My girlfriend of four years and I are both graduating college.
I haven't found employment yet, and she's returning home for work.
As near as I can tell, we're very compatible.
Pros
We are very fond of each other, get a lot of value out of each other's time.
We've been able to talk about the subject sanely.
Status
We agree on religion and politics.
Married guys make more on average, but the arrow of causality could point in either direction or come from something else.
Financial benefits
Cons
Negative Status associated with marrying young?
No jobs yet, no clear home or area to live in.
She sometimes gets mad at me for things I'm "just supposed to know" to do, not do, say, or not say. I'm not sure if she's right and I'm a jerk.
She has said that she doesn't want to marry me if she's just my female best friend that I sleep with. But I don't know how to evaluate what she's asking. There are a number of possibilities. Maybe I don't feel the requisite feelings and thus she wouldn't want to be married. Maybe I do have the feelings and I have no way to evaluate whether I do or not. Maybe I'm not ever going to feel some extra undetected thing X, ever, and so I should just go through the motions saying that I do, and our marriage prospects are entirely unchanged. Maybe this is just some signalling ritual we have to go through.
We both are concerned that I've not really had a relationship not with her, so there are no points of comparison for me to make.
How do I decide whether to get married?
Pros
Cons
She has said that she doesn't want to marry me if she's just my female best friend that I sleep with. But I don't know how to evaluate what she's asking. There are a number of possibilities. Maybe I don't feel the requisite feelings and thus she wouldn't want to be married. Maybe I do have the feelings and I have no way to evaluate whether I do or not. Maybe I'm not ever going to feel some extra undetected thing X, ever, and so I should just go through the motions saying that I do, and our marriage prospects are entirely unchanged. Maybe this is just some signalling ritual we have to go through.
We both are concerned that I've not really had a relationship not with her, so there are no points of comparison for me to make.