Assessing The State Of Your Relationship
Things may start with the first date, but the next landmark comes when both of you say, "I love you" to each other.
If things progress after that, then moving in together comes next, with marriage as the ultimate goal.
It's that nebulous stage in between the first date and the "I love you" stage that often creates a lot of confusion.
Figuring out where you stand with your guy can be difficult, especially if you think that talking about it is awkward.
Asking a guy where you stand can actually be a relationship killer, simply because a lot of men don't want to think about such things.
Quite a lot of men prefer to take a relationship day by day, in much the same way that a major league baseball player talks about focusing on one game at a time.
Long term planning, especially at this early stage, may be premature.
One of the more common landmarks in the early stages of a relationship is the mutual decision to become exclusive.
Even if your man becomes uneasy talking about it because of the "romantic" implications, you can always use health and wellbeing as your reason.
If he is going to play around, he needs to be aware that he must tell you about it, at the very least to avoid getting nasty diseases.
Men tend to agree if you use logic instead of sentiment in your reasoning.
Besides, he may not also relish the thought of you with other men.
If he genuinely doesn't mind that you have sex with others, then perhaps exclusivity will never be in the cards for the both of you, no matter how long you have been going out.
Perhaps the most important thing to consider is that both of you should be on the same page regarding the stage of your relationship.
There is something terribly wrong if you have been basing career decisions on how it would affect your relationship (you gave up a major promotion because it meant you would have to relocate), and you suddenly find out that your guy simply regards you as a sex buddy.
That can be majorly traumatic, to say the least.
So make sure you communicate, that way, you will know where you stand.
Are you in an exclusive relationship? Where do you see yourself five years from now? You should at least have a common idea of what your relationship is and where it is going, or your relationship may be doomed.
Before you can fix anything, you need to know what's wrong, and you need a firm understanding of how things are before you go about figuring out how to mend a broken relationship.
Your man can also be actually waiting for a push from you to try and make your relationship work.
If that's the case, then you're in the driver's seat, and you can decide how fast you guys go, and where you're going to end up, eventually.