Written by: Alicia Roxanne

For the past year, my Instagram feed has been constantly populated with pictures of people either getting engaged or married. And when someone got engaged after a year of dating, I thought to myself, “Isn’t this too short?”

Is it possible to commit the rest your life to someone you presumably just knew? Assuming you don’t see each other every day, perhaps just five times a week. That’s a total of about 260 days a year. So you are basing the rest of your life on WhatsApp, FaceTime, plus those 260 days of interacting with your partner.

On the other hand, my dear friend Hannah, also recently got engaged after dating her boyfriend (now fiancé) for eight years. Eight years is a really long time to stay in a relationship with someone.

The longest relationship I had was four years, which translates to four Christmases, four birthdays and four New Year’s together with him. Four years already felt like a long time to be in love with someone.

But if 260 days is really not enough, can there actually be such thing as too long? After all, isn’t it better to know someone longer and in greater depth before making a life-changing decision?

The Dating Philosophy

You date someone with the purpose of getting to know the other person inside out. Ultimately, you will only have two options: get married or break up.

Getting to know someone is a process and it takes time — we are all aware of this fact. You get to know each other by engaging in conversations and activities together. Through those interactions, you understand more about each other’s personality, wants, needs, desires and aspirations. They are the subject and you are the student. You learn something as simple as their favorite cuisine to something as complex as how they solve a difficult situation.

But the things you learn about them change over time. This is because of the different circumstances, age, experience, and maturity. People change as a result of their environment and experiences. (Though in some cases, they can also stay the same.)

When you date someone long enough, you see how they evolve over time. But in the process, you are also evolving with them.

For example, when you date someone from college, you both started as two naive individuals who had no idea about the world. But then you both go off to different places after university and meet different people. Your personalities change, so do your lifestyles, world views and values. This doesn’t mean that one is better than the other; it just means that two people who started out similar are now vastly disparate.

The longer you date someone, the more variables there are affecting the fate of your relationship.

The Pros and Cons

Dating someone for a long period of time allows you to know them really well. Both of you go through enough hardship together that makes you stronger as a couple.

But it can lead to your relationship becoming more routine and not as exciting as it used to be. You can either feel bored with the relationship or the person you are with. Most of all, you can mistake comfort for love. It’s the feeling when you date someone for a very long time, yet you can’t picture yourself spending rest of your life with this person.

But you agree to compromise with yourself and get married because you are afraid of starting over with someone else.

This feeling is almost the exact opposite when you’ve just met each other. During the first year or two, you probably spend most of your relationship in the honeymoon phase where everything is all rainbows and butterflies. Your relationship is new and fresh, and you never run out of things to do or things to talk about. There is always something new to discover about that person you are dating.

After you’re bound by commitment, things start to stagnate or go downhill, and you start learning things about your partner that you don’t actually like. That’s when you begin to wonder: what if I hold off making the decision to settle down? Might I be able to live a different story?

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The Crossroad

For me, too long or too short is just a matter of perception. You should never be pressured into marrying someone just because people tell you you’ve been dating for so long, or feel guilty about marrying someone because people say that you’ve dated for too short a period.

No. You marry someone only when you are ready. It shouldn’t matter what people say, because in the end it’s your life. It’s okay to take as long as you need because you want to be more financially, mentally, or emotionally secure and ready.

But sometimes, when it takes you so long to decide, maybe you should seriously ask yourself if this is what you really want. Because just like in When Harry Meets Sally, when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you will want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.

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