[UPDATE] I (31/F) need some advice about what to go over in a “where is this relationship going?” talk with my boyfriend (32/M) of 14 years, kind of a complicated situation.

First Post

I figured I’d give everyone an update on the situation now that we’ve got everything figured out, although I’m pretty sure that most of you aren’t going to like it. I know the general opinion was that my boyfriend and I don’t have a “real relationship” and that I should break up with him for that reason alone if not over cheating, but LSS we’re still together so if you already think that was the wrong decision you may just want to stop reading.

But anyway, so my boyfriend flew in to see me on Tuesday night so that we could talk face-to-face and actually figure out what we want our relationship to look like going forward. We also talked a lot about how exactly we ended up in our unique situation, which was actually (for me) the more eye-opening part of the conversation in a lot of ways. Until we actually sat down and went over a timeline of why we did or didn’t do certain things, I didn’t realize how much of the reason that we were coasting along without a plan was specifically because I was refusing to get on board when my boyfriend would try to get me to make a plan, and not actually that we just happened to never really have a serious conversation about it.

So as far as whether to have an open vs exclusive relationship going forward, we decided on exclusive. Not really a surprising turn of events since the only reason we would’ve still been open was if we were going to still be doing long-distance, and after talking through everything we decided that it’s time to finally be done with that.

So our plan now is to live together for at least the next 6 months, because that’s how long I’m able to take a sabbatical from my job to move to the country where my boyfriend is currently working. I’m waiting until the end of the sabbatical to decide for sure what I want to do as far as going back to my job or not, because if it turns out that I really miss it or if I don’t like living together full-time we’ll have to re-evaluate some things. But what’s probably going to happen is that after 6 months we’ll get married, because that would mean that wherever my boyfriend next moves to for work I’m allowed to go with him, which isn’t otherwise a guarantee. And then I guess we’ll more or less be in a pretty standard relationship, although we’d still be moving around a lot for the foreseeable future.

tl;dr: Staying exclusive, moving in together, probably getting married.

Submitted February 24, 2023 at 11:49AM by ThrowRASberry https://ift.tt/J4v0zUl