From Casual Dating to Long-Term Relationship
Thursday, September 27th, 2007
When you enter into a casual dating relationship, you really don’t know what is going to happen. When you started, you didn’t want to be committed, and you were enjoying being free to date different people. Somewhere along the line things changed, and you began to see tings from a different angle. You want more than just one or two nights a week, and though you feel your partner feels the same way, he or she has not indicated that in a verbal sense. Is there a time that is right to express your feelings, or do you just let it ride and see what happens? What should you do to make ensure that both of you feel the same way? What do you do if you find out that what you want doesn’t match that of your dating partner?
It is very difficult sometimes to know what someone wants, and even worse to know what to do if their desires are different from yours. How can you find out? Without any kind of question or future expectations, you can just casually in a thinking-out-loud kind of way mention that you might be thinking of something more long-term at some point and see what his or her reaction is. Notice the “at same point” rather than the “now” so that you’re not saying that’s how you feel now but that maybe at some time in the future you may be interested. Right now all you’re doing is “digging.” You want to find out if this relationship is worth continuing and to find out if you both are looking for the same thing.
What if the answers you receive are not the ones you want to hear? That is a decision you will have to make if that happens. The thing to remember is the answers you hear today may not be the same ones you’ll hear next week or next month. If you only recently started dating, you have time to wait, but if you’ve been dating for over a year, and your partner is not interested in the same thing you are, it may be time to think about moving on.
