I notice that people here – probably Americans but not sure – have fiancées for years and years. Isn’t the point of being engaged getting married? Why have a fiancé for so long? It doesn’t make sense to me. Is the reason bureaucratic? Financial?
I notice that people here – probably Americans but not sure – have fiancées for years and years. Isn’t the point of being engaged getting married? Why have a fiancé for so long? It doesn’t make sense to me. Is the reason bureaucratic? Financial?
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Part of it is wanting to make sure that you are fully compatible before getting married. In previous generations, people were rushed into marriage and often found themselves in relationships with people who they weren’t compatible with long-term.
Some of it is wanting to save up to have a fancy wedding. A lot of people are raised with the idea that a wedding must be a massive occasion with tons of friends and family, which gets really expensive very quickly. So waiting years to save up for a fancy wedding is common.
Some people just want to be engaged
I mostly see this in two scenarios:
mollifying families when they are committed but don’t care much about marriage for its own sake. when people have more traditional family members it’s easier to accept them doing “married things” like living together when they are at least engaged.
folks who paired off early and want a big ass wedding but they need to get their financials well established first.
For me it was mostly that we had so much things to do that we didn’t get around to organize a wedding.
Idk in other countries, but in America it can absolutely be financial. Some people want huge costly weddings that they need to save up for. Sometimes they want to have a wedding at a specific place that gets booked for a lot of weddings so they have to wait years before the wedding. But people do get judged when the engagement is long and no wedding plans have been made. There are other reasons that I’m sure are common like not ACTUALLY being ready for marriage, but feeling like being engaged is a step in-between boy/girlfriend and married. But no bureaucratically it doesn’t take a long time to get married, so that’s not a reason.
Everyone here is usually trying to “keep up with the Jones’s” and thinks they have to have these ridiculous extravagant weddings. The ones I’ve known who wait forever usually can’t afford the wedding they want, the ones who marry right away are the ones who have had blessed lives and families.
I don’t see the point in rushing to the alter after getting engaged. Wedding planning is stressful, if you want to spend 3 years doing it instead of 6 months who am I to complain? Plus if your marriage is going to last a long engagement isn’t going to kill it.
Sometimes people want to dignify their relationship with a more serious term than “boyfriend” or “girlfriend”, but haven’t gotten married yet. So they use “fiancée” to mean “we’re a committed couple, even though we haven’t registered with the state.”
Got three kids. We will get married eventually but right now any money we have is better spent on them. We are both in it for the long haul and everything works as if we were married it’s just on the back burner.
In the most positive way because my kids are the greatest thing I’ve ever done, I’m really looking forward to planning a wedding as a kind of success party. We did it, we raised the kids now lets have a party before we get on with the next chapter of our life.
There’s been a weird shift towards extremely extended courtship these days. You’ll see people even saying that you can’t get married before living with someone for 3 years because what if they have a habit you don’t like!?!?!?!
For the couples I have known with long engagements, usually they would get engaged because it doesn’t take any effort to declare yourself engaged, but they wouldn’t get married until they decided to have kids or buy a house or similar. Essentially until the benefits of marriage were large enough that they were willing to go through with it.
We don’t get vacation time or paid well enough to afford a wedding. People just put it off until it’ll be easier but that can be a while
I was engaged for a number of years. The engagement was a nice step in establishing that our relationship was something we saw as ‘permanent,’ it symbolised our commitment. However, marriage was never a priority for us. Why does the money on a wedding when we could travel or buy a bigger house?
Marriage was only something that became important to me when I wanted kids.
Thanks everyone, it makes much more sense now 🙂
We got marked a long time ago, but I could never understand having multiple children with your “fiancé” when a civil ceremony costs next to nothing.
Sometimes there’s financial reasons, like credit and debt. Your debt can negatively impact your spouse’s credit from what I hear, although I also hear it can’t. Student loans, some repayment plans are based in joint income, even if filing separately.
Another reason people wait is legal issues. Imagine someone is in the process of dealing with a DUI. That can raise rates on people who live together. Probation and parole can’t stop a marriage, but it makes things more annoying.
Then there’s insurance and Medicaid. If you get married and cohabitate, then one person’s income can disqualify the other from Medicaid. If they’re currently sick or facing chronic issues, that can be a financial disaster.
There are a lot of scenarios where people can be engaged for a long time, for good reason.
Modern wedding planning in the US usually accounts for a 1-2 year lead time to accommodate many things already mentioned. Venues get booked years in advance. And it’s really, really tough to buy a wedding dress less than a year in advance. Obviously you can grab something off the rack and call it good, but if you custom order a dress, it not only needs to be made, but the alterations can take months to get done. I bought my dress a month before my wedding, and I had to pay rush fees on the alterations, and they totally botched them and there was no time to fix it. I just had to deal with my sleeves being too tight to raise my arms and a hem that was crooked.
I was engaged about 3 years, and it took us that long to save up for the event. I would say our wedding was really bare bones and basic, but it still cost about $8k. My mom absolutely insisted on having a guest list of 200 (large extended family), so that was most of the cost. Catering ate up about $3k of the budget alone, and that was the cheapest catering we could find. Everything else was DIY and begging friends to help. We didn’t hire a professional photographer (which I regret), and a friend of ours was the DJ (which I also kind of regret, but he was able to provide sound equipment, so I’ll take his shitty music I guess). No bar because that would have required hiring a professional bartender and getting a liquor license from the city for a few hundred bucks. Plus the cost of alcohol. My family was not happy about that and some refused to come just because there wouldn’t be alcohol (which is totally a different problem to address, but not here). We also didn’t have flowers (I crocheted them all with scrap yarn), and all our decorations were borrowed Christmas lights and stuff from the dollar store. I did my own makeup and hair too. Like, there was no way I could have made that wedding cheaper. Absolutely no way. Hence why we were engaged for a few years. I think the average cost of a wedding in the US is like $20k, and a lot of people just go into debt over it.
A close family member died right after she said yes. No one felt like planning a wedding for a few years.
These comments are interesting in what they say about our current culture. The desire for a costly wedding; living together before marriage as seen as prudent; the parents not paying for the wedding;
For a lot of people, it’s financial. Weddings can be stupidly expensive
I’ll use myself as an example. I’m an enlisted soldier in Europe who cannot marry until I have 5 year’s service. I want to marry but obviously can’t, so i decided to show commitment by asking my girl but making it clear that it would be a lengthy engagement
Large wedding stupidity usually. Like the trend of peaking in high school that happens nowhere else.
Planning the kind of wedding many people want takes time, effort, and money. A lot of people need a few years to have enough of all 3.
For me, it was time. I went back to school shortly after I got engaged and needed to spend most of my time on schoolwork, so I planned a little at a time. I was also in school year round (accelerated degree), so I needed to wait until after graduation to have the wedding in order to fully enjoy it.
Another factor is etiquette. Save the dates are expected to be sent out 8-10 months in advance to give guests plenty of time to plan around it, especially if a lot of guests will be coming from out of town. In order to send save the dates, you need to have a date, which means you need a signed contract with a venue, which means you need to have done research on venues, narrowed the list down, toured some venues, decided on one, and signed the contract. Which probably means starting the wedding planning at least 1 year in advance. That’s not specific to big, expensive weddings, it can apply to cheap ones too.
Some people will move in together, sleep together, have kids together, travel together, and make a life together and then say that getting married is too big of a commitment and they don’t want to rush into it. I don’t get it either. *shoulder shrug
It’s common here in Sweden as well to be engaged for years. My best friend was engaged to her boyfriend for 5 years before they broke up lmao. Then she met her new boyfriend, got pregnant in a month, they were engaged within a year and then 4 years later they also broke up.
I think it’s also a way to get your family off your back when you’re “shacking up”. Especially in the US and in certain parts of the country, living together without being married is still frowned upon. By saying “we’re engaged” you meet those people half way and sidestep discussions.
Everything I read from fellow Americans could also be done without engagement. (Saving money, finding out if you can live together) I guess technically if you’re organizing the wedding 2 years ahead, it’s also easier to talk about “my fiancee” and has a bit more pomp but in the end you can just call anyone that.
In most of Europe you’d just live together, save the money if you need to and then get married with the engagement phase either non-existent or comparatively short. I’ve also seen people get legally married and then just have the wedding ceremony and everything at a later point.