He was 3,000 miles away these signs told me he wanted to marry me

He was 3,000 miles away these signs told me he wanted to marry me

The video call froze on his face. Not on a grand declaration or a romantic moment just him, mid-sentence, talking about his lease renewal. "I told them I might need a two-bedroom," he said. "You know. For when you visit. Or if you ever..."

He didn't finish. The screen pixelated. When it cleared, he was looking at me with an expression I couldn't name yet. I felt something shift in my chest, like a door opening to a room I hadn't known was there. That was the first time I thought: this might be real.

I had read every article about signs he wants to marry you in a long distance relationship. I was skeptical of all of them.

Lists feel like fiction when you're staring at a phone screen at midnight, wondering if the person on the other end is actually thinking about you or just passing time.

But that frozen frame his unfinished sentence about space, about us having space stuck with me. It wasn't on any list I'd seen. It was too specific, too ordinary.

That's when I started paying attention to what was actually happening instead of what I was afraid wasn't.

How we ended up long distance

We met in person. That's important to say, because so many people assume long distance relationships that work started online, built on fantasy. We had eight months in the same city.

Coffee shops where we left lipstick on the same mug. A park bench that still feels like ours in my memory. Then his company transferred him to London, and I had a contract in Chicago that I couldn't break. We decided to try. I didn't expect it to last.

The first six months were performance art. We sent photos of our meals. We watched movies "together" by pressing play at the same time.

I smiled in every selfie, angled the camera to catch good light, tried to be the person worth flying across an ocean for. He did the same.

We were both acting, and we both knew it, and neither of us said anything because saying it might make it true.

Then the acting stopped. I don't know exactly when. Maybe when I got food poisoning and called him at 4 AM his time, and he stayed on the line while I cried in a bathroom tile floor, not trying to fix it, just breathing on the other end.

Maybe when he admitted he'd been skipping meals because he didn't see the point of cooking for one. The facade cracked. What was underneath was messier. It was also real.

The first sign I noticed

He started sending me pictures of apartments.

Not decorated ones. Not "look how nice this is" photos. Empty rooms. Narrow hallways. Kitchens with bad lighting. "This one has a guest room," he'd text.

"You could work here if you visited during the week." Or: "The landlord allows pets. Do you still want a dog?"

I didn't know how to respond. We had never discussed me moving. We had never discussed him moving back. The conversations about our future existed in a carefully maintained vagueness "someday," "we'll figure it out," "when we're in the same place."

These apartment photos were specific. They required me to be specific in return.

I asked him once, directly, why he was looking at two-bedrooms. He was quiet for a moment.

"Because I'm tired of pretending this is temporary," he said. "I'm looking for a place that has room for you. Even if you're not there yet."

That was the first concrete sign he wants to marry you in a long distance relationship that I couldn't explain away as wishful thinking.

He was spending money application fees, deposits on a future he wasn't sure I'd join. He was building something with a door left open.

Signs I almost missed

The subtle ones came next. They were easy to dismiss, especially when I was feeling insecure. I almost missed them because they didn't look like the grand gestures I thought commitment required.

When he started talking about "we" instead of "I"

It happened in small moments. A friend would ask about his weekend plans. "We're just laying low," he'd say, even though I was thousands of miles away and we had no concrete plans to talk, let alone do anything together.

His mother asked if he was coming home for Christmas. "We're still figuring it out," he said. I wasn't in the room. I heard this secondhand, later, when he mentioned it casually.

I noticed it most when he talked about hard things. His job was stressful. He was considering a change, maybe a different field entirely.

"I don't want to make this decision alone," he told me. "It affects us both." I hadn't asked to be included. I hadn't positioned myself as someone whose opinion mattered for his career.

He just... put me there. Assumed I was staying. Assumed I wanted to be part of it.

This is one of the subtle signs he wants to marry you that no list prepared me for. It wasn't a conversation about marriage.

It was the grammatical shift from singular to plural. It was him deciding, without announcement, that we were a unit now.

When he included me in his future plans without me asking

His sister got engaged. He called me immediately, not to tell me the news we could have texted but to ask if I thought we should fly out together for the wedding.

"I can book the tickets," he said. "If you want to come. As my..." He paused. "As my person."

I went. I met his extended family. His grandmother asked when we were getting married, and he didn't laugh it off. He said, "We're getting there."

Just like that. Like it was a destination on a map we'd both been studying.

After that trip, he started mentioning things further out. A friend's wedding the following summer. "We should go together."

A conference in Berlin. "We could make a vacation of it." He was painting a future in watercolor, soft edges, easy to step into. He never asked me to confirm I saw it too. He just kept painting.

How long does it take for a man to realize he wants to marry you?

I can't give you a timeline that will match yours. I can only tell you what happened to us, and hope it helps you recognize your own pattern.

For him, I think the realization was gradual. Month four of the distance, he started calling more often. Not longer calls actually shorter ones, but more frequent. Checking in.

Good mornings. Good nights. He wanted to maintain connection without the pressure of performance.

Month seven, he asked about my finances. Not in a controlling way. He was researching visa options, just casually, just "in case," and wanted to know what my flexibility looked like.

If I could work remotely. If I wanted to. I remember being surprised that he'd thought that far ahead without me prompting him.

Month ten, he told his landlord he wouldn't renew. He didn't have another place lined up. He told me later it was because he couldn't imagine signing another year-long lease that didn't include a plan for us to be together.

He was willing to be homeless, essentially, rather than commit to another year of distance without movement.

Month twelve, I found a book on his nightstand during a visit a guide to how to know if a man truly loves you in a long distance relationship.

I teased him about it. He turned red. "I wanted to make sure I was doing this right," he said. "I don't want to lose you because I didn't know how to show you."

I had been reading too, honestly. During the hard months, when I couldn't tell if his silence meant he was busy or drifting away, I researched. I found resources about male commitment patterns, about the psychology of why men pull away or lean in.

One program that helped me understand his behavior the way he processed decisions differently than I did, the way he needed to feel like a provider even from a distance was something called his secret obsession It wasn't magic. It was just... perspective.

It helped me stop interpreting his quiet moments as lack of interest, and start seeing them as processing time. That shift saved us during month six, when I would have otherwise panicked and pushed him away.

So to answer the question directly: how long does it take for a man to realize he wants to marry you? For him, about ten months to know.

About fourteen to say it out loud. About eighteen to actually ask. The signs were there the whole time, but I had to learn to read them in his language, not mine.

When I knew for sure

It wasn't the proposal. That came later, on a bridge in Prague, and it was lovely, but it wasn't the moment of certainty.

The moment was six weeks before. I was visiting, and I got sick not dramatic sick, just a cold, the kind that makes you stuffy and pathetic. I was embarrassed.

I had flown across an ocean to see him, and I was spending our limited time blowing my nose and falling asleep on his couch. I kept apologizing. He kept telling me to stop.

On the third day, I woke up from a nap to find him sitting on the floor next to the couch, laptop open, working. "Why aren't you at your desk?"

I asked. He looked at me like I was missing something obvious. "In case you needed water," he said. "Or tissues. Or just to know I was here."

That was it. That was the signs he wants a serious relationship with you made flesh. He wasn't trying to impress me. I was disgusting, honestly, mouth-breathing and puffy-eyed.

He had taken a day off work to sit on a floor and make sure I had tissues. He had rearranged his life around my minor inconvenience, not because it was fun or romantic, but because that's what you do when you've already decided someone is yours to care for.

I cried. He thought it was the cold medicine. I didn't correct him. I just lay there, watching him type with one hand and hold my foot with the other, and I knew. I absolutely knew.

We live in the same city now. It took another eight months after that moment to make the logistics work visa applications, job searches, the boring machinery of merging two lives. We're married. Have been for two years.

I still think about that frozen video call sometimes. The unfinished sentence. The pixelated expression I couldn't read.

I think about how I wanted lists and guarantees, and what I got instead was a man who looked at empty rooms and imagined me in them.

Who learned to say "we" before I was ready to hear it. Who sat on a floor with a laptop so I wouldn't be alone.

If you're looking for 6 clear signs he wants to marry you, I could list them now. I know them by heart. But what I really want to tell you is this: the signs that matter won't look like signs. They'll look like small, specific, ordinary moments of someone choosing you, over and over, without fanfare.

They'll look like lease renewals and grammatical shifts and tissues on a nightstand.

Trust those more than you trust the lists. And if you're struggling to read the signs in your own relationship, if you're stuck in the spiral of "what does this mean" and "does he really care," I get it. I was there.