Search Results: love being single

I have two friends: both are 40, have chosen the single life for years. One is a guy, he was friends with a girl in her early 30’s for a year and dated her casually for a year before he finally decided she was the one and asked her to be his girlfriend. After one year of seriously dating, he proposed marriage at Christmas. They married two months later. He’s a guy, we’ll call him Ryan. Him taking his time is fine.

The other friend is a woman (we’ll call her Tara), she’s been “seeing” a guy (also 40) for at least 9 months. They haven’t labeled it yet, every time I ask her when she’s labeling the relationship she always says “we’re taking our time with it, keeping it casual and just being friends first”. I love Tara, but she’s out of her freakin mind. I demanded my boyfriend to define the relationship after 5 months. Tara does want this guy, but she just lives in her own little shell and won’t demand what she wants. She just sits back lets things happen and says she wants him to define it in his own time (I told her drop his ass if he doesn’t define it at the end of this month).

It’s fine that Ryan took his time. He’s a guy and it’s more socially accepted for him to put off relationships and marriage. For women I don’t understand it though. I feel like when we go that route, we get used, we get our time wasted and we get hurt. I think Tara is making a huge mistake, but my boyfriend says she’s not. What if she defines the relationship and then decides she doesn’t like him after all (that’s his logic). Maybe because I’m also dying to matchmake her and there’s a friend of my bf’s who I want her to meet (because he’s dying to date her and I think they’re perfect for each other).

She won’t butt out. At first I took it as “okay, she means well”, but now I don’t know. I took a long break from dating and was fine just being single, and she says “nope, you’re 40 now and you’ve been single too long. You need a man in your life. Since you’re friends with me you’re getting a man whether you want one or not” (she loves to matchmake). I realize she has a point, so I get on Facebook dating. She saw me on the apps one day at lunchtime (we work together) and she’s telling me who to swipe right on, who to swipe left on, etc and when I didn’t swipe right on a guy she told me too, she literally took my phone out of my hand and swiped on a whole bunch of guys because I (according to her) “clearly don’t know how to pick men”. Eventually I did match with a guy who I really liked, we’ve been dating for almost a year, and she doesn’t like him. Apparently she’s got someone all picked out who she wants to fix me up with (who’s a really nice guy and financially well off but I’m not attracted to him). The guy understands and said it’s fine but she won’t stop and says “this guy’s perfect for you, and your boyfriend’s a loser. Dump him and give this other guy a chance.” (The guy is definitely loaded and my boyfriend supports himself well, but he treats me well and we make each other happy).

she’s gotten to the point where she’s literally taken my phone out of my hand and texted my boyfriend from my phone making really ridiculous demands on him (like demanding he get me a Louis Vuitton bag for my birthday which I know he can’t afford). She’s caused some bad fights between us this way.

I’ve tried telling her to butt out but she doesn’t. She’s dating a guy who is 25 years older than us and is trying to push me to date much older as well. My boyfriend is early 40’s, like me. Nothing wrong with dating older men, but if I’m happy why can’t she just butt out?