The Queue Dilemma

So, I’ve sat on this post for about a week now as it is something quite personal and ongoing for me, but it wouldn’t be a blog unless I was honest. So today I want to discuss with the dilemma of the queue.

Imagine being in a relationship is being in a queue, and the destination is marriage, children, living together, happily ever after, whatever you want it to be. When you start a relationship, you join the queue to see where it goes…

Sometime after a very short time you choose to leave the queue as you realise you don’t want to journey to that destination anymore with that person and you find a new queue.

Imagine you’ve been in the queue for 2 years, that’s a long period of time. You’re now invested in the queue… to leave would mean to give it all up and start again when you could be so close to the destination. The issue is we don’t know how long the queue is… We don’t know how long before the house, the marriage, the kids the ‘whatever’ happens. If we were two years in, and were told the queue would be another 10 years would we stay? Probably not. Most of us just don’t want to wait that long. But what if it was 2.5 years… maybe we would.

That’s the difficulty I have found myself in, I’m 2 years into the queue. Generally, my partner (aged 38) and I get on well, we’ve spoken about buying a house together and getting married etc. But there has been no progress, nothing concrete to allow me to believe things are going in that direction.

He has a past history of being bad with money and being unable to save which is a worry of mine and we have weathered the storm of him drinking to excess and the fall out of that, I’ve stood by him through losing two jobs – one his fault and one contract ending, as well as his two children from a previous relationship. Then there’s been COVID. We were living together up till then, but since then he’s moved back to his parents as there is literally nothing for him to do here. His father has managed to give him cash in hand work fixing up tractors, and he’s decided he wants to do his HGV but the test centres are still closed due to COVID and frankly everything’s come to a grinding halt.

I see him infrequently maybe twice a week and seemingly to me, when he feels like it (often cancelling at short notice) He tells me he needs to earn money which I appreciate but I feel left and neglected in the meantime. He has been here 3 night since my surgery one of those in a low mood where he napped for three hours of the day.

So, it leaves me, plus my body clock ticking on by about to be 35, wondering if I should stay in the queue on the hope that a future will come true.