My boyfriend sleeps on the couch while waiting for me to get home and he says he wanted to save the bed for both of us. Does this mean he is special?

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You’re asking whether it’s time to commit to him or not. The thing to realize here is that this question has no easy answer. Not for your particular case, not for any case.

A relationship is like a little country in which the only two people making the rules are the two people following them. To the extent that you’re in one, the rest of the world just kind of fades away. Nothing else can really matter as much as the time you spend with your SO.

A lot of single people never really grasp this, I’ve noticed. They go through boyfriends / girlfriends never really getting close to them. They don’t understand the mechanics of meeting someone else’s emotional needs or compromising for the health of a relationship.

Once they finally find a working, healthy relationship, the natural tendency is towards fear. It really is a whole new world. And once you get a taste of it, you never really want to go back to your old single life.

Single people are all looking for that special someone, but really it’s about the very love and commitment they’re afraid of. They think the solution lies in that other person, that if they could just find the right person that they’re perfectly compatible with then they can finally open up. And to a certain extent that’s true.

But the real thing that matters here is the single person’s readiness for a relationship. It doesn’t happen all at once, you have to work on it. It takes time to learn how to dance.

The thing I’ve learned that’s the most helpful, as someone who is extremely serious about wanting a relationship, is that you need to have a dance partner in order to learn properly. Even if this person turns out to not be the one, it’s still worth going through the exercise of working your emotional muscles and figuring out how to negotiate the perils and pitfalls.