It's my life, not yours

I like to think I'm pretty good with words. But there are those I find who can express my thoughts so much better than I could. This is one of those times. Saturday, Manolo For the Brides wrote a post called "Whose Decision?" Should that really be a question we are asking? But it is. And it has to be asked too often.

I am surrounded by people who love me. And I know this because they all have opinions about what I should be doing with my life. If they didn't love me they wouldn't care enough to tell me what to do. Right?

Ever since meeting the boyfriend over three years ago... Okay, that's wrong. Since about six months after meeting the boyfriend, I've been hearing from one person or another that he just needs to marry me, that if he didn't act soon it meant he was leading me on and just playing with me, that there must be something wrong with him if he hadn't already married me, that if we aren't already married then I'm just wasting my time with him, that I should just dump him since he hadn't married me already. And many more such statements that I can't specifically remember at this time.

Seriously people! It's not your life!

I do talk a lot about my life and my relationships, but that does not mean that these people know everything there is to know about the relationship, that they have all the details of the issues he and I have been working through. In fact, I don't talk about the big issues/problems much at all. I believe that the issues a couple is working through should be worked through by the couple. I do not want to have told someone else about it and then after it's been resolved, still have that other person not yet over it. It's why I don't tell my mom about disagreements or such I have with a boyfriend. If we work through it and I end up marrying the guy, I don't want my mom to have past bad feelings for him when I'm clearly over it.

As to the boyfriend, there have been some pretty big issues that have come up between us, issues that unless they were resolved wouldn't have contributed to a healthy marriage. They are also issues I haven't told anyone else about. So leave us in peace to work through them. When we're ready, we'll get married.

And the comments of "it's about time" or "I don't know what's taking you so long" are generally not appreciated. It will be in the time it's supposed to be. And of course you don't know what's taking so long, you don't need to know.

A friend of mine asked this week what had changed between the boyfriend and I since we'd voiced our love to each other. Honestly, pretty much nothing has changed. This friend said that we had a pretty solid relationship so they weren't surprised nothing had changed. And how did we get that solid relationship? By working through our issues on our own in our own time.