Quote:
Originally Posted by Matrixliz
Also, what did you take away from each relationship?
Also, which ones did you live with and for how long?
During what years were you totally single?
and what do you conclude from all this?
So I guess this is a thread about everyone's relationship (or lack of relationship) history.
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Hmm...going back to HS/when I started dating? I don't know that I'd call those "relationships," per se, but they were age appropriate ones, and fairly lengthy, if not ultra intimate.
I dated a guy most of my senior year of HS, he was older and my dad hated him, although he was very nice. I did break up with him when I was getting ready to go away for college, I was not keen on a relationship that would have spanned about 800 miles at that point.
Nobody at my college dated, unless the came in with a BF/GF from home. There was more of a hooking up/FWB culture than "dating" or "relationships," and that wasn't my bag. I had a long-term crush that was unreciprocated through most of college, so that kind of curtailed dating for me, anyway. I dated one guy kind of halfheartedly through about half of my junior year, but he was a year older, graduated, and moved to the West Coast. We did an LDR through the summer, but it died out.
I spent my twenties casually dating, mostly. I had one on-and-off guy from about 25-27 where I'd have called him a boyfriend some of that time, but mostly it was just dating and seeing people with no real strings attached. I had a really busy newspaper job, lived by myself in a sweet apartment from 23-30, and keeping things non-serious worked for me.
When I was 30, I met a guy and we moved in together pretty quickly. I actually moved to his city/state (I'd been looking for another job, anyway, so it worked out). We lived together for five years.
I met my now-husband when I was almost 36, after my breakup with the previous guy, while I was living on my own. We dated exclusively for about 8 months, and then he asked me to move in to his place. I did, and while I was unpacking, he proposed. We got married about six months later.
So I've lived with two guys - one from age 30-35, and my husband, from 36 to present time. I spent all of my twenties alternating between casual dating and being totally single. I spent most of college totally single by choice as well.
There isn't a lot of takeaway or pattern to it, for me, except that I definitely wasn't ready for serious, cohabiting, lifesharing relationships until I was approaching thirty, and I definitely wasn't ready for marriage until later than that. Serious relationships and marriage and kids were the furthest thing from my mind in my twenties. I came from a small, rural community where early marriage/young families were pretty common, and always knew it was not my thing.
As far as what I took away from each relationship, each could be a novel in and of itself.
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