How long did it take you to realize that the person you’re engaged to or married to right now, was whom you wanted to marry?
My guess is that men are more prone to love at first sight and women are not, but that could be a misconception.
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Edit: Bummer! I tried to add a poll, but failed!**
I went to a meeting at work with some new business analyst to kick off a new project we would be managing together. About 45 minutes into the meeting I was daydreaming, picking out names for our children.
She claims it was a couple of weeks before she got to that stage.
Neither of us said an untiward word to each other for several months. Wary of workplace relationships. Also since she was a few rungs levels lower on the corporate ladder, and I’d have input into her review, it could have been awkward. As soon as the project ended, we were an item.
Many of our co-workers swear that they knew early on that we were bound to be a couple. Many assumed that we were carrying on on the sly long before it was public.
About an hour. I knew that I could trust her to never do anything with the intent to cause me any harm or distress, physical or psychological, and that we were both on the same political wavelength, and with 24 years of retrospect, I was right. She felt the same way, and we have lived together since that first lhour.
IIRC it was about three months after we first met.
We were dating, and there was a huge snow storm that shut the whole city down. Neither of us could get to work, and even the buses weren’t running. So I called her and asked if she wanted to spend the day together, and I walked the four miles to her apartment thru the snow drifts. It took about two and a half hours, and sometime during the second hour I asked myself if it was really worth it to go thru all that just to see her.
It was. Thirty four years later, she is still there to welcome me in from the storm.
Regards,
Shodan
We were good work friends, and later really good outside-of-work friends, for about six years before we got together romantically. Neither of us were still holding onto any hope of ever finding someone, so we both had to kind of drag each other kicking and screaming. However, we’d only been working together for a couple of months before people started whispering that we were secretly dating (we weren’t). We clicked right off; it was just a long long time before it turned into something more.
Same day we went out for the first time.
But in retrospect, had I done anything else that day, I would probably be off parole by now. :smack:
It took me about a year to be sure. I am not sure he was sure until after we’d been married ten years and our son was born. He loves me madly, but he doesn’t think much in terms of defining a relationship. I mean, he wanted to be with me forever, was totally content with whatever formal arrangements I wanted to make (like getting married), has his own sense of the boundaries of the relationship (i.e., is faithful), but never really cared about labels. I doubt he was at all aware of when he began to assume it was a permanent relationship. Once we had a son, though, I think his sense of “us”, as a family, was more engaged.
I met my future husband at a party given by mutual friends. He made me laugh like no one else ever had, and in just talking to him, I knew he’d give me a run for my money.
Once I met his parents about a month later, I was all in. They had a solid marriage, and were hardworking, honest people. They had passed those qualities down to their son.
We’ve been married 22 years, and I still fall in love a little bit more every day.
We’re not sure. At some point it just came to be a given that we were going to get married, but neither of us can pinpoint the moment that became true.
About 4-5 months of dating.
Third date, which was ten days after the first date.
On the first date, I thought he was an intelligent, interesting, and handsome man.
On the second date, we couldn’t talk fast enough to keep up with our thoughts.
On the third date I yanked him into bed.
We began to actually talk about marriage one week later, when we finally came up for air.
My wife actually told her brother that I was the one a month or two before we started dating. I took a bit longer - I’d guess I knew around 2 months after our first date.
I knew he was a keeper from the first time I met him face-to-face. He came straight from work at a restaurant and smelled like grilled onions. If he ever changed jobs, I’d have to divorce him. 
I love the smell of grilled onions.
We met at work and had been co-workers for about 2 weeks when I asked her to go to lunch. While we were in the car, I was making small talk, so I asked her opinion of organized religion. Her response was “I believe people should be allowed to have whatever crutch they want.”
If you were in the car at that moment, you may have seen little hearts circling around my head.
Both my wife and I had a good feeling by our second date (one week after meeting for the first time) and were rather certain by our sixth (about 3.5 weeks after).
A little more than a decade and a half after we first met.
About a year after we met we went out a few times. About a year after that we became fairly serious. I think we got married 4 years after we met.
Well, I have fallen in love at first sight exactly once. And she really was as amazingly wonderful as my first instincts told me. Alas, it was unrequited.
I have been married twice. In both cases, it took me nearly 2 years of dating to be sure I wanted to marry the woman.
We had been coworkers and had been going out in big coworker groups for about for months. Then we started bangin’. About a week later I told some dude trying to hit on me in a bar that I was gonna marry him. Seems to have worked out.
I’m the male version of this, albeit without the child yet. My wife and I dated for six and a half years and lived together for two before we got engaged. At some point around year two or three I think “permanent” just became the way things were. When we finally did get married, it was more about the bureaucratic stuff: taxes, visas, health care rights, you know, real romance.