term relationship that didn't work out, get engaged/married to another person after a much shorter length of time.
Let me further explain. I know of a number of people who have been in relationships that have lasted for a year or more. Occasionally 2 years. And sometimes 8-9 months. Sadly, these relationships will sometimes not work out. (I always wondered how you could date a person for a year or more and then NOT get married- but then I was in that situation and therefore stopped questioning it.) Now let me explain the oddity of the situation- the phenomenon is more clearly seen when that person finally gets married. Often times you will notice that this person who was in a fairly long relationship will end up marrying someone that they have dated for 3-4 months.
Why? I can count 3 of these strange cases off of the top of my head:
~A guy that was in a 2 year relationship gets engaged to another girl after 4 months.
~A girl who dated a guy for a year and a half gets engaged to another guy after 3 months.
~A guy who was in a year relationship gets engaged to another girl after 4 months.
*(Trust me, there are many more examples where those came from...)
Now I realize that someone who has had the patience to date for a length of time and not get married is probably more ready to get married the next time someone comes along- but something about those statistics just seems a little off to me. Why would you invest so much time and energy into a person that you do not end up marrying and then invest less than half that amount of time in the person that you DO end up marrying?
With my luck I'll end up getting engaged after 4 months of dating... just so I can join the group. But I really cannot understand why/how it happens that you can spend so much time, effort, emotion into someone that you don't marry- and end up spending so much less time on someone else. It would seem to me that it would almost be needful to spend at LEAST the same amount of time with the new person that you spent with the previous person. But for some reason this is not the way society seems to be working.
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5 comments:
Maybe it took a year of dating that one person so they would be led by the Lord to the person they would marry?
That's just one thought and possibility why.
I think a lot of it has to do with a person's psychology. If you're in a relationship that's so-so, you probably won't push it towards marriage very quickly. You'll let it play out and see how it evolves. The relationship may only be so-so, but it's better than no relationship, so you don't jump ship either.
You do that a few times, then you end up in a relationship that is above and beyond, so you push on towards marriage without pausing to look back.
Interesting insights. But I maintain that it is a bit odd that the person many people marry is one that they've known a shorter amount of time than many other people they've dated.
"Why would you invest so much time and energy into a person that you do not end up marrying and then invest less than half that amount of time in the person that you DO end up marrying?" I would like to point out that eternity is much longer than half of two years. ;)
Here's my question. If you know marrying someone is the right thing to do, and they know it too, why would you wait an extra year to spend time dating when you could spend that year married and in a lot less danger? I think a lot of times (not all), people date for a long period of time because they never hit the point of "I want to marry this person." Sure, they like the person, they enjoy their company, but the thought of marriage just doesn't seem right at the moment. Eventually they break up. Then awhile later they date someone else and suddenly are feeling things that they never felt with the long-term person. Is that such a wrong thing? Should they use the experience of the relationship that didn't work out as a gauge for how to proceed with the current relationship? Seems a bit silly to me.
Lastly, I've never understood the thought of, "I want to date someone for at LEAST a year before I marry them." In that scenario, if you only date 5 guys in your life before you get married, and you jump from one to the other quickly, you've just spent 4 years of your life on relationships that won't work out and 1 on a relationship that will continue on for decades longer (of life... eternities past that). Seems like a waste of four years. During that time I probably tried out 10-15 different guys and spent a lot of time learning what loneliness comes from being single. I had a better idea of what I really wanted because I had tasted a lot more. Some for longer than others. And you know what? None of that mattered anyway, because when I knew BJ was right for me, no matter the timing, I pressed forward with it.
Don't worry so much about how long you date someone. Rather, consider how you feel and what God says about the relationship.
It may be odd, but I think it ties into CPM's statement, that the year relationships are so-so, or they think they will get better, but break up because it won't progress to marriage. I would assume that getting married after four months means they had a spiritual confirmation about that person that they didn't have with the person they dated for a year or so.
Of course this isn't always the case as a roommate of mine got married after dating his girlfriend for a year and a half.
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