If you've been dating someone for some time, you may be deliberatin over how to define the relationship (DTR). You like that person, see them often, communicate with them, and have gotten to know who they are while you've dated them. The thing is, DTR-ing takes courage, and it's something you may want to plan out, at least a little bit. It's important to communicate your thoughts and feelings, so if you want to define the relationship into, well, a relationship, that's a conversation worth having.
It's all too easy to date someone and think you're supposed to play this game where you both never share what you're feeling. It's like, who can act the least interested while simultaneously making the other person super interested in you for the longest? The "game" or whatever it is is not worth it. It's so much better to put your feelings on the line, find out if the other person is on the same page as you or not, and be with them or move on. So if you've been dating someone and you want to officially be with them, here's how you define the relationship.
Make sure you've gotten to know the person first.
Giphy
If you DTR too soon, you may be committing to someone you don't fully know quite yet, and that could lead to possible fundamental arguments or disagreements, like politics, religion, or where you see the relationship going down the line.
But if you've gotten to know the person well enough and are communicating often, it may be time to have that conversation with them.
"Once you’ve got a strong connection, are talking and texting daily, it’s a good time to let the person know you’re enjoying the direction your relationship is going in," online dating expert Julie Spira told Elite Daily.
Open the conversation on the right not that you want to begin the conversation with an opener that won't set off alarms in that person's head. Melamed offers phrases like "I just love spending time with you," and "I feel so lucky that we have had this time to get to know each other" get the conversation off to the right foot, as opposed to something like "We need to talk," which can be kind of ominous.
"The anxiety bells might not be going off because the person is a commitment-phobe," Melamed said. "It's just that... most people will engage with conversation over confrontation any day of the week."
Literally define the relationship.
Giphy
When having the conversation, lay out what you would want your relationship to look like. Beyond saying that you'd like to be committed to that person, really explain what that means to you.
"Getting a sense of what they are looking for, talking about future hopes and dreams, where they see themselves, how they would like to spend their days, what they want to do in their free time, how they relate to their family ... is a great information-gathering exercise,"
Be clear about what you
Too often, we brush aside what we want in our dating lives in order to keep the status quo. If you like dating someone, and you're scared telling them you like them may scare them away, you're only hurting yourself from getting what you actually want: something more with that person.
If the other person has indicated they want a relationship, that could give you confidence to have a DTR conversation. If they've explicitly said they want to date around, maybe it's time to focus on other people to date.
"The number one thing I wish people would do is really listen to what's happening and what [their partner] is saying, not hearing what they want to hear," licensed marriage and family therapist Nicole Richardson told Elite Daily. "A lot of times, we hear what we want to hear and we see what we want to see, and that's when we get hurt."
Once you've laid down your thoughts and feelings for the other person, you see what they have to say. Then you take it from there. You'll either have a relation Married? '
Selling Sunset fans may think they know when Mary Fitzgerald and Romain Bonnet got married, but it turns out they're — uh, how do I put this gently? — wrong. While the show made it appear as though the two tied the knot recently, they actually got married over a year before the televised ceremony took place. That said, the pair still view their televised nuptials as their real wedding. "In their minds, they weren’t properly married until the wedding that was filmed during the show," a rep for the couple reportedly told multiple publications, including Entertainment Tonight and People,
And don't feel too left out because their friends and family apparently weren't even in on the secret. "Mary and Romain had a civil union a couple of months before the show began filming in June of 2018, but they chose not to tell any of their friends or family, as they were still trying to see if their relationship would work out in the long term," the rep explained.
Per Entertainment Tonight, "their televised wedding took place in Los Angeles in October 2019." But according to the marriage license reporters at were reportedly able to get their hands on, the couple actually got married 19 months prior on March 9, 2018 at the Ventura Courthouse.
This means that when viewers first watched Bonnet propose to Fitzgerald during the first season of Selling Sunset, which premiered in the two were actually already married. Same obviously goes for when fans watched them plan their wedding during the second season, which came out in
I guess that's showbiz.
Fitzgerald gushed about her televised wedding during a May interview with People. "It was our dream wedding," she told People on "Neither of us are big, showy kind of people, and we just wanted the people closest to us, where it just felt sincere and comfortable. So that's what we did."
Next on the couple's agenda is children. During an interview with Entertainment Tonight, Fitzgerald revealed the two have even taken some measures that weren't featured on the show. "We went to a fertility clinic. I got everything checked, and we filmed actually me doing all of that, it just didn't make it on the show," she shared. "I'm good to go, I just time. So I'm working on that."
Honestly, who cares when they officially got married? All I care about is that they're happy and in love, which they definitely seem to be.
Dating is love