156. Your boyfriend might not love you at the pace you love him.

Marriage and expensive rings.

I think I fell in love with my boyfriend, C, the day I met him. We were both studying at university and happened to end up living in the same student dorms in rooms that were across from each other. I was in room number 19, and he was in room 34. We were introduced by a mutual friend by accident, and from that day on, we have been inseparable.

My room was an individual room with a shared kitchen, while his room was a shared room with a shared kitchen and no floor to ceiling walls to separate him from his roommate. C practically moved in with me a few days after meeting me. He’d go to his room at night and come back with his toothbrush, pillow, and phone because he claimed that my room was more comfortable than his, an easy excuse but I had no complaints, of course.

Once it was clear that we were a couple and we started doing our weekly food shop together, eating all our meals together, watching movies together before bed, and even buying a car together, he would still tell everyone, including myself, that we were just friends. This was a little hard to believe, and I don’t think anyone we knew believed it, not even himself deep down, because he’d even taken me to meet his grandma, who I’d kiss on the cheek every time I walked in and out of the living room where she spent most of her time.

I recently saw this green lamp and remembered that these were the ones we had in our rooms when we first met.

I was deeply in love with him, and I couldn’t believe that someone like him was interested in someone like me. I didn’t have a lot of self-confidence at the time, and I wasn’t an expert in expressing my feelings either, so I kind of just went along with the “I’m your friend but not your girlfriend” story he was telling—he and I weren’t on the same page, obviously. We became best friends within days and felt like we’d known each other in three different lives beforehand, but I was ready to commit, and he didn’t know if he was. He committed as much as I did and was always fair and loyal, but he wasn’t comfortable with thinking that he was in a serious relationship at eighteen, even though he was the one who had deep-dived into one.

Fast forward to 2024; that means that we’ve been together for almost eight years and I have no idea where the time has gone. It feels like we’ve already lived a thousand lives together but it’s only been 2900 days.

Throughout these last eight years, there have been a lot of moments when we haven’t been on the same page. Curiously enough, we’ve always been on the exact same page, paragraph, and line when it comes to most topics in our shared life—like moving to a new city, buying a car, moving in together, renting a new apartment, or starting a project together… But when it comes to our romantic relationship, I’ve always been one step ahead of him, knowing with my soul that I was in it for the long run from day one.

C and I haven’t had a perfect relationship, because, hello? Anybody that tells you their relationship or marriage is perfect is lying. When you’re in your luteal phase, I’m sure the sound of his breathing makes you want to throw your coffee over him, and as soon as you bleed, you fall in love head over heels. There will also be days when you leave the precious Opinel knives in the kitchen sink to soak, and he’ll want to kill you too. Let’s not even talk about washing the moka pot with soap by accident.

However, what I can say is that our relationship is our joint project I’m most proud of. We’ve gone from being two eighteen-year-old kids that didn’t know where their heads were, to being two twenty-seven-year-old adults that prioritize their relationship above everything else. If our beloved and successful creative projects had to burn and cease to exist for us to carry on being us, we wouldn’t doubt it for a second. We’ve worked through countless tornados and mishaps, and each one has made us love one another more.

Spending the day wandering around IKEA taking photos and eating their disgusting food has always been our thing. Getting our first IKEA Family card felt special eight years ago, now we are our own family.

I’ve been saying for years that I want to marry C; even my dad wants me to marry C, so you can get an idea of how nice this guy is. But C hadn’t said that he wanted to marry me too until a few weeks ago. I’ve been one step ahead of him in this department for a long time, and guess what? That’s normal.

I see a lot of stuff nowadays on social media saying that if your partner hasn’t asked you to marry them after two years, you need to find a new one. Or if he’s not saving thousands to spend God knows how much of his annual salary on a ring, then he’s not sacrificing enough and not investing enough in your partnership. Excuse me? Are we completely stupid? I mean, I’m sorry but maybe I’m the delusional one after all?

Of course, everyone is different, and a lot of people my age have a lot more money than me because they live very different lives, but why is the aforementioned the norm? You only have to look at the comments on the videos on Instagram about marriage and engagements that spread these ideas to see how messed up we all are. There are people that agree with those ideas and expect all that from their future husbands.

Going back to C catching up with me regarding getting married: We were sitting in a park not long ago. The sky was blue, and the sun was warm, reflecting off the lake next to us while we ate at a picnic bench, brewing coffee to our right. We began to talk about marriage, and after a long, beautiful conversation that I’ll keep to myself, he said that he was finally opening up to the idea of us getting married our way and understanding how I felt about it. That, to me, had the same impact as him proposing to me. It was possibly one of the biggest highlights of my year. We were on the same page after so long of me asking myself if this day would ever come.

On one of our first dates C bought an Ian Rankin book to improve his English, nowadays he’s pretty much bilingual.

When C was still in his “we’re just friends” period, he used to repeat something to me all the time, and now I’m grateful that he did. He always used to say that we were two different people living our own individual lives who were deciding to share them together. But that it was crucial that we never blend into becoming the same person or abandoning our individual selves to become one. I used to think he was pushing me away and trying to keep his distance, but he never did that, and he never meant that.

What he did mean was that he had his path to walk along, and I had mine, and we’d both reach different checkpoints at different moments in our lives. And that’s what a partnership is: you’re both walking in the same direction, toward common goals, but each person needs their own time to process things. And not only that, each person will encounter personal crises along the way that will slow them down, and the other partner will have sudden spurts of growth, launching them forward faster than expected. But when you both have a common goal in mind, the timing isn’t as important because, in the end, you will reach the finish line, and in my opinion, there’s nothing better than reaching those milestones in your own time, leaving a trail of shared life behind you along the way. Where’s the fun in doing things because you reach a certain age or because everyone else around you is doing it?

What I’m trying to say is that your partner may be walking at a different pace than you, but you don’t need to constantly worry about it. You may feel like you’re ready, and your partner isn’t, but one day it may be the other way around. In short, there is no fixed pattern and no right way of doing things. But if your partner is your safety net, your ride-or-die, your rock, your safe place, your home, your buddy, your lover, your friend, your joy, your confidant, and your carer, don’t second-guess them because of what other people are telling you. Nobody should have to prove their love to you by spending thousands on you for a ring. We’re not in the Middle Ages, and you’re no longer being sold by your family to a rich husband for their benefit.

There will always be more fish in the sea—I mean, you live on a planet with billions of other lovely and attractive humans—but you won’t have the same story you have now with any of those other people or the same life. You can’t just pick up the perfect aspects of your relationship with your current partner and take them over to a new one. You have to abandon everything you’ve built with your partner to start from zero with someone else, and we tend to forget that part, and it’s usually the hardest bit too. Just because C spends almost an hour with me in bed, fast asleep on his chest, while he plays with my hair and kisses my head every morning, doesn’t mean that a new dream man will. You have to be prepared to lose it all to build a new life.

Learning to value what you have and what you’ve built as a partnership isn’t settling for less; it’s finding the page you’re on and the page your partner is on and respecting that you’re two different individuals with two different lives who are choosing every day to share themselves with each other, and honoring that as it deserves.

Forever my most favourite person on the whole planet

What I read on substack this week and really enjoyed (in order: most recently posted to latest)

1. sweater weather, crisis cultural by

   GirlPope

2. poda.serving 3 by me and C, aka

   poda.server
   because we spend so much time and brain power on these and in my never fully objective opinion, I think they’re cute

3. nadie te va a querer como yo by

   carlota 🦎
   unfortunately most women have to go through this toxic male boyfriend stage in their lives and Carlota spoke for herself and all of us this week

4. Annie Ernaux: Los Años by

   FRAGMENTOS
   aka
   Carlota y Emily
   , we’ve just launched our podcast on Substack. We’re back for a Season 2 and we’re over the moon yet exhausted, subscribe, listen to us, like, support in any way you can, we appreciate it deeply

And now I’m realising how little I’ve read on Substack this week. I’m currently reading Intermezzo by Sally Rooney to see what all the hype is about and I’m also spending time with my mum so my brain is elsewhere.