Serious question - What is the purpose of an engagement?

kitty8403 · April 2014

I agree, it used to mean something a little different, historically.
Ours will be right about 13 months. It's been a time to focus on preparing for a marriage, now that a public commitment is in place. Beyond wedding planning, I've changed jobs; he's taken on bigger work commitments; and we saved for, searched for, and finally bought a house. We're going through our stuff to figure out what we need most urgently, what should be replaced, and what has outlived its usefulness to us. We're tackling household projects and discussing ways to expand or improve on the place we purchased. We're working out budget issues. We're making notes about how things like personal paperwork and taxes will change and trying to plan accordingly.

Honestly, the wedding planning has, if anything, take a back seat to some of this other prep work. I'm just now getting back into the swing of it.

Jells2dot0 · April 2014

From reading through everyone's posts, it just means so many different things.

For us, we knew for years we wanted to get married, but the act of getting engaged was my DH's way of saying that he felt his family was ready for our next step. When I say his family, I mean his children. We waited to get engaged/married until we felt they were both in the right place. As for length of engagement, ours turned out to be much longer than planned. "Life got in the way" (aka I moved away for a year because of work) and pushed our plans out. For some, moving away would not necessarily put things on hold, but since I had a DW, I had to make sure I had enough vacation time for what we had planned. I was burning up vacation time just to spend time at home while we were living apart. We were not really willing to compromise on our plans, and were really in no rush, so we just waited until I had time banked up.

kitty8403 · April 2014

melgibbs said:
For me engagement is telling everybody that you and your fiance is already taken so those with cruel intentions, please back-off . However, there are a lot of real life / fictional stories that people who were already engaged ended up marrying other halves. I'm honest and faithful to my fiance but I really don't take engagement so seriously. It's a sort of formality sake.

Most of this sounds a little immature and overly possessive. Yes, engagement does signal a more serious, specific level of commitment than just dating, but if you were exclusive before, you both were just as "taken" then.
Even when you get married, though, your fiance is still his/her own person, not your property.

kitty8403 · April 2014

FiancB said:
I think it's when you're at least very close to setting a date. Sometimes things come up and we end up postponing a wedding or whatever and end up with a longer engagement than ideal, but personally I didn't want longer than a year engagement. I also don't get when people are engaged for years and years without setting a date.

I don't get it either. I realize life happens, but I think these situations tend to occur when one party is ready to be married (or wants/demands a ring!) and the other is not. We discussed timelines and finances the day I received the ring! Do people seriously just get all gaga and forget to have this part of the conversation?
A serious engagement, IMO, goes beyond "I want to get married to you someday" to "We intend to wed AND have good reason to expect that we will have the resources to commit to a wedding, home, and possible family with a reasonable time frame."

flyingfoxes · April 2014

To me, it means planning the wedding, but it also signifies a deeper commitment than "boyfriend/girlfriend". We didn't live together before getting engaged though, but will before we get married so maybe that's part of it.

singinchick13 · April 2014

For us, it really was just about officially setting a date and starting wedding planning. We already lived together and had a baby, we knew we would be getting married one day and spending our lives together. Our engagement will be about a year and eight months due to maternity leave and wanting our son to be a part of our wedding.

That said, I guess everyone does think about it differently. I know a girl a year younger than me who has two kids and is a stay at home mom. The father works 60+ hours a week to support them, and he makes a good living, but she is desperate for a ring. To me it feels odd in this situation to refer to him as 'her boyfriend', you know? I think I would probably feel the same in her situation and start using words like 'my partner' because it is obvious they are more than bf/gf.

JCbride2015 · April 2014

We have a bit of all the reasons PPs mentioned. We had discussed marriage many times before the actual proposal, so it's not quite right to say the engagement was the exact decision to get married. For us I think the engagement meant we were ready to start planning and saving-- taking concrete steps toward the wedding instead of just knowing it would be "someday." We will have a fairly long engagement (over 2 years) so that we can save for the wedding we really want.

bethsmiles · April 2014

I see the engagement as the time to plan the wedding. The engagement doesn't make us any more committed or change anything about our relationship.

jdluvr06 · April 2014

@jenna8984 his grandmother died a couple of weeks before the wedding and neither of us was feeling up to it. We didn't care about losing the money on the venue and the deposits. We were both just really upset. His grandfather had died earlier that year so losing both his remaining grandparents in the same year was extremely hard for him. We were extremely close to them both. When we postponed for his mom she had the same cancer that killed his grandfather. At that point all we had done was set a date and picked a venue so it was an easy decision to decide to hold off. We didn't want the stress of trying to plan the wedding and helping his parents out. We could have gone to a courthouse but we want our families there. Well... We wanted my family there, if we went to a courthouse my mom and sister, and his whole family (he doesn't have any aunts or uncles it is only his parents and his brother) so it would exclude a majority of my family (there are 43 of us) and neither of us wanted that. I have a really right knit family, I don't think there is anyone I don't go a week without getting some type of update from.

jenna8984 · April 2014

@jdluvr06 That is really nice, I envy that you and your FI are that close knit with your families so that does make more sense why you would postpone. Kind of seems wrong celebrating in a time of sadness. When there is a death in our families life just goes on because none of us are close and that's actually a pretty depressing way to live life if you ask me. FI and I vow to change that with our future kids and their cousins so that we can all have that closeness. Good luck this time around!!!

netskyblue2 · April 2014

I see it as time from when you officially announce that the two of you will marry though the planning of the wedding you announced you would be having.

I don't understand having an engagement longer than the time it takes you to plan for/save for a wedding. Meaning getting engaged and staying engaged without any actual plans to have a wedding.

Couggal12 · April 2014

I see the engagement as time to plan the wedding and to set a time frame to get married. FI & I will be together 6 years in June so we already knew prior to getting engaged that we were committed and wanted to get married to each other.

amakayeb · April 2014

I think that one factor that can really affect your answer to this question is how you feel about living together before marriage. As someone who will not live with my fiance until after the wedding, I know that being engaged deepened our relationship. It was also the time to plan the wedding, and is only as long as it needs to be until we can realistically have a wedding and being our life together (waiting through his last year of grad school, otherwise I would have needed to move and find a job there for just one year, which would have been practically impossible). I can't imagine postponing at all, as that would mean more time spent not together.

Cookie Pusher · April 2014

It was a great way to get people to stop asking if we were ever going to get married. I mean, we'd already talked about it over the course of the 10+ years we were together before he proposed. I told him I didn't care one way or the other about marriage because we had already decided we wanted to be together, he realized he wanted a wedding. So he made it "official" and everyone stopped asking if we were serious about each other (because dating for over a decade and living together for 9+ years wasn't "serious" enough for a lot of people). We've taken the last 2 years to plan a wedding we could pay for in cash, save up the cash, and do all of the DIY projects involved to keep our wedding within budget.

RebeccaB88 · April 2014

I see it as a statement of intent - a public declaration of a private decision between two individuals to get married, and to accomplish that (in however form) within a (to be determined reasonably soon) set length of time. Secondarily, it provides an 'official' period of time to allow the couple to plan and prepare (in whatever ways are necessary) to accomplish marriage, whether that time period is short or long.

I, too, don't get the appeal of having a neverending engagement. Engagement doesn't provide the legal benefits that marriage does. It's a statement of intent that is never followed through on. It's in a lot of ways only a baby step beyond being a committed relationship - you just (sometimes) have a piece of jewelry that signifies that step. Even that is not required to be engaged. You can be in a committed relationship for your entire life without getting engaged if you honestly don't intend to ever get married. The act of legally binding yourself to another person is a pretty big deal, but if you're committed for life anyway, I'd think that wouldn't scare you. And the legal benefits can't be denied.

You don't like to think of it as being just one way to shut her/him up until you can determine if there's really no better option living down the street or across town, but unfortunately, sometimes I think it can be.

pinkshorts27 · April 2014

eg72 I get asked that allll of the time. I just bean dip or say "That is all that worked with our schedules", which is the truth.

Serious question - What is the purpose of an engagement?

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