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‘My girlfriend wants to get married – but I’m not sure she loves me’

Ask Roe: ‘She bosses me around a lot and can be very demanding’

‘I’m very confused.’ Photograph: Getty Images

Roe McDermott's face
Roe McDermott
Sun Feb 28 2021 - 06:00

Dear Roe,

I’m a 29-year-old man and I have been with my girlfriend for two years. We met through mutual friends who were eager to set us up and we have lots of things in common. We moved in together last year and almost immediately our friends started asking when I was going to propose. Most of our friends are engaged or married so there’s a sense of pressure around us being the last couple in the group. But I don’t know if I want to marry her.

She bosses me around a lot and can be very demanding. If I don’t “treat” her enough she sulks or starts a big fight. I don’t know if she even really loves me or if she just wants to get married and I don’t know how to get a real answer to that because she does say she loves me. I do think I love her and everyone says we’re a great couple and she tells everyone we’re really happy so I’m very confused. There’s also the fact that even if we broke up, I couldn’t really date right now anyway.

Here’s a rule of thumb: if the only reason you are staying with someone and possibly thinking about marrying them is “dating is hard”, you need to leave.

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What strikes me here is the complete lack of agency you seem to feel around your life. You got together because your friends were eager to set you up. You feel pressured to get married because your friends are all married. Your girlfriend tells you and other people that you’re in love, so you believe her. Where are you in all of this? How do you feel? What do you want?

It’s a dangerous position to be in, when you don’t feel a lot of agency and don’t express your needs and desires, but your partner feels very comfortable expressing their needs, desires and dissatisfactions. When your relationship becomes about their monologue, rather than a dialogue, the relationship becomes defined by their experience. The lens through which you discuss the relationship is about what they need, and what you are doing right or wrong – rather than what is best for both of you, and how you can work together and take care of each other.

This is a very confusing state to be in, and when you have gone along with this dynamic for so long, it can often be difficult to tap back into your own feelings and desires that exist independent of the relationship. But it is absolutely vital to do so. This is your one and only life; why on earth would you risk committing it to someone when you’re not entirely sure that they love you?

And here’s what I find so fascinating about your desire to get a “real answer” to the question of whether or not your girlfriend loves you: you are still deciding that her feelings about you are the important, defining issue here. If she loves you, you stay. If she doesn’t, you leave.

Forget about your girlfriend for a moment. Forget about your friends. Think about what you want from a relationship; what is important to you, how you want to communicate with a partner

But what if you centred your feelings, your emotions? Instead of focusing on your girlfriend, what if we focused on what you love, how you want to be loved, what you want love to look like in your life?

You’re currently wondering whether your girlfriend loves you, and I’m wondering, do you ever ask yourself if you even like her? You say you love her, but I’m not entirely sure what that means for you. The way you communicate with each other and with others about your relationship doesn’t seem enjoyable or authentic to you; you seem to have different ideas of how to express affection; you don’t seem excited by the idea of a future together; and you haven’t given me any specifics of what you actually enjoy about being around her.

You say you have things in common – but many people are interested in politics or swimming or superhero movies or whatever. That doesn’t mean they should be together. Liking the same things and having the same life values are very different. Liking the same things and communicating respectfully are very different. Liking the same things and being passionately, adoringly in love are very different. Liking the same things is nice for small talk at a cocktail party or a great group chat – but sharing the same hobbies does not mean you have to walk down the aisle. Liking the same things isn’t enough.

And a fact that is even more important to remember is that even liking a person isn’t enough. Because liking someone, or having them say they like you, doesn’t mean they’ll treat you well. Let that sink in: liking someone is not enough. They must treat you well.

One thing I’m particularly concerned about is that you don’t seem to acknowledge being single as an actual possibility. You need to either be in a relationship, or dating to find one. There are two problems with that approach. One, that seems to have happened already, is that you can become so scared of being alone that you would rather adjust your needs and desires and boundaries to someone else, rather than adjust your life to their absence. This leaves you vulnerable to staying with people who treat you badly just because you don’t want to be alone. The other danger is that without some time alone, you don’t ever get the chance to establish your own desires clearly, leaving you vulnerable to repeating the same cycle over and over again.

Forget about your girlfriend for a moment. Forget about your friends. Think about what you want from a relationship; what is important to you, how you want to communicate with a partner, how you’d like for affection and appreciation to be expressed in your relationship, how you’d like to deal with conflict. Think about how you’d like to feel in a relationship.

Now compare those thoughts to how you feel right now. It doesn’t seem from your letter like they’re adding up. And that isn’t healthy or sustainable. So you have two real choices: start speaking openly and honestly to your girlfriend about how you don’t feel valued or respected in your relationship, and express that you need things to drastically change before you even think of getting more serious. Or you can leave. Yes, dating is hard during Covid – but this may be a blessing in disguise. Take some time alone, re-evaluate what you want your life to be – but for you, not to appease a partner or your friends or some ridiculous form of societal pressure to settle down as soon as possible. Stop settling in your own life, and instead ask yourself: what do I want?

I hope you find it.

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