Hi,

I could do with some impartial advice about my relationship. This is very long so brace yourselves!
I am 30 years old and female, I have a great life with good friends, hobbies and a job I love. I live with my boyfriend of 10 years in a flat we are lucky enough to own in central London. I feel very grateful and fortunate for the life I get to live. So I feel a bit silly moaning about anything, but here goes.
My boyfriend and I got together at university when we were both 20. It started off as a bit of fun, which turned into lots of fun and a deep, emotional connection. We fell in love and stayed in love. We spent our twenties together having adventures and going through all the crappy jobs and shitty 20s stuff together. And having a great time! But as we were having so much fun in the ‘now’ we never bothered talking about the future. We never talked about anything like that at all. It felt taboo to bring anything like marriage and babies into a conversation (probably because we still had the mentality that we were in a university relationship – and you don’t talk about that stuff when you’re 20..) So over the years we just carried on together, quite happily to be fair. People around us started to get married about 5 years ago. It didn’t bother me at first as i felt they were very young. But then about 3 years ago my younger sister got engaged and two of our funniest friends got married. I think seeing these fun people go for it was a catalyst for me thinking it was something I was finally ready for. But I didn’t say anything to my boyfriend about the way I felt. Instead, I guess I just expected he would be feeling the same way. Except he wasn’t. So I spent the next year or so feeling more and more like getting married was something I wanted. That our relationship was perfect, so we should take it to the next level and so on. So I dropped hints, I talked generally around the subject with him but I never said anything to him directly about it. It felt like I couldn’t say anything direct now because that would ruin the ‘surprise’ if he proposed and that it wouldn’t be very romantic if we just had a sensible chat about it (I realise now how stupid this was and I should have said something direct 3 years ago). Instead I got more and more annoyed that he wasn’t taking my hints. I started taking out that frustration on him about stupid, little, unrelated things. Picking fights and generally being irritable with him because he wasn’t proposing. I guess at the time I didn’t realise I was doing it but he was definitely noticing the tension between us. We’ve never fought really, or have any kind of tension, so it suddenly made everything horrible between us. I kept feeling like ‘if only he’d just propose I’d stop feeling so angry at him’ and he must have felt so confused as to why I was behaving so cross at him. Finally after probably a year of NOT talking about it I finally exploded and just asked him outright why he didn’t want to marry me (not the best way to start such a conversation). We had a big chat about marriage, children and the future. Except it was mainly me crying on him and giving all the reasons why i wanted to get married, have kids etc. He didn’t really say anything – stunned into silence best describes it. At the time I went away feeling relieved I’d finally said something and convinced that, while I wouldn’t get that surprise proposal at least now he knew what I wanted and would do something about it. Except he didn’t. We just carried on as we had before. I didn’t mention it again for a few months as I was hoping he would take some action. But nothing happened. So the anger and frustration returned, along with the fights and irritability. I’d have occasional outbursts of crying where I would basically plead with him about it and he wouldn’t do anything. This lasted about a year, with me in an endless cycle of hope and then misery. But we still had moments of loveliness together and this just reaffirmed why I wanted to be with him. Finally in January this year I had enough of waiting. By then I was 30 and it was our 10 year anniversary (which I guess in my head was always a bit of a deal breaker milestone). I had become obsessed with us getting married and it was making me miserable. So I told him that if we didn’t get married then eventually we would have to split up as it was making me crazy. Finally this got him talking, he told me he didn’t like the idea of marriage (due to the idea that you’re buying a woman with an engagement ring or that she loses her identity etc – we both believe in equality and feminism so I do understand these concerns). Also he has issues that marriage is something society expects of you and that weddings are expensive and all the same. The thing is I know he doesn’t like to conform to what people expect or do but it hurt that he’d never expressed this antipathy to marriage to me before. He didn’t like the connotations of marriage either, the idea that you ‘settle down’ and essentially become boring and move to the suburbs. He also said he felt there were problems in our relationship he felt we needed to work on before he could commit to something as huge as marriage. And also that he wasn’t sure whether he wanted children or not. He said ‘I have everything I ever wanted right now, why would I want to change it’ as an explanation to his inaction. In response to my ultimatum he told me he knows he will lose me if we don’t get married and that he wants time to work on his issues and our relationship problems before we go further. The relationship problems he cites are ones I do agree with, like making more time to spend together on dates, more sex, communicating better and more honestly with each other, finding our shared interests and passions again. But one of the issues he cited is me being cross with him and picking fights. I have explained that this is out of the marriage frustration but I don’t think he believes me or that it will go away if we got married. I also think he worries it will happen again if there is something else I want in the future he doesn’t/can’t give me. I don’t know what to do about fixing this rift between us. Also the other big one is that I know I would like kids one day (not right now as I’m not ready) but he isn’t sure (and doesn’t want to marry me if he thinks we’ll disagree on something so fundamental in the future). I think he is scared about how life will change if we have kids. He loves our lifestyle at the moment. We do a lot of activities, like visiting museums, theatre, travelling, hanging out with friends, clubbing etc which feels very like we haven’t left our twenties. I’m not sure I’m ready to leave that lifestyle behind either as I love our life and I don’t want it to change. But I know if we had kids our lives would have to change in some ways as they would come first. So while I don’t ever want to become a boring person and stop my hobbies or cultural activities I know there are some things we would HAVE to stop (like partying etc) – which I worry he will resent me and future kids for. I worry that essentially we want different things and we are too afraid about losing each other to admit this. I worry he just wants to party forever and will never want to commit to me properly (by getting married) or start a family. I love him so much but it feels like there is an endless stream of reasons (or are they excuses?) from him about why we shouldn’t move forward in our relationship and get married. He feels that marriage isn’t important but a strong relationship is. But I think if we never got married I would always feel like we were never properly united together and it would destroy whatever strong relationship we had. I want us to bond and commit to each other in all the ways marriage means. And I want us to be seen by the world as a family or a unit (whether or not we have kids). I already feel our relationship is undervalued by people because we aren’t married (recently I was not invited to his childhood friend’s wedding as plus ones were only for married couples