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Dear Carolyn • Bit of an introvert here, all tuckered out from wedding season. My friends mainly got married one to three years ago, so we're now onto attending the weddings of my boyfriend's closest friends.

We fight at every other wedding, triggered by a combination of too much wine and my own impatience about not being engaged yet.

At the next wedding we attend, I'm going to try sticking to soda to see if that helps, but the real problem is the impatience. Is there something wrong with me/my relationship if this is happening to us? We love each other and get along in other settings, but on days designated to celebrate the progress of other people's relationships, I just find myself a lot more vulnerable to petty annoyances, and then things unravel.

Anonymous

Dear Anonymous • "My own impatience about not being engaged yet": So, what's this about? Boyfriend not as into you as you are into him? You're more hung up on checking the box than you are on the person Boyfriend is, and Boyfriend on some level recognizes this? Boyfriend can't even settle on which socks to wear without naming a blue-ribbon panel to weigh in on his options? (You fill in the blank)?

There's an underlying something here; couples of long-enough standing who are suited to each other and mature enough to enter into a declared commitment to each other tend to do just that, so when they don't, it usually means they're not suited to each other, not mature enough, or some blend of both.

For what it's worth, the drinking and brawling say you're not quite up to the "marriage-ready" hash mark on the maturity stick, but it also sounds as if there's more to it than that.

Plus, I wonder whether you've actually just talked about it in a non-charged setting, and, if you have, why one or both of you isn't accepting the outcome of that talk as your current reality. "Fighting" is really just a nickname for an attempt to renegotiate what you already know is the truth but don't want to accept.

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