No, I’m not talking about the “right place, right time” sort of timing. I’m talking about realistic expectations about the development of a relationship. Mike’s written two posts recently that contained passing references to time frames that twisted my brain into knots. One was his attempt at getting inside a woman’s head with a recitation of the things she might have wanted to consider before giving up and moving on.
I disagreed with almost everything Mike said in that post, but one thing that really jumped out at me was that he was talking about a woman giving up on a relationship because she wasn’t getting the level of serious response she wanted after three weeks. And I just kept thinking, “didn’t give her his heart”? In three weeks? Really? I’d be a lot more concerned about a guy who thought he WAS “giving me his heart” in three weeks. I could flip a coin, maybe: Liar? Or just an immature guy who has no idea what love is? Either way, he’s not stellar relationship material.
I had the same reaction when I read Mike’s post about introducing women to his daughter, and learned that some women felt it was unreasonable that he didn’t want to make it a family affair in the first few weeks. In my mind, the “couple of months” Mike mentioned was wildly ambitious. Of course every situation is different, but in my mind the reasonable point to start thinking about introducing someone to my daughter is between six months and a year.
And then, just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, I read a discussion in an online forum in which it seemed that a large number of people thought that if there hadn’t been sex by the third date, something was missing and you’d better just move on.
I can’t help but think these accelerated time-frames are part of the reason that endings are so accelerated as well. False intimacy is created when we say “I love you” after two weeks, to someone we barely know. False intimacy is created when we have sex with someone we’ve been dating for a month (and think that’s “waiting”, because so many people would have done it the first night). False intimacy is created when we drag someone we barely know into the tableau of our family and try to create not just one relationship on a foundation of sand, but many. And when that false intimacy doesn’t hold up, we break up, move out, get divorced, move on and start the whole thing over again.
Maybe, if we’d all slow down in the beginning, the ending wouldn’t come upon us quite so quickly.
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