I Won’t Marry You, But I’ll Move In

by J. Courtney Sullivan

My parents grew up and fell in love in the era of “’til death do us part,” An Affair To Remember, and the Beatles singing “All You Need Is Love.” Mine has been the era of friends with two households, Fatal Attraction, and advice gurus warning us that we need to be on the same page as our partners about everything from money to religion to kids to laundry detergent if we want our relationships to stand a chance.

My friends and I seem to take dating a lot more seriously than our mothers did. Perhaps too seriously. We obsess about every interaction, overanalyze each conversation. As much as we crave relationships, they also scare the everloving crap out of us because we have all seen what can happen when a woman makes the wrong choice.

I dated my high school boyfriend for three years, my college boyfriend for two. Even then, I was asking the big questions. If we couldn’t agree on child-rearing practices during our junior year of high school, then what was the point of staying together in the long run?

Imagine my dates’ delight: what 16-year-old boy doesn’t want to weigh the benefits of day care versus stay-at-home parenting?

The point of all this questioning, I suppose, is to keep ourselves safe. If we can solve the small stuff, then maybe we’ll be able to conquer the scarier, unanswerable issues, too: Will we get married? Live happily ever after? Break up next Tuesday? Stay together for 42 years only to have you leave me for our grandchildren’s buxom piano teacher on your seventy-fifth birthday?