Engagement Lengths?

paintgirl

How long is/was/will be your engagement? Are external conditions dictating the length of your engagement (ie family stuff, sold on a particular time of year, whatever)?

I ask because we have a very dear friend that is in the military and has not one but TWO deployments scheduled in the next 2 years. We aren't engaged just yet but defnitely want our friend there when we do get married, if we can make the timing work.

We are talking about a very simple wedding (BF wanted to elope - seriously) so it wouldn't take years to plan.

Share your thoughts, please!

notquiteblushing

We got engaged almost a year ago....so our total engagement will be about 18 months.  This was because we wanted a summer wedding and my sister got married 1.5 years ago and my family wanted to take a little time off from weddings.

Just found out my brother will likely be deployed during my wedding which sucks but we're not 100% yet.  It's hard to plan things around deployments since they're so up in the air but that's nice for considering your friend.

jeanacorina

Our engagement will be about 10 months. We got engaged August  16 2009 and will be married June 4 2010.

School played a big part in our wedding date. I have always wanted a warm-weather wedding, which is easy in Louisiana. But, I didn't want it to be 100 degrees or during the school year, which is harder.

We settled on the very first weekend in June because I'll have a couple of weeks after school is out to tie up any loose ends for the wedding. Plus, May is chock full of birthdays for our families.

I don't know, it was just the right time. I didn't want to wait until next summer because we've been together over 5 years and I am just ready to get freaking married! And, by next summer we MAY be ready to start trying for a baby (depending on my expected graduation date)... and we wanted to have our honeymoon in December after the wedding (we're going to Mexico).

I didn't wanna be possibly preggers for the honeymoon....

This sounds really complicated. But we made the decision really fast, it was just the right time for us.

Ana_2985

I think we will have been engaged for 18 months by the time we get married.  We are both students, so we need more time to save money.  Also, a lot of people will need to travel for our wedding so we wanted to give people plenty of time to save and plan if they wanted to attend.

I'd rather just get married with my immediate family this summer, but I know FI is really excited about having a wedding and inviting all of his friends.  So that idea's out...

I think it's really nice that you want your friend to be there for your wedding.  But it can be really hard to plan your wedding around other people.  Things change and things come up and it can be difficult for other people to make your wedding a priority, no matter how much you mean to them. Sometimes you just have to plan it and hope for the best.

desertsun

My engagement will last about 7 months. He proposed Nov. 30, and the wedding is July 16.

I would have preferred closer to a year, one b/c I think it gives you more options in terms of venues and vendors, and also b/c I wanted a fall wedding.

But my FI is going back to school, so it was basically this summer or next summer, and we decided together that we didn't want to wait til next summer.

katanne9

We'll be engaged for 8 months.

We wanted to get married/honeymoon before grad school begins and after FI takes his next CFA exam.

Not to mention the other 7 weddings we had to work around next summer.

PaigeMcC

Funny you should mention this - BF and I had a convo about this last night! We decided that we want about a year for our engagement.  Of course it depends on when he proposes (rumour has it he's waiting to get our taxes back in Feb so he has some free cash...my sister can't keep secrets!hehe!!) but we both want a fall wedding so unless it's really soon, which I doubt it will be, we're going to have a year.  Maybe even a lil longer.

loopy82

Ours will end up being just shy of 10 months. We got engaged November 1, 2009 and will be getting married August 27, 2010. For me this is ample time, as everything has just kind of fallen into place.

All I knew is that I didn't want a winter wedding. Winter in MN means that most of the guests would have a good liklihood of not being able to make it due to weather.

The venue we are using said they would waive the room rental fee if we had a Friday or Sunday wedding vs. a Saturday wedding. Well FI was a thinker and looked ahead and saw that our 4 year anniversary just so happened to be on a Friday this year. That is how we came to our date.

We didn't focus our date around other people's schedules. We planned for what we wanted and would work for us. Trying to plan around 180 people's schedules would be a nightmare in my opinion.

MidniteRae

I don't really want to have a long engagement, however, since we have talked about an interfaith wedding and the Diocese of Phoenix changed some marital things(You now have to start Pre-Cana 9 months before your wedding date.etc..) Ideally, I would like to be married on Halloween. But don't want to have to wait till halloween 2011 if BF doesn't propose soon. (Unless we just skip the Catholic part of the wedding and just have a Jewish wedding and renew our vow in the Catholic church so they recognize it)
We will figure it out when the time comes.

paintgirl

Thanks everyone! I like the short engagements. That might be how we end up.

I know you can't plan around every person and his plans could certainly be changed but this is one person we want to try to accomodate.

If BF gets the show on the road, I would vote for this fall. We could swing that, timewise. And our families have to travel but not far - road trip.

denimdarling88

Ours will be about 7 months; it would've been shorter than that since FI and I picked a date and started planning without the ring -- but FMIL kinda slipped up and it became official before there was a ring on my finger.  Haha -- story of our life, but it fits us. =]

I would've liked a longer engagement to have more time to do things, but we're making it work just fine.

RaiKai

Ours was only ten weeks long.

We had such a short engagement as we wanted a small (only 16 guests), very intimate and very non-traditional wedding (i.e. not a pretty princess day that required lots of details and time to plan), wanted to "just get on with it" (i.e. not have a long engagement), we wanted to do it over a long weekend so we and family could travel easily and have time to relax (DW at a Canadian resort), wanted to do it before DH went back to school (and it helped that he had some time to plan it), and when my own work schedule was not too bad (was able to take some time off during Christmas season), and we liked idea of doing it in winter. 

We also really liked idea of doing it around New Years, as we find New Years Eve itself is overrated - now we could have a fun celebration, and a fun anniversary to celebrate in the following years!

It all just worked out that way, and we had no problem getting the venue/rooms needed (at a discount yet due to the off season!)

paintgirl

Follow up question: Do you think the shorter engagements negatively affected your budget? Did people think you were desperate and charge more, or were you forced to pick vendors you might not have? Or was it the reverse - vendors knew they had an opening and wanted to fill it, so you might have got a deal?

Thanks

RaiKai

In Response to <a href="http://forums.theknot.com/Sites/theknot/Pages/Main.aspx/special-topic-wedding-boards_not-engaged-yet_engagement-lengths?plckFindPostKey=Cat:Special%20Topic%20Wedding%20BoardsForum:136Discussion:386bd79e-2477-4484-b329-191584449770Post:30c01892-58d9-41f0-9f9c-1aa42ced1b29">Re: Engagement Lengths?</a>:
[QUOTE]Follow up question: Do you think the shorter engagements negatively affected your budget? Did people think you were desperate and charge more, or were you forced to pick vendors you might not have? Or was it the reverse - vendors knew they had an opening and wanted to fill it, so you might have got a deal? Thanks :)
Posted by paintgirl[/QUOTE]

Not at all. Our wedding cost was under $9,000 (under our budget) and that includes some of the items generally not included in the "wedding budget" such as our hotel room and meal costs for four days, our flights to and from the destination, our rental car and insurance,  all our spa treatments at the resort (we each had manis, pedis, facials, massages), and our gifts to each of our guests (we gave each guest a $200 credit for the spa and dining room), etc

We found that as were doing it in the off season, we got a great rate and desired date on our first (and only) choice venue. Our ceremony room (at the resort) for example cost us $270 for 12 hours. Our hotel room cost us less than $250 (1/2 price) a night, and this was their top suite - massive, top floor, with 270 degree ocean views and balcony, hot tub, double shower, etc). Our contact at the resort was awesome at arranging accomodations for us (she upgraded us, etc).

We also saved in other areas, like having an a la carte dinner in the resort's dining room after the ceremony (i.e. no need for arranging catering, another venue, centrepieces, etc), making our own invites, no wedding cake (we don't like cake!), which also cut down on vendors required etc.

It really depends on where you are intending to have the wedding though, and what you may WANT for the wedding, if there are vendors who need to "rush order" things, or venues are in high demand, costs may go up.

jeanacorina

My wedding will cost about $10,000. I think that's reasonable. Really, I would have spent more with a longer engagement because I would have had more time to go "OOh, pretty! I want this, and this, and that, and we can save money for that, and this, and those...."

Besides, most places here (being in Louisiana, where there's not much of an off-season), don't change prices. They have a package, or a standing rate. That's what you get. We asked everywhere if we could get a discount for booking a Friday, or for it being the beginning of hurricane season (wish me luck with that), but it was always "No, people get married here all year. We don't have special pricing for Fridays."

Things I DID notice:

Having a shorter engagement, it was much easier to book everything for Friday. Saturdays were already taken.

Fridays had less restrictions-- we didn't have to have a minimum of 100 guests. We could do our rehearsal whenever we wanted since it's the only wedding of the day. And so on.

I am not bored. I have the perfect amount of time to plan my wedding without a lot of downtime but also without being terribly rushed. It's perfect so far.

Good luck!

Acrosthec

We got engaged Oct. 28, 2009, and are getting married Aug. 14, 2010.  So just under 10 months.  We really wanted to get married in April, but the church was booked, and so we had to find an alternative.  Working around everyone else's weddings this summer, we found the soonest we could do it was August, so that's what we ended up with.

In the end we decided we would've been ok with a shorter engagement.  Most everything is in place at this point to where we could be getting married in February if we really wanted to (I didn't because I thought it would be miserably cold, and so far, it is - sorry Northerners...it's in the 40s here, and that's miserably cold for me!).  I probably would've had to improvise on my invitations (buy the pocketfolds instead of making them), but we would've made it work.  It doesn't take long to plan a wedding once the big stuff is out of the way, and if you're not in the "season" it's likely dates and vendors will still be available.  I actually feel like I could get bored with the time span, but I've scheduled a lot of DIY to keep myself busy, and I'm hoping that will help.  I have to have it all done by May anyway.  Once May (wedding season) hits, I won't care anymore anyway, because it'll be work M-F and then going out of town to somewhere to do SOMETHING every weekend.

Our wedding was going to be expensive, and we knew it from the start.  We're inviting 250 people.  FI and I have a lot of friends that we weren't willing to not invite, and my mom is the youngest of 9 children and my dad the middle of 3, and everyone has kids, etc., so my side of the family is monstrous.  Plus my mom insisted on it being "proper etiquette" (I know this is not the case anymore, but it wasn't worth fighting over with her, especially since she offered to pay) to invite EVERYONE that FI and I work with.  So yea, it's big.  It's going to be pricey.  Luckily, the person insisting I invite co-workers and the person with all the siblings offered to pay, so I'm just going with the flow.  That being said, I don't think anyone took advantage of me price-wise for having a shorter-than-a-year engagement.  Most people just seemed happy to be getting business.  A lot have even bent over backwards to try and be accommodating.

honeybee724

Our engagement will be just over a year- engaged 7/3/09 and getting married 7/24/10.  We knew we wanted a summer wedding so we called the chapel to find out what was available (this was actually before the official proposal but after he bought the ring).  They only do weddings on Saturdays and the latest they will do them is 3:00pm (which we already knew we wanted).  They had one remaining date left- July 24- so we took it!  Its what we both really wanted and we knew we'd get married but he wanted the proposal to be a surprise.  I expected he'd do it in September (our anniversary) but he completely surprised me by doing it on my birthday in July.
As for the finances, I don't think it really changed.  July is obviously great for weddings in Chicago, but we had our hearts set on it.  We had both already been saving for the wedding prior to getting engaged.  Also, we jumped right into planning and started meeting with vendors early on so we pretty much had our pick of places to work with.  There are a few things we can't do due to budget but I don't think that would have changed with a longer engagement- no matter how long it was I don't think I could have stomached paying $1500 to rent chairs!

kate85

Ours will be a little less than 10 Months. We got engaged middle of November and are getting Married September 4th. I knew I wanted a short engagement because FI and I have been together 7 and 1/2 years so I am ready to be married and start a family.
I was a little nervous since it is a holiday weekend, but was debating between two venues and one was completely booked and the other had nothing going on so it made my decision much easier!
If you pick an off season date it will be much easier. My friend will of have had a 11 month engagement and is planning a June wedding and had very few options for venues since she wanted a Saturday.

babybchbum

Our will be around 11 months. We got enhaged 11/27/09 and our wedding is 10/22/10. If you want to have your ceremony/reception at a popular place you better plan on having a year or more to plan. Many places book years in advance. If you want an off day (NOT SATURDAY) or a smaller wedding then it is easier to plan in under a year.

swim1011

Our engagement will be 22 months.  This is mostly bc we are paying for it, but also partly because our best man shipped out last January, and will be back in the next couple of months.  It was very important to us that he be there, so we waited. 

Ana_2985

In Response to <a href="http://forums.theknot.com/Sites/theknot/Pages/Main.aspx/special-topic-wedding-boards_not-engaged-yet_engagement-lengths?plckFindPostKey=Cat:Special%20Topic%20Wedding%20BoardsForum:136Discussion:386bd79e-2477-4484-b329-191584449770Post:30c01892-58d9-41f0-9f9c-1aa42ced1b29">Re: Engagement Lengths?</a>:
[QUOTE]Follow up question: Do you think the shorter engagements negatively affected your budget? Did people think you were desperate and charge more, or were you forced to pick vendors you might not have? Or was it the reverse - vendors knew they had an opening and wanted to fill it, so you might have got a deal? Thanks :)
Posted by paintgirl[/QUOTE]

I would say this depends on the person and the place.  If you are in a big city, of course a lot of the vendors will be booked early so you may not get your top choice in venues, photographers, things like that.  And yes, you might get some discounts if vendors aren't booked as much as they'd like.  But I don't think any respectable vendor will try to over-charge you b/c you are planning something under a year out.

honeybee724

The only ways I saw "discounts" happening was really due to the economy.  Our reception venue, for example, was willing to lock in our prices at the current rate for 2009 (instead of charging the 2010 rates), added ice cream to the package (to go with the cake) and they gave us a bigger discount than they first offered for the hotel room block.  I think they, like everyone else, was hurting from the lack of travel/big parties and figured they'd come out ahead by throwing in some extra stuff.
I also mentioned talking to vendors early in the planning process, if only to get price quotes.  This really benefitted me when it came to our photographer.  I contacted her maybe 6 weeks after we got engaged I think.  It was the first thing I did after booking the reception venue. We didn't make a final decision on the photographer and sign the contract for nearly 2 more months- and by then she had increased her prices dramatically.  I got really nervous because with the new prices she was out of our budget- but since I had been in contact with her so far she gave me the original prices.

rickylee244

Our engagement will be just under 10 months - engaged May 22, 2009 and wedding March 20, 2010.  We are actually getting married over my spring break for a number of reasons:
1. it fit in our schedule, and are able to take the week before to head up to CT from FL to finish details, and if we didnt do it now, I would be too far into my PhD to have the time to do it all
2. we are getting married in CT and wanted it to be the off season = saves us almost $8000!
3. Had to be a Saturday night (he is jewish and we are having a rabbi marry us)
4. Bonus- its actually my parents anniversary

It all depends on what works for you and many extenuating factors on the date/length of engagment.

As far as cost - I second Ana on it depends on where you live - i what you can get for $10000 in one place may cost you $30000 in another.

mrs.rab

We got engaged on Dec 10, 2009. And figured out a date of July 16, 2011. So that would be about 17 months. 

We are actually using this first month to figure out what each of us want on our own (in regards to the wedding) and then talking about what our likes and dislikes are with each other. 

FI is a teacher so the summer was the best time for us.

His cousin is getting married in the fall of 2011.

We are paying for it ourselves. If we were accepting money from our families, or already had money saved for the wedding then it would have been sooner.

GL!

oceana919

We got engaged recently, and we're shooting for just under a year and a half, for several reasons:

a) Gives us time to plan during our crazy work/school schedules
b) Gives us time to save $$$
c) Springtime in Florida = most cooperative weather
d) I wanted to wait until after my cousin's wedding was over, so the family could focus completely on her

ocprincess

We got engaged August 8, 2009, and we will be married May 15, 2010.  I always wanted a May wedding, but didn't want it right next to the first ann. of my bridesmaid...I also wanted friends of mine who are at my first college to be able to attend.

dwest2201

BF and I are not engaged yet, but have discussed this many times.  He is wanting a short engagement of 6-9 months and a big old party (he has a really big family)... I would aslo like a big wedding I was married once before and it was a very small and moved up a year due to my mother (who passed away not too long after)'s health, but I have concerns about planning a big wedding on a short timeline and short budget.

My concerns...

Money (it will be my second wedding and his first) he thinks that his parents will help with some of the cost as they helped pay for his younger brothers that just got married in October.  My parents paid for 95% of my first wedding so I am expecting nothing at all from them obviously. 

Time I am working fulltime and going to school part time and I'm a mom too so I don't know how much time I can dedicate to wedding planning. 

Planning a wedding and getting married again without my mom (who was also my best friend).

Oh well, I guess once we are actually engaged we will figure it out... he has said many times that he deosn't care if its fancy or not he wants to marry me and he wants all of our friends and family to be there to celebrate.

K2snowbunny

We got engaged on Thanksgiving and probably won't be getting married until Spring 2012, so about 2.5 years.  Money and school are the two main factors in us having such a long engagement.

saisongbird

We got engaged on April 17, 2009 and are getting married July  24, 2010, so just over 15 months.  I'm a teacher and have always wanted a summer wedding and in my area you CANNOT plan a summer wedding in 3 months - well, now with this economy you might be able to, but a year ago that wasn't an option.  Also, getting our religious requirements out of the way that quickly just wasn't going to happen.

Our parents are paying for about 90% of the wedding.  In terms of money, I think that if you're paying for your own wedding and need to save for it then it can affect the length of the engagement, but for most people it's really just a matter of what YOU feel comfortable spending on one day of your life.  If my parents hadn't thrown a considerable amount of cash at us we would have eloped to someplace tropical and our guest list would be literally 1/5 of what it is (we're nearing 250 and I want to cry!), and we wouldn't be dropping this kind of cash.

laurenclaire1386

Our engagement will be about 13 months. Before FI actually proposed, we talked about a timeline and decided that toward the end of 2010 would be the best time for us to get married. A conversation about possibly buying our house is what made us get serious about getting engaged and that was in September of this year. We got engaged October 10 of this year.

Button5807

rickylee I had no idea you were getting married in CT, whereabouts?