[cyang1208]

Hi Everyone,
I hope to get some help on one issue in my relationship. Here goes…
Me and my boyfriend have been together for two years (tomorrow actually). We spend healthy amount of time together, but I feel I want to spend every possible moment with him. By “possible”, I mean whenever we don’t have to work or go out with our own friends. We are at the point in our relationship where we already know that we are going to get married (ie we have plenty of talks about our wedding day including details of where and possibly when). We constantly talk about living together (for me to move in with him), but since my parents are highly conservative being asian christians, we can’t live together without tying the knot first. But we’ve both said to each other various times that we should just live together already. At separate times, we’ve even suggested to each other going to register at city hall for marriage liscence and move in the next day. So there’s no problem there (ex. committment issue). Given that backgroung, my biggest question is shouldn’t we be spending all our “free” evenings together? Like tonight, he’s not working and I’m not working either, but he hasn’t asked me to go over to his place. And we both don’t have committment to friends or other plans. I mean, it’s not like we live in different cities. We live only 15min apart. And I don’t mean that when I head over I want us to be all over each other or have a “date” night, merely I just want to hang out with him.
Pls help me with this issue, since I’m so conflicted that I don’t want to come right out and ask him if he thinks it’s weird that we are not hanging out tonight eventhough we’ll both be at home by ourselves and we don’t live far away from each other. I don’t want to sound clingy. Am I too clingy? Am I asking too much since he’s a man and he may no feel the necessity to hang out all the time?
Thanks:)

[Ask April Masini]

You’ve asked a good question because you’re basically wanting to know what your relationship is going to look like when you get married. Will you spend all your free time together? SHOULD you spend all your free time together? What does time apart mean to the relationship? These are all excellent questions to answer now, before you’re married.

The answer is that the amount of your free time spent together is [i]a mutual compromise [/i]that encompasses his needs and your needs. For some couples, spending only one night a week together, if that much, is normal and works in a successful relationship for them. For other couples, spending every waking minute together is normal and works in a successful relationship for them. You and your boyfriend need to figure out through trial and error (and bumps in the road!) what works for you. If you’d like a little more time together, and you’re in a committed relationship heading for marriage, there’s no reason you can’t invite him to hang out or have dinner or do something with you on your mutual free time. That said, if he wants alone time or time with the guys or his family, this doesn’t necessarily mean your relationship is doomed. It means you have different needs.

So you’re not correct that just because you both have free time you should be spending it together, but you are correct in asking him if he’d like to spend some of his free time with you because that’s what you’d like.

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