While marriage is a great thing for the right reasons, pressuring your date to marry you isn’t a good idea for a number of reasons.
What you need is for both of you to come to that conclusion on your own. Feeling pressured into marriage runs the danger of not allowing that process to happen naturally.
Just why is it dangerous to pressure your date into getting married? Here are a few of many reasons why.
How Do You Feel When Someone Pressures You into Something?
The natural human response to feeling pressured into something is to resist. To put on those brakes.
Cold feet often follow and the one feeling pressured tends to distance themselves from the situation or relationship.
Maybe you’ve been pressured into purchasing a new vehicle that could alter your financial situation for years. Perhaps a salesman tried everything to get you to buy his high-end vacuum cleaner or someone’s working too hard to get you to change your religious beliefs.
If you can relate to the feeling of being pressured into anything, you know it’s not a fun experience.
Especially, when the pressure could lead you to make the best or worst choice of your life by marrying, doubling down on your date could backfire.
Too often, if someone’s pressured into something, they come to regret their decision. They feel like the choice really wasn’t theirs to make.
That leads to difficulty when times get tough in your future marriage.
If a partner feels like they freely made the choice to get married, they may try harder to make the marriage a success than if they felt forced into the decision.
Your Date Can Feel Used and Manipulated
When individuals pressure someone into anything, including marriage, the coerced person can feel used, manipulated and even abused.
Deep in their hearts, the pressured person knows it’s their right to make their own choice.
After all, they have to live with their decisions—not someone else.
Pressuring your date to get married communicates that you care more about your perceived needs than theirs.
It communicates that you don’t respect your date enough to let them make their own choices.
Pressuring Someone to Marry Could Mean Underlying Relational Problems
The very fact that one person in a relationship is pressuring another to get married could be communicating some major red flags in the relationship.
Often, the pressuring comes from the faulty belief that marriage will magically fix a variety of deep, complex problems.
The reality is that you and your date will be the same people after marriage as you were before. If anything, marriage will lead to even bigger problems if you didn’t adequately address them beforehand.
Here are a few common situations people wrongly assume tying the knot will magically fix:
- Maybe the relationship is emotionally turbulent and unstable. One person in the relationship could falsely assume that marriage will naturally bring about that much-needed stability.
- Marriage will result in quick change like abstaining from the abuse of drugs, alcohol or will lead to a greater interest in work.
- The faulty belief that marriage will solve your date’s problem with unfaithfulness.
- It will allow a blended family to merge with few or any issues.
- Marriage will make the abuse stop.
- Getting married will cause my lifelong fears and insecurities to vanish.
All of these bulleted statements are obvious misconceptions. But every day, they’re believed by many who desire marriage too badly.
In Conclusion
While marriage can be an awesome experience, pressuring your date into a huge life decision isn’t a good way to start your marriage.
In fact, it’s a really bad idea.
Do you need some guidance before you marry? Now could be the perfect time to contact the OC Relationship Center to build a better foundation for a healthy marriage!