I am 36, a banker. My 40-year-old boyfriend moved into my house after financial difficulties. I pay the bills and run the home. He says we are building toward marriage, but there is no plan or progress. I feel like I am mothering a grown man. Am I being impatient or is this normal?
You're looking for the right thing in the wrong place. Marriage-minded men don't behave like that. A masculine man does not move into a woman’s house. He cannot exercise leadership in a space that is not his. He cannot lie on a woman’s bed and find rest. His honor will not allow it.
He cannot live in a woman’s space and consume her resources. That order is unnatural and his ego rejects it. These types are not mature men. They are boys trapped in male bodies. Many were raised by hyper-functioning mothers, women who paid for everything, led the home, and never called a man out of the boy. Now he is searching for another superwoman so he can remain a son. He has never seen a man provide, protect, and lead.
Where there was no father to initiate him into manhood, he must undertake compensatory growth on his own or remain stuck. Others become squatters in a woman’s house because they are financially handicapped. The woman calls it dating, like you're doing. She convinces herself they are building a future and buys into his perennially unfulfilled promises. She mistakes her compromise for patience.
Your good heart is being used against you. When this man finally gets money, you will stop being his type. You saw him at his worst and he resents you for it. You remind him of what he is trying to escape. He now wants a woman who only knows the successful version of him, which you built him into. Whenever you bend your boundaries to build a man who has not built himself, you prepare him for the next woman while he breaks you for the next man. After that, he laughs while you cry. Stop being so understanding.
Allow men to take their journeys without your interference. Always choose a man who has completed his preparation just as you have completed yours. He may not be rich but he must be ready. He may not have excess but he must be financially capable enough to provide shelter and meet basic needs. If you own a house by yourself, you can keep it as an asset. Let the man marry you and take you home, literally. Stop reversing natural order and then acting surprised by the consequences. You need a man with pride, not one dependent on your help to marry you.
If he needs assistance, let it come from his friends and family, the people he has been building life with. You're not married yet to start helping financially. There's a time for everything. You need a man of the house, not just a man in the house. How can he be the head of a household where he is a guest? Even when you are financially empowered, in marriage, be feminine and allow yourself to be led. One dangerous fact being implied here is that you're already sleeping together and that, although many downplay it, is the greatest undoing that will mount in costs and consequences over time.
Once you cross sexual boundaries, everything else becomes blurry. A man is only comfortable moving into your house because he already moved into your body. If you kept sexual boundaries, some discussions would never even come up. Sexual intimacy manufactures fake closeness and it makes you feel like you're already an item. After all, what have you not done that married people do?
Naturally, the next thing is a child. Once you start getting children, that train has left the station. There's no going back. Even if you break up after that, things can never be the same. You can never fully get rid of someone from your life when you have a child with them. Especially if they want to participate in co-parenting. It will feel cruel to the child. And yet the perfect co-parenting arrangement makes moving on harder because men generally don't like to deal with a woman who has another man orbiting her life.
Men are generally wary of being cheated on by their wives with their exes and baby daddies. It is the easiest and most common weak link in marriages. In short, you may not see what's going on now but you're already on a slippery path. You're becoming known as that man's woman. Men are territorial and you'll get referred to as that man's ex-wife even if you were never legally married. African societies view cohabiting as marriage.
What must you do now? Step back immediately. Stop cohabiting and coupling. Restore boundaries and let the man show leadership and initiative, if at all he's ready and capable of marriage now. In all likelihood, he'll dodge and disappear. If he can't hold up his own life, how will he hold up a marriage of two? Believe it or not, you'll have dodged a bullet. You'll be free to move on and date more aligned people who are ready for marriage and responsibility.
