Nagging won’t get you engaged

DEAR AMY >> This summer, my boyfriend and I will be celebrating our seventh anniversary as a couple.

We have been living together for a year. He’s 32, and I’m turning 26.

I am ready for the next step: engagement. While he says he wants to be engaged, too, he doesn’t seem to be taking any steps to get us there.

It seems like everyone around us is getting engaged or married, and taking their next steps, while I feel like we’re not progressing further.

Can I get him to propose without nagging him?

— Unengaged Upstate

Woman

DEAR UNENGAGED >> You were quite young when you and your guy first got together, and you are now at an age where many people feel pressure to tie the knot.

As emotionally loaded as the prospect of marriage is, the ability to discuss marriage openly and with comfort now will predict other important conversations later — about sex, money, children, work and family responsibilities. A therapist once told me, “People ‘nag’ when they don’t feel heard.”

Having a conversation is not the same as nagging, as long as both of you talk and listen and feel heard and understood.

If you want to create a timeline for engagement, you should say so. You could say, “I’m feeling a strong pull toward getting engaged. You say you want this, too — how do you feel about setting a basic timeline for taking this step?”

If you and he want to adhere to the concept that the man must ask the woman to get married, and if you agree to a time frame, then he would have time and space to create a special “proposal” moment.

You should then relax and let things happen.

DEAR AMY >> While I think your answer to “Frugal Older Sister” was on the right track, the unspoken reason for this difference in lifestyles between these sisters is that each is living her own values.

Even if the older sister had more financial resources, she would probably make decisions that were not like her younger sister’s.

Younger Sister seems to be fine living without a clothes dryer. It’s her own home. She didn’t ask her sister for a dryer. This is Older Sister applying her own values to her sister’s life.

I have a wonderful older sister; we’re both in our 60s. She has accumulated many more resources than I have. She occasionally makes financial gestures that I appreciate. Sometimes I take her up on them, sometimes I don’t. What I love about her is that through it all, she honors my decisions and values when I am applying them to my own life.

DEAR GRATEFUL >> Great and beautiful point.