Dear Prudence,
I’ve been with my partner for four years now. I’m 26, and he’s 29. Everything was very easy right from the start, and we went from “dating” to “settling down together” quite quickly. We communicate well, compromise easily, bicker occasionally, and are happy living together. Our relationship is not passionate—we’re more like an old married couple. We’ve started talking more seriously about marriage and kids, and I’m anxious. According to my friends and a lot of books and movies, there seems to be something about love I haven’t experienced. I love my partner, but I don’t have that feeling of urgency I’ve heard other people describe as love, and neither does he. (We talk about everything.)
He says he is perfectly happy as we are. I had a meltdown about this last year, and he was very supportive, even suggesting I move away and try out “a new life” for a few months before reconnecting. This offer meant a lot to me, even though I would not have taken him up on it.
Friends talk about when they “knew” they were going to commit to their partner, how they can’t imagine themselves with anyone else. But I don’t know, and I can imagine. I don’t want to leave. Just the thought makes me cry immediately. But what if there’s something more, that neither of us have experienced, but we’re keeping each other from finding? Then again, what if there isn’t and I throw away a perfectly happy existence in pursuit of a fiction?
—Unready