Now, the real question is, after spending 10 years with this person, why the f**k would you up and get married? If you guys broke up a year ago half your s**t wouldn't soon be gone.
I'm not giving her anything I wouldn't willingly part with anyways. Well, she's getting our dog, which sucks (a
lot), but that would have happened if we broke up, too. Financially I'm no worse off. She keeps her stuff, I keep mine. In fact, this is working out exactly as if we had never gotten married at all.
*
Shrugs*
Well to be fair, he's only 26. Getting married might have been the "grown-up" thing to do.
I mean, it's quite another thing if you're 40-something, been in a relationship for more than 10 years and aren't married. (I know very happy couples like this.) Clearly, marriage means crap all to you in that case.
But a 10-year relationship from 15 to 25 is a very different thing.
Yeah, but that's long enough to have seen the writing on the wall. That spot between 18 and 25 is where some of the biggest change comes in a person's life. You start becoming the person you're gonna be for a good chunk of the rest of your life. Time enough to realize that maybe it wasn't gonna work out. 10 years then lets get hitched is almost always gonna end badly. Just like getting married at 18 or marrying somebody after 5 months. Don't do it.
I
liked the people we had become. I liked her
more at 25 than I did at 16. She became a better, more stable person. Someone I could have spent the rest of my life with.
The problem was that I moved away for a year to school. The plan was to have her move out with me this August. We got married right before I left - which was a complicated situation. I guess we figured that it would make us feel more secure about our relationship, which we knew was going to be difficult with the separation. In fact, I think it did help me stay the course. Otherwise, the marriage didn't change anything. We were happy.
There are other factors here I'm not going into in any level of detail, but while I was gone, she suffered a traumatic event (about which she didn't tell me until much, much later). This other person was there to comfort her, etc.
Anyway, long story short: the marriage didn't hurt anything. In fact, it helped. But things fell apart anyway.