How to force myself to stop obsessing over marriage and...

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Motherhood?

More specifically, stop obsessing over marriage and motherhood ambivalance?

I cannot make up my mind about any of these things and it's just dragging me down!! !

And now that I am actually engaged I MUST make that big choice about whether to get married or not!

Please help me overcome this!

Toss a coin !

(Oh...and isn't ambivalance a reversible bedspread?)

Wait, I'm confused, I thought agreeing to be engaged was agreeing to be married?

Anyway, when it comes to difficult decisions there's lots of options. You can weigh the pros and cons. You can try using techniques like motivational interviewing to see if you actually want the things you're over-thinking or if you're simply trying to please your partner. A therapist would probably be able to help better than we can there. As Carbonhalo suggests you could just leave things to chance. If you want to not think about these things entirely I've found that redirecting myself to think about a special interest instead can sometimes help. It might not work for everyone.

But I completely understand being on the fence when it comes to marriage and children. To me: sometimes they seem like really amazing ideas and something I want...and other times they're an overwhelming change that seems like too much.

Have you talked over your concerns with David? What are you most afraid of?

Yes, that's the whole point of getting engaged, otherwise there wouldn't be any engagement, you'd just immediately go to the justice of the peace or one of those chapels and get hitched. Often times there's rules in place to enforce some sort of minimum waiting period to try and avoid people getting drunk and then married.

So an engagement is an agreement to think about getting married? I thought it was like a planning period after you already agreed. Especially since weddings are often a whole big event and people want family and friends there. That wouldn't be possible without at least a few weeks of planning and the need to announce plans for marriage in the first place.

Sorry to get off topic, Mikurotoro, but I'm curious about how this all works.

In Western culture there's no formal definition of engagement. People used to sit for engagement photos and publish them in the newspaper. If you did that, you'd be taken seriously.

Nowadays, you aren't formally committed to marriage unless you've planned a wedding, and sent invitations. But of course you can always just get married whenever the mood strikes at City Hall or a wedding chapel in places where they have those.

Having said that, I'll also add that nobody should feel totally obligated to get married. I guess you could be perfectly happy just being engaged.

An engagement is a promise to get married and it usually includes a sense of what the time-frame is. The only real commitment at that point that you don't have with "going steady" is that there tend to be contracts signed for services related to the wedding that can be hard to get out of and depending on how far you are into it, there can be reputational damage from backing out. Up to the point where you're literally being asked if you marry them, you can back out at any time.

It seems like this is your mind telling you that you moved too quickly towards engagement.

I think just recognizing that you're having those thoughts and let them pass through is probably the only thing that people can really do from a practical standpoint. The more you try to stop those thoughts, the worse it gets. This isn't really that much different from intrusive thoughts.