Wedding Engagement Etiquette
The “engagement,” or rather your engagement, refers to a period of time between the marriage proposal and the wedding. It can be long, short, or something in between. Usually, because of planning considerations for the wedding, the engagement lasts six to eight months. Engagements as long as a year (or longer) are rare, but some people want to go that route for financial reasons, or perhaps because the groom to be is in the military overseas, or other extenuating circumstances.
The engagement makes it official to everyone concerned (family, friends, employers, acquaintances) that you and your now fiancee’ have made a serious commitment to each other and intend to be married. This changes your status in everyone’s eyes to some degree. No matter how devoted you were to your fiancee’ before the engagement, you are now even more devoted, to the exclusion of all other dalliances and flirtations with other ladies and grrrls and interminable late night carousing with your buddies at bars. You are no longer “single,” in a very real sense, because you are part of a couple, a couple planning to spend the rest of your lives together. During the engagement you and your now fiancee’ will plan for the wedding, the honeymoon and your lives together as husband and wife. Considering all the major life changes this involves, it only makes sense that a period of time, the engagement, lets you gradually ease into all of these new roles and responsibilities, rather than jumping into them with both feet without any forethought or reflection. So engagements are good things, both for you and your fiancee’ and for society as well.
Some engagements never actually end in marriage, as we all know. We say so-and-so “broke-off” the engagement for one reason or another, an act usually directly attributable to the fact that he/she discovered he/she didn’t really want to be married to the other person. “Broke-off” is an apt term, because it implies the breaking up of a coupling of two people. While it may be a sad state of affairs, the engagement can’t be said to have failed, because it served the purpose of vetting each member of the couple as suitable for the other as a spouse. A broken off engagement, while painful, and sometimes embarrassing, is far less painful and expensive than a divorce!
