ANyone else think that long engagements are silly?

Along the lines of the sex before marriage and living with each other before marriage threads…

“Hi, I’m John and this is my fiancee Suzie.”
“Pleasure to meet you, when is the big day?”
“Oh, we haven’t set one yet, maybe in a year or two…”

Does anyone else think this is silliness? I am of the belief that if you are engaged you should be making plans for the wedding. IMHO, one year is about the longest people should wait. If you aren’t ready to get married within a year of making that commitment, then you should stay boyfriend/girlfriend. Otherwise you are making a joke of the situation, using the term ‘engagement’ as some sort of ligitimizing title. As if being ‘engaged’ makes you a more committed couple than other LTR’s. Without a date in mind, you are posing as a ‘committed’ couple who really aren’t ready to commit.

What are the reasons to propose but not carry-through with it? Do people think their friends/family will accept them more because they are engaged? Has engagement turned into the ‘next step’ above dating, thus its definition should be changed?

I can understand certain circumstances like military, medical, school or work getting in the way of planning a wedding. But that is not the same as what I’m talking about. If someone says “We are engaged to be married 3 months after she gets back from the war.” That is setting a date and is a commitment. I’m talking mainly about the folks who use it as a waiting room for their relationship.

I am guilty of this myself. I was engaged 3 times, the first 2 as a blahblahblah thing above dating and ultimately failed (thank God!), the final one was 5 months from “Will you?” to “I do.” That has led me to believe that if you are serious about the institute of marriage, then you should put up or shut up.

-Tcat

I agree with you, but I have to admit I found it rather annoying when I told people I had just gotten engaged and the first question out of their mouth was, “so, when’s the big day?” It took us about a month before we could nail down an exact day, due to various family and work conflicts, and the “when’s the big day” question got real old, real fast.

So yes, I agree that if people are going to officially become engaged they should be thinking of an actual date. At the same time, though, I think their friends and family should just say “congratulations” and not pester the engaged couple for a timeline.

Regards,

Barry (proposed in October, married the following April, thank you very much)

I say this nicely, honestly.

Just because you don’t know the reasons for the delay doesn’t mean the couple lacks commitment.

In my situation, I have a problem with the IRS thanks to my ex-husband. If my fiance and I married now, the IRS would regard the future Mr. Contrary’s assets as mine. And they would become even greedier and more rapacious than they already are.

As things stand, I will probably find out by the end of July whether a petition I have submitted is accepted or rejected. If it is rejected, then it will be almost another year before my case is concluded (so says my accountant/attorney, based on the length of time this sort of thing takes). That means we will have been engaged at least a year and a half before we can consider getting married.

I don’t think we could show much more commitment to each other than we do now. And I’m glad he did ask me to marry him even though the wait may be long.

Believe me, we would love to get married in October (we’ve set a tentative date in hopes of a favorable resolution). However, I have not yet seen the IRS behave in a reasonable way so I am preparing myself for the very strong possibility that we will not be getting married until about this time next year.

<sigh>

Well, in some areas the traditional wedding venues tend to book up way, way in advance…sometimes two years or more. It can take while to find a date when the stuff you want is available that’s also during the season you want for your wedding. These probably aren’t the same ones you’re talking about, though. They usually have a date, it’s just 3 or 4 years down the road.

I think a lot of it depends on how you look at engagement. My roommate and I had this conversation one time in college, and it was…interesting to say the least. She was all for long engagements, claiming that it was a chance to make sure you really knew this person and wanted to get married. And hey, if it falls through, it’s a minor commitment, not something major like actually being married, so it’s not as much of a loss.

Her stance was pretty much the polar opposite of what I’ve always thought. To me, engagement is only slightly less of a binding commitment than marriage itself. If you’re not completely, totally, 100% sure you want to marry someone, then you have no business promising them that you will. (Of course, this can all go flying out the window upon the discovery of some devastating and previously unknown tidbit, but it’s a good rule of thumb.)

We took 13 months from proposal to wedding, and it was 5 months into the engagement before we were able to set a date. When we got engaged, we didn’t know yet where he was going to match for residency, when he’d be able to take vacation time, etc. That uncertainty is more than half the reason I didn’t bother to tell my parents we’d gotten engaged for a couple of months. It was easier to not listen to a constant litany of “When are you getting married?” and “When’s he getting you a ring?”

Contrary, I do believe you fall into the special circumstances category that I made allowance for. OF COURSE if you are unable to get married for reasons outside of your own choosing, this does not apply to you. I’m talking about the people like CrazyCatLady’s roommate. I feel so sorry for you and I know that it must just suck. Wifecat and I were dreading government intervention as well. She was a Czech woman under the age of 25 with a wedding dress in her suitcase flying back to Denver after going home for the holidays…If she had had her luggage checked, I’m sure she would have been barred entry into the US and had her visa revoked. You know, every foreign woman only marries for that green card. :rolleyes: (She still doesn’t have one, we moved to Prague 3 months after our wedding)

And truthfully godzilla, how can you expect people NOT to ask when the date is? That is one reason why this bugs me. The statement begs the question, so people should be able to answer it somehow beyond “Dunno.” Even “After we do X, then the date will be Y months later.”

-Tcat

Well, since this was the first time I had ever been engaged, I honestly didn’t know what to expect. I certainly never ask anybody when the big day is when they tell me they just got engaged. It’s really none of my business if they plan to get married in a month or in 5 years, and I don’t imagine that people have already picked out a date when they propose (in the movies, nobody ever says, “Will you marry me… on June 5th of next year?” or “Will you Marry me? Yes! Great, how does August 27th work for you?”)

Barry

Yeah, waiting a long time does seem a little silly. Guys and Dolls, anybody? :wink:
Then again, I’m sure the idea of actually getting married takes some adjusting to. I’m thinking about it on a very regular basis even though it’s gonna be some time before I even propose. I’m sure I want to spend my life with this girl, and she with me. But it’s a big deal and there’s little to be gained by hurrying, I guess.

Well, I met and married my husband in a little over 5 months, so I guess you can say I don’t believe in long engagements;)

BTW that was almost 19 years ago!

With me and SkipMagic, it came down to practical and financial considerations.

a) We live in different states, which meant that one of us (yours truly) was going to have to find a new job and move. With the job market the way it is, my fear was that we’d set a date (say, a year from next Tuesday), the date would come, and I still wouldn’t have a job where he lives, which would only add to the stress of planning a wedding, and I’d be freaking out.

b) We wanted to pay for everything ourselves (mostly to maintain rights of control over the whole affair), and it was going to take us awhile to save up the money for the wedding we had planned.

(As it turned out, we found ourselves losing control anyway, so now we’re eloping to Vegas and will, in fact, be married before (possibly wayyyyy before) we’re able to live together. As a result of this, my mom is freaking out, but Skip and I have talked about it and we’re both OK with it.)

Also, as CrazyCatLady said, if you’re having a big she-bang, it can take a good year to get everything arranged.

I do think you’re right though, that a long engagement should not be used as a trial period. Aside from the occasional hot-headed argument that causes one or the other person (ahem–that would be yours truly again) to say “I am SO not marrying your ass” (or some derivative thereof), I think that once you’re engaged, you’re in for the long haul. Just as you shouldn’t get married with the idea that you can get divorced, you shouldn’t get engaged with the idea that you can ditch, either.

My biggest concern about long engagements is people who get engaged with no real intention of getting married. I think this is often a disagreement within the couple about the seriousness of the relationship - a compromise between someone who doesn’t want to get married and someone that does - that does neither party any good in the long term.

My husband got engaged under these circumstances. He didn’t really want to get married, but didn’t want to break up and was informed that it was get engaged or break up - so he got engaged. They had a long engagement before she even managed to get him to set a date and he bailed a few months before the wedding.

Well, my wife and I were engaged for 2 1/2 years. Dunno if this qualifies as ‘long’ or not. Of course, we were in different states for most of it, in school, so anything less would not have made sense.

That said, I thought that the whole point of being engaged rather than just going out was that you had a pretty clear idea that you would get married some day. So, even if you aren’t marrying in the next year, you still have some idea of when it wil happen, or what pre-conditions need to be met. Getting mad at people who ask, given that your status is shorthand for ‘waiting to get married’ is silly, IMHO.

Then again, I think that the ‘endless engagement’- and I’ve known several of them- is a bit tiresome, and is indicative of unspoken problems in the couple.

In some families, yes!.

My husband and I were engaged just a couple of months, but we ‘shacked up’ for two years first.

To be truly engaged some feel you need the ring and a date, otherwise it’s just not serious.

Then there are guys who get engaged to make the girl happy, but has not intention of marrying her. That way, if they refuse to set a date you know he’s not serious.

Considering you need to book a lot of stuff for the wedddin at least a year in advance to get the date you want, well when you get engaged you start to call around about the details and you may have to wait longer than you planned, and need to set a date on the church’s or the hall’s availablity. That’s what set our final date!! When the hall for the reception was available (Aug. 22). We wanted a summer wedding and lots of advance notice so people could book holidays and such. We even had to work it so that a campground could be booked for the relatives that needed a place for their campes so they didn’t have stay in a hotel.

So yeah, a date, or you’ll be seen as not serious at all considering all the planning that needs to be done!!

Gunslinger and I have known we were going to marry each other for almost two years. We wear each other’s rings. We consider ourselves to be engaged. However, we don’t want to marry right away for various reasons. We’re thinking of 2005, unless we elope sometime before then.

I personally don’t think it’s any of your business why we’re not married already, or why we didn’t get married as soon as we got engaged. I resent your implications that we are not sufficiently committed. After all, you do not know us.

I hear of people just getting ‘promise rings’ if they aren’t setting a date for marriage, or aren’t 'sufficiently committed", would that seem more appropriate to some?

We were engaged for almost two years before we even set a date. For us, the engagement was the commitment, the agreement that we were going to spend the rest of our lives together. The ceremony? We had the rest of our lives to take care of details such as that.

Who cares if anyone besides your fiance sees you as not serious?

:smiley:

It’s good to not care about what anyone but your fiance thinks :slight_smile:

:slight_smile:

I just think it should be each couple’s choice. Even if a date is not set, engaged means so much more than boyfriend and girlfriend.

That’s very true- but we can’t forget that being engaged is more than just ratcheting up the significance level. There is an implicit statement there that not only speaks for the two people involved, but for their families as well. Engagement doesn’t happen in a vacuum- otherwise, it would not be significant at all.

I’m posting in order to get something off my chest and to see if I’m having an irrational viewpoint on this- I have a good friend who’s been engaged for… 7 years now. No date set, no date looking like it’s going to be set. Heck, she was having to move out of her place for financial reasons and he even refused to move out of his parents’ home and find an appartment with her. I think she’s being horribly used, but in the end, she doesn’t think anything’s wrong. Much. About once a year she blows her cool over it, and somehow he talks her down from it. I’m thinking this engagement, well, may not be worth the nonexistant paper it’s printed upon. Any thoughts?