This afternoon I had lunch plans with my friend Laurel! She got engaged on Saturday night and even though I saw her on Sunday morning, I was more than excited for our lunch date today to hear all about her wedding day ideas and plans.
Once I picked her up, we headed out for a yummy lunch of fresh salads.
Why do salads taste so much better when someone else makes them for me?
My salad was very flavorful and perfectly fresh. A definite winner!
Laurel and I finished our meals quickly but kept talking until she had to go back to work. She already has a potential date in mind for her big day and it’s sooner than she initially thought it would be, which is very exciting! I can’t wait to be there as everything unfolds.
As the friend of a bride, I love short engagements! I get so excited for all of the wedding fun to start and want it all to happen now.
According to this article, the average American engagement is 14 months. Ryan and I were engaged for 13 months, but we both said we felt like you don’t need that much time as long as you can find a venue in a shorter amount of time. Once the place for the ceremony and reception is lined up, finding other vendors, flowers, a dress, etc. all seem to come together pretty fast (though it did take me a million different tries to find my dress). I honestly felt like Ryan and didn’t do anything for a good four to five months in the middle of our engagement other than wait.
Questions of the Afternoon
- What do you think is the ideal length of an engagement?
- How long were you engaged/ How long would you like to be engaged?
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Craig and I have looked at rings and have been talking ALOT about marriage. We are leaving for Costa Rica in about a week and I am so hoping he pops the question. We have discussed engagements, and we are planning on having a destination wedding, so we are talking a 6 month or less engagement. I am so happy with it, I am 28 and would love to start having a family…I am not getting any younger. I know the sooner we are married the sooner we can have kids!!!
I will absolutely be the girl that will want to plan for the wedding the second I get proposed to. I would probably get really antsy after a year but I wouldn’t want to be completely stressed and rushing if it was too short.
I totally think everything is better when someone else makes it for you, but salads and sandwiches the most!
I agree with a lot of other readers, I think about a year is a good amount of time: my husband and I were engaged for 15 months. 🙂
I just got engaged in June and our wedding will be in October 2012.
I would say between 1 year and 1.5 years. My fiance and I have been engaged for exactly 1 year and it’s almost perfect! The only problem we ran into was venues were starting to get really booked up even one year in advance. A year and a half would have given us that extra edge, but we found a perfect venue anyway!
I just got engaged a little over two weeks ago and we are planning a 13 month engagement. For me, it is more about the season I want to get married in (summer) that decided the length of time. However, in the Boston area things book up early so I feel like a year is necessary to plan!
Yum! That salad looks so good!
I think engagement length definitely depends on each individual situation! My boyfriend and I always talk about maybe getting engaged in grad school but then waiting until after we both got our masters/save up some money to actually get married… so I have a feeling I’ll have a fairly long engagement! 😉
YES! Salads ALWAYS taste better when someone else makes them. Why is that?
It’s a universal mystery!
I was engaged for a year. I thought it was a good amount of time, but I am also a procrastinator 😉
7 months and it’s too long. 🙂
My engagement was 7 months and it worked out great! Once we had the venue and the photographer, everything just fell into place. We had to keep it short because we were engaged in March, wanted to marry in October and we couldn’t wait a whole year because of his army commitments. But everything worked out great and I’m glad to have kept it short. 🙂
I don’t think I could do more than 6 months — I’m just impatient. I also feel like during a long engagement, the pressure builds and people start to go nutty.
I’m not sure that I would want to get married in the winter, though, so I suppose it would depend on when I got engaged. Note to the future Mr. Peacock: Dec/Jan would be a great time to pop the question 😉
We were engaged for 8 months – it was perfect. We seriously even had a long lull!
We got engaged in December (the 17th) and will be married Oct 9th— so 9 months. I think we would have done it sooner but I am in quite a few weddings this summer (including my best friends) and wanted to be able to concentrate on their special days without worrying about what was on my own to do list. Plus, my brother was supposed to be deployed until the end of September and Oct 9th is Thanksgiving. What better way to be thankful then spending an amazing day with all the people you love. 95 days… 😉
We were engaged for 9 months. It was the perfect amount of time!
I was engaged for 14 months and that was wayyyyy too long for us.
Btw, where did you go for lunch? Those salads look delicious!
Husband and I dated for 5 years before he asked then we were engaged for 2 years before we got married, for us we loved our ‘long’ engagement. We wanted to plan a wedding and enjoy it and also be 100% done with college
This is a very interesting question. I think it all depends on the couple, their lifestyles, and the type of wedding they both want. My fiance’ and I have been together for 2 years. Our entire relationship has been long distance, with me being in Tennessee and he in Kansas. We gotten to see each other regular, as I was a school teacher and got regular breaks to fly out and visit. I ended up spending all of last summer with him. We got engaged on Christmas Day 2010. Initially, we were going to wait until 2012 to get married, but that would’ve meant another year of long distnace or us “living in sin” (I would’ve left my teaching job and moved), but neither of us or our parents were fans of those ideas so we settled on a date for this year. Once I got the venue, everything else was fairly easy. Our wedding is this Saturday and we both can’t wait! 7 months is all we needed!
I…yeah.
I used to think that I would not get married, even though I have a loving partner and we are in a committed relationship. However, I have just found out that my mother has pancreatic cancer, and it’s in Stage 4, which is the “buying time” phase as opposed to “finding a cure”. It’s still too hard to take in.
Apart from the initial denial (“this isn’t happening…this is a nightmare”), all of a sudden I was flooded with anger for the moments I thought I would have which I might not now have; I really want her to be there as I try on wedding dresses, having a laugh and finding “the one”. I wanted to have lunch with her afterwards, and I wanted to buck the trend and have her walk me down the aisle as she had more of a hand raising me than my dad, to be fair…It’s things like that.
So now I almost feel “cheated” from these moments I didn’t even know I wanted, or pressured into getting married soon so I can have those moments…Is that selfish?
Sorry to leave a comment like this – but I would tell everyone that you don’t know what’s around the corner and it can change what you feel almost instantly; everything’s changed for me. Never take anything for granted in this world. I would say, tell everyone how you feel about them all the time. It’s something I do now and it makes a difference.
This is such a fun comment log! 🙂
I’ve had crazy stories around me! My boyfriend’s grandparents MET and got MARRIED in 6 weeks! They are now going on 55 years of marriage! His parent’s MET and got MARRIED in 6 months! They are going on 25 years of marriage! And now his sister is planning her wedding–and their total engagement is just over 6 months, with some down time! I’m starting to think it is possible if you want it to be!
When I get married one day, I want NOTHING longer than a year–and that is pushing it! But it really all depends on venue’s availability and the budget I’ll be working with! I think this plays a huge factor!
I had two friends that were engaged for 2 years… and the time their wedding came around, they were SO over planning and SO ready to just be married to each other! So it was sweet, but it showed me how annoying (hahaha) wedding planning can be if it is dragged out too much!!
Love wedding talk* 🙂
This is a super fun discussion. My husband and I were dating for almost 10 years (we were high school sweethearts) before getting engaged. I was so worried that he wouldn’t ever want to get married that when he finally proposed, I was perfectly happy to just be engaged for a while…but that while turned into a year before I even thought about making any wedding plans. When our one-year engagement anniversary came up, Jared was actually the one who told me to stop being silly and just pick a date already. We set a date for 4 months later and had a small and beautiful beach ceremony, complete with a boat captain to marry us!
I don’t think the engagement time matters as much as the dating time before hand. I think 8 months would be the perfect amount of time, long enough to plan without feeling stressed- but not too long where you get antsy.
My husband and I were engaged for 18 months and for us it was the perfect amount of time. We didn’t view it as a time to prepare for a wedding, but as a time to prepare for a marriage.
We read the five love languages book, we read a book with about 100 questions to ask one another before you get married. We discussed how we would handle finances, kids, and other major issues. We didn’t want to rush into anything.
We both come from divorced families and we wanted to make sure that we were both on the same page that divorce is not an option. It’s not even a consideration. We are in this for the duration, through better AND through worse. And with the current divorce rate and the tendency for so many people to rush into things, we’re really glad with how we did it.
But it’s also what worked for US, we would never claim that anyone has to do it for the same amount of time. It has to feel right for the couple.
We were engaged for a 11 months & 3weeks. My husband wanted 6 months and I wanted a year so we compromised 😉 But I had to finish college and we were very young. We got married when I was 21! We have now been married for 2 years and are blissfully happy 🙂
I was engaged for 10 months and it worked well. If we could plan a wedding in 10 months in a place where we didn’t even live (Florida to Ontario, Canada isn’t exactly a short drive!), then I believe you could probably do it in a shorter amount of time living in the town/place you’re getting married.
On the other hand, I guess we did cram a lot in on our trips down to Florida, because we knew we were only there for a limited amount of time, so we tried to use it wisely by booking everything that needed to be booked!
We will be engaged for 9 months when we get married in September! I think it is a nice length of time. I would never be able to be an 18 month fiance. I would change my mind about too many things and drive myself crazy.
We were engaged 18 months. I picked the month of October because there was little going on our families during that time. Maybe a birthday or two. I just didn’t want my day to conflict with a bunch of other activities. I knew I didn’t want to get married during hot weather or rainy weather either. October just seemed the best bet. Which extended our engagement longer then we intended. Roughly a year I think is a good amount of time. We got married in 2000 so it was expected to be a jam packed year. I booked many vendors early which proved awesome since their prices all went up once January 1, 2000 hit. I was locked in with the cheaper prices.
I think it probably depends on the couple. If you want a short engagment, it’s probably because you want to get married and finally begin your life together. But if you want a longer enagment-maybe something’s holding you back. Maybe you don’t really want to get married to that person. It’s just a thought.
I was engaged for 5 months before I got married. It was perfect!
I think I’d want to date for 2-3 years first, then be engaged for around a year. I’m not planning on living with the boy before I get married, so I think a long engagement would give us the best opportunity to prepare for marriage. But in saying that, my parents met and were married within a year, and they’ve been together almost 35 years!