So here is the deal . . . I have been with my fiancé for about five and half years. We have been engaged since February 2008. We are very much in love, have a wonderful relationship, and I am confident that our relationship will last forever, we have been through a lot together many good and bad times, and I would not trade him for anything in this world. I count my blessings everyday and feel very lucky to have found a man that is so perfect for me at such a young age. I am twenty-three. My fiancé is twenty-nine, and will be turning thirty in February . . .
However, I am having some issues. For one, I am dying to get married . . . we have been together for what I feel is a long time, and I want to make things official. We have been living together for almost our entire relationship and I really want to be married. I imagined we would be married by now and us not being is really beginning to bother me. My parents were together for sixty years, but never officially married . . . I don’t want this to be me. I want to have children also, but I want to be married first. The problem with all this is we are completely and utterly broke. I have a decent job, that I got by the grace of God, however my fiancé does not have a reliable job . . . He works hard don’t get me wrong, right now he has two jobs but both of them pay minimum wage and together we are just getting by. We make enough money to pay all the bills and survive in between but we have absolutely no extra money, and debt that is not going away any time soon, based on us usually only paying the minimum payments. We have no health insurance, no savings etc. Just getting by.
I have accepted the fact that I will probably never have the wedding I have always wanted, and would be happy to have a small inexpensive but nice wedding, but we can’t even afford this . . .
The only wedding we could afford would be one at the courthouse, which neither of us wants.
My other major concern is that I want a child. I have always wanted to have a child and feel that both of us are mentally ready, we both want to have a child now, but again we are choosing not to because we don’t have any extra money, and we want to be married first.
I am having major issues with this. I love my fiancé, we consider ourselves married now, I have and plan to stick by him no matter what, through it all, but I get very discouraged when I think about our future . . . I am scared that we will struggle financially forever and therefore will never be able to fulfill the dreams we share of having a family together. All of this is swaying heavily on my mind. My fiancé will be thirty in a few months, and not that that is old, but he is getting to the age where if we are going to have children we shouldn’t wait much longer.
I am also scared we will not be able to conceive which also makes me anxious to try just to know. This year I had to go off of birth control for a while and we had unprotected sex for about six months and I did not become pregnant. I have since gone back on birth control but deep inside do not want to take it.
I am so confused about all of this.
Have any of you been in a similar situation?
Should we continue to do the responsible thing and wait it out? Wait until we can afford to get married and have children even if that means that it might all pass us by?
