Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
Church. That's it. Otherwise you should expect that waiting for engagement/marriage will weird a woman out and make her concerned about your sexual compatibility.
The advice I gave on "getting a life" as a distinct skill that needs to be considered and practiced is the most important thing. Xenophon's Socrates speaks often of the art of making friends (and of making good friends) as the most important of the arts, and he's right. It will serve you with women, but it will also improve everything else about your life. You will get a great deal for yourself out of it, and you'll also get the satisfaction of altruism. Once you let go of your hangups about it being a skill, you can apply yourself to it with the diligence people use to learn to code, and you'll likely find that the people around you are excited to have someone with that skill in their lives. 28 is a fine age to start, you can learn faster than a younger man. But you have to be pragmatic, reflective, and focused on improvement, just as with any other skill.
I appreciate your advice, I just have to comment on the sexual compatibility thing. Where the hell did that line even come from? It feels like an excuse to have a ton of sex before you get married. If you hadn't had any sex before getting married, wouldn't you both just figure it out with each other and there wouldn't be such a thing as compatibility? The modern world is kind of fucked up. I was surprised to learn in high school that even the preppy valedictorian had sucked at least one dick, and this is in a rural area. I'm pretty sure she was religious, too.
I'm gonna necro this a bit (I mean, it's only been a week) to say, as someone in a 10 year relationship getting married in a few months, sexual compatibility is a huge deal. There are people who, after the initial honeymoon phase of a relationship ends (2-8 years or before first kid), will want to have sex 3-5 times a year. There are people who want to have sex once a day. There are people who prefer a more reasonable 3-5 times a week. There are people who are only interested in sex when they are in a good mood and after substantial foreplay. There are people for whom sticking it in is the foreplay. There are people whose sexual interests are dominated by one or more very specific paraphilias. There are people who just don't like sex and are only doing it because they don't want to be alone. There are people who don't give a shit about any of this and enjoy sex but experience no real FOMO or distress when they don't have it for long periods of time.
There are gender distributions to this traits, but none of the groups I mentioned are smaller than 10% of the population. People vary extremely wildly on this dimension. Unless you're one of the take it or leave its, you need to be on the same page about this to have a marriage-length relationship. That doesn't mean having sex before marriage, but it does mean talking about the subject in more detail than a lot of people are comfortable with. "Figure it out with each other" is a strategy that works maybe 50% of the time, and the other 50% either dooms you to eventual divorce or one or both parties perpetually being unsatisfied with whatever compromise you end up with.
I have been doing some more thinking, and I think the "no sex before marriage" thing was predicated on a lot of things: that people got married really early on, that parents could much more closely watch their kids to ensure nothing bad happened, and that they could not easily get divorced. I think evangelical Christianity misses some of the nuances, and unfortunately, male evolutionary psychology also doesn't appreciate that people tend to have more sexual relationships now, on average.
Yeah, that probably describes me. Thanks for writing this, helps me feel more normal. I've been thinking about sex a lot more lately now that getting married seems possible for me, but I do still want it to only happen with someone I'm fairly serious with. I just don't know how long I should wait once the relationship starts, or how long the particular woman will tolerate.
At the end of the day, getting married is a leap of trust. Some people figure out they are aligned in values and take the plunge early, trusting in mutual commitment to make it work. Others move as slowly as my fiancee and I did, and the official commitment is just recognition of a trust and commitment that already exists. At the end of the day, all you need to figure out is when you reach the point that you believe the two of you are on the same page about what a life together should look like, and how much you are willing to work and compromise in order to bring that dream into reality. The appropriate timeline for you will be greatly dependent on the potential spouse you are considering. Don't think about when you need to leap into bed as an answer you need to have worked out, but as a chance to build or test that level of trust and communication you need to develop to make a marriage work. If you wait too long and she dips because of it without giving you a chance to fix the issue, well, marriage wouldn't have worked out anyway.
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Well, for instance, from a male perspective, some women can orgasm easily, some it's yeoman's work to get them there if they even can. Some women love giving head, some will never enjoy it. Some women have a death-by-dehydration sex drive and some have a big fat zero. I'm sure they have similar questions about us. It might seem nice to say that you'll just figure it out (figuring out a woman in bed is also a skill that can be learned), but you're basically rolling dice on not ending up in an /r/deadbedrooms situation.
Based off the testimony of friends, I do think that religious courtship, where you're expected to be overwhelmingly horny for each other but restrain it out of belief in moral duty, can establish that without going all the way. However, if you're doing it out of hangups over sex, she has a pretty good reason to suspect something might turn out wrong, and women are extremely risk-avoidant in these things for obvious evolutionary and pragmatic reasons.
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There's forms of incompatibility that are just 'figure it out' and whatever you get, you get and that becomes your expectations. There's also forms of incompatibility that have massive mismatches in desire that don't care what each partner's expectations are, or where one partner has such limited desire that it's obvious to anyone who can look at other families and do math, so on. And then there's forms where a couple literally can't have penetrative sex to completion, either because the guy's pushing rope the entire time, the woman's gone to such an extreme level of vaginismus that no level of stretching is going to solve the problem without blood, or one person's only comfortable position is another person's snapped frenulum (you don't want to know).
Worse, there's a reason deadbedrooms is such a horror show, and it's not because I think anyone's going to die from blue balls (blue ovaries?). Even the traditional right-hand rule solution to the biological problem can leave the other partner wildly demoralized, and the bonding that most people get from sexual behavior papers over a lot of things that would be extremely frustrating in a roommate or a long-term guess.
There probably are alternative solutions to this problem, but very few of them are compatible with social conservative interests (even those used historically!), and many of them have other downsides.
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