Hi Ammanda, I've been reading your Ask Ammanda posts for a while and some of them have been so enlightening that I would love to get your take on my situation currently.
I'm 27 years old and I've been with my fiance for almost five years now. We officially met in our local church, became friends, hit it off and eventually got engaged New Year's Eve 2019. Since then we've been "planning" our wedding. Our church has a building that we want to use for the ceremony but the church requires that we do 6 months of pre-marital counselling.
Originally we were going to get married in 2020 but that was a write off because of covid, so we moved the wedding to September, 2021. While the plan was focused on marriage we also saw an opportunity that year to purchase a flat that was really close to family so we thought why not go for it and then get married after so that we have a place to live. But I noticed that as we going to viewings and getting things sorted, that the topic of marriage was put to the side. So I mentioned it to my partner and said "I understand that we're trying to see if we can get this flat but I also think we can still do counselling on the side while we're in the process of getting this flat." To which, he stated that we should do the counselling after we bought the flat, which confused me because to put the marriage prep on the back burner was not something that was agreed and I couldn't see why doing both would have been an issue. We ended up not buying the flat which almost caused us to break up due to differing opinions and he also felt like not going for the flat at that time was a big loss for him.
Since then not a lot of progress has been made on the wedding, we've been back and forth with plans and we still haven't really set a date despite the fact that we agreed on getting married in 2023.
At this current stage, I'm mainly frustrated with the fact that he keeps resisting going to pre-marital counselling, which I have voiced is majorly important to me. I never had a blueprint of what a successful relationship/ marriage looks like, plus the benefit of mental, emotional and spiritual preparation; yet every time I try to discuss with him about starting counselling, its often met with his demeanour changing and or other excuses.
He has mentioned in the past and recently that he doesn't think counselling is necessary. I mean don't get me wrong it's okay to voice an opinion, but I'm just confused by the fact that we've chosen a venue that requires it, yet when it comes to doing it, it's an issue. Right now, it feels like we've reached a dead end and I'm worried that I'm being strung along. I feel like he doesn't want to do it and he's not being 100% honest with me as to why.
And with time going, things will just become more and more delayed. I don't want to compromise on letting go of doing counselling as I don't think it's fair for me to do so.
I really love him and am willing to go through the process to achieve the goal of getting married and starting our lives together, but I'm just not sure if he's willing to do the same anymore. We've often talked about the future together and having our own place and family so his unwillingness to do this one thing is, is confusing to me.
After all this time, it would break my heart if he doesn't really want to marry me but keep me as a convenience.
I'm just not sure how to approach him about it because I don't want to cause an argument or disagreement over it.
I think the last line of your letter explains what the problem really is here…
Basically, you want him to agree with you but he doesn’t and that’s too difficult to talk about together. At the risk of being challenging, your letter does suggest that there is little room for manoeuvre in these wedding arrangements. It’s understandable that you want things how you want them to be. I wonder though if your fiancé is trying to say that he’s unsure about some of the arrangements (and I know this will be an upsetting thought) - perhaps about getting actually married at all.
Wedding arrangements are fun, exhausting and stressful. They can also be overwhelming and that can add to the difficulty for a partner to actually say what’s no longer working for them because they fear causing huge upset. In this case, you feel that marriage preparation would be a sensible thing to do - and maybe it would, but he doesn’t want to. Maybe he genuinely feels that counselling won’t help much and maybe it wouldn’t. Counselling isn’t the answer to everything and for it to have the remotest chance of success there has to be a buy in at least to some degree from both partners.
I’m wondering here if looking for the flat was a welcome distraction from the wedding planning for him. You’re quite right when you say that you could have looked for a flat and taken part in the marriage counselling simultaneously, but again, he didn’t want to do that. As a result of all this, you’re now playing with the idea that despite having talked about a future together, he may be thinking of your relationship merely as a convenience. It sounds like you feel as if you would be ‘just a convenience’ unless you marry but I’d like to suggest another way of thinking about this….
We all have our ‘bench marks’. These are things below which we feel we cannot go. Sometimes these benchmarks apply to very minor things and sometimes to very big ones such as feeling that a relationship lacks value unless you’re married. We gather these bench marks from when we’re kids. Family scripts, beliefs, rules and experience all contribute to how we see the world and what we feel gives things meaning and value. We add to all this as we get older. Life experience sometimes helps to confirm or reject earlier beliefs and then when we look for a partner, we tend to look for someone who maybe shares what we think makes things OK. Occasionally though, people change their minds or come to feel different bench marks meet their needs more effectively. In this case I’m wondering whether your fiancé does indeed see a rich future together but maybe rejects the notion of marriage. Equally, maybe it’s not that at all and he’d love to go ahead but with less formality. Perhaps to having someone shine a light on interesting questions to ask each other – as is often the case in marriage prep programmes just feels like a step too far – as if someone else is being too influential in how you work things out together. As a therapist myself I would have to add here that asking important questions of each other prior to any serious development in a relationship, whether that’s starting to live together, try for a baby or get married, really does make sense. Better to know up front that for example, only one of you wants kids means that choices can be made, even very painful ones, before everything gets set in stone.
In conclusion, I would suggest that you start practising how to talk to each other differently. There’s clearly a conversation that needs to be had and I suspect that it’s the fear of causing significant upset that’s holding you both back. I’m guessing that the reason you don’t want to have an argument or disagreement is because you may hear something you don’t like. But better to know that now than later. My idea is that he loves you very much and you’re definitely not a convenience, it’s just that he wants to approach things differently. If that’s the case then you have to discuss this to decide if your benchmarks and his really are in love with each other.
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Ammanda Major is a sex and relationship therapist and our Head of Service Quality and Clinical Practice
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