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The original was posted on /r/tifu by /u/GiantLemonade on 2024-10-03 19:48:03+00:00.

My girlfriend (20F) and I (21M) have been together since I was 15 and she was 14. We have an excellent relationship, we’ve only had about four arguments in six years, and none of them were serious. I have no doubt she’s the woman of my life.

Here’s how the problem started: for some years, I’ve seen many women complaining about how frustrating it is to be a girlfriend for a long time. For example, some say “I’ve been with the same man for 9 years and I’m still just a girlfriend” and how uncomfortable they feel in that situation. I understand how bad that can be, and I wanted my girlfriend to know I take our relationship seriously. At the same time I’m far from being financially stable enough to get married, so my solution was this: I would propose now, but we’d get married in about five years. That way we could tell people we’re engaged, and she wouldn’t have to be a girlfriend for 11 years before becoming a fiancée.

We’re on vacation now, and yesterday I proposed to her. She was extremely happy, cried a lot, and I was happy and cried too. But when we got back to the hotel, she asked me how I wanted the wedding to be. I told her “I don’t think it’s worth planning the wedding now since we’re only getting married in about five years.” She instantly got sad and went to the bathroom for a few minutes. I apologized to her, but she was not talking to me (when she’s extremely sad she usually stays completely silent). After some time she said she wanted to talk about it on Friday, that it was okay, and she wanted to enjoy the rest of our vacation.

It’s clearly not okay I shouldn’t have done this. I thought she would be happy and understand my point of view (which we still haven’t talked about yet because I’m respecting her space), but now I think I tried to fix a problem that didn’t exist and ended up hurting her. Looking back she never complained about being a girlfriend for six years, I don’t know why I thought this was necessary.

TL;DR: I asked my girlfriend to marry me but I only wanted to get married in 5 years and I ended up hurting her feelings.