Reading the Signs When It’s Time for a Serious Commitment

Are you ready to take the leap? Are they?

Photo by freestocks on Unsplash

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I knew my partner was going to be the person I spent the rest of my life with about a year into our relationship. Things weren’t going well at work and I was having a really hard time adjusting to life in a new country. Fed up and at the end of my fuse, I returned from a lunch break one day to see a vase of flowers waiting for me on my desk.

“What’s this?”

My boss was sitting at the other end of the office, hammering away on his keyboard. His face was unreadable behind the huge computer screen, but there was a strange energy in the air.

“They’re for you,” he told me, hardly looking up. “They’re from your boyfriend.”

I was shocked I had never been sent flowers before, not from anyone that wasn’t family. That shocked magnified tenfold when my boss got up from his desk, walked around the edge and revealed even more.

“He called me too.”

“What?” My belly dropped.

“Yeah, he called me too. Had a pretty long talk with him. I gotta say, he really loves you a lot.”

At first, I was panicked. Having come from a family of volatile men, I could only imagine what embarrassing onslaught my partner had unleashed. My panic was soon transformed into incredible pride and softness, though, as my boss went on.

“You know, I’m really sorry for the way we’ve been pushing you around here. We’re going to sort things out and change the way things are setup. You’re right. Things need to go a little differently around here, and you need to give yourself a break. We’re going to make it happen, okay?”

I wanted to cry. In fact, I did cry. I felt like an enormous weight had been lifted off my shoulders.

Commitment has one sole purpose.

To this day, I don’t know what my partner said to my boss, but it remains one of the kindest things that anyone has ever done for me. Only a year into…