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How soon is too soon to get engaged?


SpeakNow

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1st Mr. heathen: Met April 1982. Married July 1982. Divorced Feb. 1987.

Current Mr. heathen: Met Sept. 2001. Moved in together Dec. 2001. Married June 2003. 10th anniversary June 2013.

Could have something to do with the fact that I was desperate to get out of my parents' house and Mr. heathen#1 was the first boy that didn't throw rocks at me, as we like to say down south. :roll:

Edited to add a word.

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It really depends on the people involved. I was dating my husband for over 4 years before we got engaged, and we lived together for a year of that. We got married about 10 months after getting engaged. It was natural progression. For the first two years we were together, we were still teenagers, and neither of us had any thoughts about getting married. After that it seemed easy to move in together, and then decided that yeah, maybe marriage would be OK, and then getting engaged and finally actually getting married. We had our first child 2.5 years after getting married, and we've been married for 13+ years at this point.

I worked with a serial "engagement" guy once. He seriously went from first date to "we're engaged!" in about 6 months, and didn't make it to the altar with any of the three women I saw him date over the two years I worked with him. I don't know if he was the one pushing to get engaged, or if it was the women he was dating.

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Hmm...We moved together after two years, got engaged when we had been together five years. 1,5 years after engagement we got married and that was four years ago.

I have never been much of a dating type. In a way, I have drifted to relationships, I have never really been looking for a possible lifemate but interesting people have found me :) But my spouse was the one, we just knew it. And in the very beginning we both knew that this was serious business. Someone asked after we got married that what changed. Well, nothing. While our wedding day has been one of my happiest days, nothing really changed emotionally. Marriage was more of a judicial decision and in my country in a way less binding than a joint mortgage...There just wasn't any rush, we met in our early twenties and studied and worked and just lived and faced a few hardships and learned life.

I think my parents would still be a wolf couple as they are called here, unmarried and living together but my überreligious grandma forced them to marry when my older brother created a babybump, ahem.

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The whole train wreck of the "emotional purity" teaching is leading a lot of young fundies into bad marriages as well. They are convinced they have to marry the first person they have feelings for whether they are truly compatible or not. I have seen it even among more progressive evangelicals.

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There is no rule for this. My husband was my first real boyfriend (at 24... I do not suffer fools and I am an introvert). We got engaged about 1.5 weeks after we met in person (initially met online). We were married 9.5 months after we met. We have been happily married for 5 years. Sometimes, you just know. It was very obvious. And when we did our methodist church required premarital counselling, the pastor told us we were one of the most compatible couples she had seen.

We are not fundie by any stretch... we go to church when we feel like it, a few times a year. I just don't think it is possible to take an arbitrary length of time and say that after X months/ years, it is okay. I know people who were together for years before engagement who didn't work out, and people who "rushed in" and are happy years later.

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The whole train wreck of the "emotional purity" teaching is leading a lot of young fundies into bad marriages as well. They are convinced they have to marry the first person they have feelings for whether they are truly compatible or not. I have seen it even among more progressive evangelicals.

That's especially the case among Mormons as those who have served a mission are under intense pressure to get married ASAP and have babies. Also, women who do get married are pressured to drop out of college and by the time they have 5 children, they're basically trapped since they don't have a finished college education or plenty of work experience. As premarital sex is seen as a sin one could get excommunicated for, Mormons often marry the first person that gets them horny so they don't sin.

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Without living together prior. Learning to communicate is much more important than living arrangements. I know a lot of couples who lived together and still can't communicate with each other effectively.

Absolutely. My parents never lived together before marriage and they've been happily (I assume) married for 35+ years. It's just advice I'd give based on my own experiences.

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My ex and I got engaged like two months after we started dating. We married a year later (he was military and we spent most of that time apart). Two and a half years later, I was pregnant and I found out that he was a raging psychopath with a very flimsy relationship with the truth. So yeah. It helps to spend some time getting to know the person, the real person as they really are, and not just the best version of themselves that they're putting forward in the tiny amount of time you have before you run to the altar like so many courtships we've seen.

Current husband, I met back in '98. We remained friends all those years, got together in '04, engaged a year later, married two years after that. I knew him so, so much better than I did my ex (even at the end of our marriage, because with all the lies he told me, I'm still not sure who he really is). All these years later, he's still the same friendly, helpful, caring, goofy guy I first met back in '98. It's reassuring. :)

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I've been engaged for 18 yrs and 2 months. Just thought I'd put that out there :lol:

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My dad proposed to my mom on I think their third date. My mom said she needed to think about it, then said, Okay, but only if we have a year-long engagement. They didn't live together-- in fact, they were in separate states for most of the time they were engaged. Had they lived together, I think they would have discovered some fairly important compatibility issues prior to marriage. This would have been a good thing.

Edited to add: The Partner and I have been dating for nearly nine years, living together for eight of them. And we've known each other since we were pre-teens. We are in no hurry.

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I've been engaged for 18 yrs and 2 months. Just thought I'd put that out there :lol:

Engaged 18 years? You making me laugh so hard, sorry!!!!!!!

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My husband and I met March 25, were married August 25, and 4 kids later will be celebrating our 12th anniversary this year. :-) I'm also in the boat of the very cliche, we just knew we were meant to be together. We have only been apart, including when we were dating, less than 2 weeks of those 12 years.

It hasn't always been easy. We've been through crap, and our marriage definitely isn't perfect, but we love each other and do what we have to do to make things work. We're also definitely not fundie. I'm pagan, and he's nothing. lol We were also married very young. I had just turned 21, and he was 22.

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I know 2 couples who have been married since 1984. Both are still very happy together.

One couple (married at 24 and 26), were together 8 years, started dating in high school. They got married a few years after she finished college & had a teaching job.

The other couple met when he was stationed near her (Air Force). They were set up by friends on a blind date. Met in February, engaged in April, married in July.

While I agree that dating for at least a year is usually a good thing, different for everyone. I know a couple who just broke up after dating for 10 years.

I also agree about cohabitation. If I'd lived with my jackass ex before marriage, I NEVER would have married him.

DH and I met in 1993, moved in together in 1994, married in 1995. We met at 28 and 30 after unfortunately lots of bad relationships first (for both of us) and didn't want to rush. It's been a good 20 years. :)

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Count me in with those who feel like there's no one timeline that works for all relationships.

I'm Agnostic and my husband is a very laid-back, non-church-attending Eastern Orthodox Christian, so no fundies here. We were engaged six months to the day after we professed our love to each other and decided to be a couple officially and were married a year and approximately 5 months after the day we became a couple. So far, so good! :) He's amazing and is so sweet and nurturing to me. He makes me smile all the time. It's pretty awesome. :D I credit our success to many things, which include "getting" each other naturally, having good chemistry and being very attracted to each other mutually, and tackling our life tasks in a mature manner, willing to talk about anything and everything that needs to be discussed in a respectful and loving way, and our mutual desire and goal of nurturing each other and having a happy marriage and home together. We're very democratic - there's no "leader and follower." We divide household labor evenly and fairly. We want the same things in life. We both understand that compromise is essential for a good marriage, etc.

I do think that most of these fundie courtships are rushed. To go from single to married in 6 months when courtship is the model of getting to know each other seems a bit unwise. Most of these people are sheltered and inexperienced at life in general. They're letting their parents (dads, of course) dictate what a good mate for them would be. I mirror the thoughts of someone else in this thread, that no matter how good my dad's intentions would be, I know he wouldn't be able to choose the right person for me, and if I weren't allowed to get to know this person on my own without supervision, well, I wouldn't really know him, because we'd both be holding back for fear of upsetting the elders who were watching over the "relationship." No thanks. I did want to respect my parents and my husband's parents when it came to introductions, and I'm so glad that both sets of parents were supportive of our relationship for sure. It's much easier and nicer when your parents like your spouse, lol. :D BUT, I didn't go seeking their permission or approval, because I'm not a piece of property to be auctioned off.

As an aside, at our wedding we walked each other down the isle, because I didn't want my dad or stepdad to walk me down to "give me away." Again, I'm not a piece of property. I'm an adult woman with a mind of my own, and chose on my own to marry this man. I'm not a piece of property to be passed from my dad to my husband.

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Cohabitation mean live in the home together not married but like married?

Exactly that. Not married in the legal sense but living together as if you were married.

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Cohabitation mean live in the home together not married but like married?

Yes, that's what it means. It is not living together likes roommates or friends.

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My husband and I got engaged six months after we started dating. We were already living together at that point and it seemed silly to wait to become engaged just for the sake of dating. We also wanted our families and friends to understand how serious we were about each other since his grandmother kept asking when he'd break up with me. We waited until we had been together two years to get married though so I don't feel like we really rushed things. I used my mother's engagement ring so it wasn't like if things hadn't worked out it would have been that horrible of a thing. Honestly him moving out would have caused way more problems then ending our engagement. We were friends for three years before we started dating and we knew we wanted to be together.

I also think living together is a huge factor in realizing if you're right for each other. There are some things you can't know if you haven't lived together and dealt with all the tiny problems it creates. Also I think it's a lot easier to put on a happy face and fake things when you see somebody a couple times a week or less like many fundie couples who are courting or even engaged.

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Engaged 18 years? You making me laugh so hard, sorry!!!!!!!

Never could find the right dress :P

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Mr. ewf and I dated six months and were engaged for eleven. He was 27 and I was 23 when we got married just over four years ago. If you had told me I would be one of the first of my friends to get hitched, or that I would be 23 when I did it, I would have told you to get your head examined. As it was, I had lived on my own for seven years by that point, had a Master's degree, and generally had a solid sense of self and knew what i wanted/didn't want. Those things are more important than time frames, IMHO.

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My 1st cousin is getting married on Saturday. He had 2 long term relationships before this one. He knew what he wanted, they got engaged after being together for a year.

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I know a couple who lived together for 26 years before they got engaged, then got married 6 weeks later. (Admittedly it was a health insurance thing, but still...)

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Some couples marry here only because of widow's pension payment, half of the pension of a deceased person will be paid to the spouse for the remainder of the spouse’s life no matter how long widow lives. I have relatives who have said this widow pension is the only reason they got married and some haven't even married because of that. My uncle has been engaged for some 30 years at least.

There are of course cultural differences. Despite of the fact that some 76 % of Finns are members oc the church, we are typical secular leaning Nordic country. I think the importance of marriage started to crumple in the 1960s - 1970s. By this I mean its institutional importance, people here highly value a functional, lasting relationship, they just don't think marriage is the only solution.

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I think time to marriage and time living together is more important. You need time enough to get past that good behaviour phase and learn where your respective tolerances for dirty dishes lie.

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I know a couple who lived together for 26 years before they got engaged, then got married 6 weeks later. (Admittedly it was a health insurance thing, but still...)

My friend's father did that (they were together for almost 25 yrs). Also Joy Behar from The View got married after being w/ her partner for yrs!

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