That seems like really dangerous advice to me. The article confirms my suspicion:
“We think that some couples who move in together without a clear commitment to marriage may wind up sliding into marriage partly because they are already cohabiting,” Rhoades says. “It seems wise to talk about commitment and what living together might mean for the future of the relationship before moving in together, especially because cohabiting likely makes it harder to break up compared to dating.”
The solution is not to avoid living together before marriage; the solution is to break up when you know you should.
In that case, remind yourself that the costs of moving your stuff out are trivial compared to the costs of continuing a poor relationship.
If you are looking for marriage, give yourself a deadline for deciding whether to get engaged or break it off. Share your deadline with a brutally honest friend. When the deadline comes, you and your friend can evaluate what you’ve learned about your relationship and whether it’s worth continuing.
Thanks, but this is really not the sort of advice I need. Me-and-the-relevant-person are, you know, in a healthy relationship that consists significantly of conversations. I do not need to do anything cloak and dagger here. I could probably just say “hey let’s be engaged RIGHT NOW” and he’d probably say “okay!” after some amount of thought. I’m just trying to figure out if I risk torpedoing something I value by doing that now as opposed to in six months or a year or whatever.
Getting married/engaged can involve drama and bad memories, because of the necessity of considering such things as the Rehearsal party, Bachelor party, Bachelorette party, Wedding party, and the Honeymoon.
For instance, due to a slight breakdown in communications, I ended up spending a substantial amount of my Bachelor party being responsible for driving/watching my underaged brother. He’s a good little brother and it wasn’t any one particular person’s fault. But that wasn’t part of the “Series of fairy tale events that I had been visualizing in my head.”
I can probably think of about ten more anecdotes like that of around that time. That one was actually one of the mild ones.
I’m under the impression many people give bog standard advice like the wedding might be a fairy tale, but what about the marriage afterwards? I would like to point out the reverse perspective: You may have a fairy tale marriage, but your time period around your wedding is likely going to be a set of extremely difficult feats in social event planning.
Actually, I’m curious what the effects of being more familiar with Less Wrong when I got married would have been. I would have had more practice in lowering my expectations and dispelling overly idealistic fantasies based on no evidence, both of which from my current perspective seem like they would have been amazing useful skills to have during wedding planning.
This is not to say you can’t have a perfect series of parties topped off by a fantastic honeymoon. That actually does happen. I sincerely wish it happens for you. But If I were to couch this in terms of advice to Michaelos 2008, I would tell him that he should not EXPECT it to happen, because he’s never done it before and planning social events was never his or his soon to be wife’s forte. But honestly I’m not sure he would have had enough context to get that advice.
So in terms of your actual question about doing it now, six months from now, or a year from now, I would say first discuss it in terms of the best way to handle those tricky social feats with other people. In addition, possibly discuss it with the other people as well, or someone you think of as a skilled master at tricky social situations.
Thank you! I will update in favor of getting help from my socially-adept friends, especially married ones. I will also attempt to aim my drive-to-do-overcomplicated-socially-dramatic-things at this challenge when it appears rather than expecting to accomplish it all with more ordinary planning-of-stuff skills.
Two years is the time frame one always hears, isn’t it? I only did a very quick search but most of what I found seemed to be referring to the same study by Ted Huston, and I didn’t even find the study itself. My impression is that 2 years (25 months, one article said) was the average time spent dating before marriage (not before engagement, as you asked) for happy, stable couples, however they judge that. So, not the most helpful.
But, it does kind of match my intuition that one should wait until New Relationship Energy is mostly over before making that decision, and I often read that NRE (though it’s usually not called that in these articles) typically lasts about 2 years (this matches my limited experience). Also, I’m monogamous, but I’d guess that even if your NRE with Partner A has faded, NRE with Partner B could spill over onto your other relationship(s) and affect your judgment there too?
I don’t remember hearing 2 years, although it is relevant data that you have done so. One complication is that we started dating two years ago, but were broken up for somewhat more than a year in the middle before getting back together. So we’ve spent less than two years dating, but about two years conducting an extended empirical observation about whether we prefer being together or not.
If I knew this relationship didn’t have long-term potential, would I break it off?
I’m not sure which answer points to “Engage” here! I would guess “yes”, since it allows you to reason ”...and I’m still around, which means I believe it has long-term potential, which means we should get engaged”. But “no” indicates attachment to the person and a willingness to make the relationship work even if it’s rocky.
Questions I would consider (privately):
If I knew this relationship didn’t have long-term potential, would I break it off?
What would I need to know about this person in order to become engaged? What would make me break it off?
How much am I likely to learn about this person in the next month/six-months/year? How can I learn what I need to know?
Try to avoid living together before marriage..
That seems like really dangerous advice to me. The article confirms my suspicion:
The solution is not to avoid living together before marriage; the solution is to break up when you know you should.
Too late.
In that case, remind yourself that the costs of moving your stuff out are trivial compared to the costs of continuing a poor relationship.
If you are looking for marriage, give yourself a deadline for deciding whether to get engaged or break it off. Share your deadline with a brutally honest friend. When the deadline comes, you and your friend can evaluate what you’ve learned about your relationship and whether it’s worth continuing.
Thanks, but this is really not the sort of advice I need. Me-and-the-relevant-person are, you know, in a healthy relationship that consists significantly of conversations. I do not need to do anything cloak and dagger here. I could probably just say “hey let’s be engaged RIGHT NOW” and he’d probably say “okay!” after some amount of thought. I’m just trying to figure out if I risk torpedoing something I value by doing that now as opposed to in six months or a year or whatever.
Getting married/engaged can involve drama and bad memories, because of the necessity of considering such things as the Rehearsal party, Bachelor party, Bachelorette party, Wedding party, and the Honeymoon.
For instance, due to a slight breakdown in communications, I ended up spending a substantial amount of my Bachelor party being responsible for driving/watching my underaged brother. He’s a good little brother and it wasn’t any one particular person’s fault. But that wasn’t part of the “Series of fairy tale events that I had been visualizing in my head.”
I can probably think of about ten more anecdotes like that of around that time. That one was actually one of the mild ones.
I’m under the impression many people give bog standard advice like the wedding might be a fairy tale, but what about the marriage afterwards? I would like to point out the reverse perspective: You may have a fairy tale marriage, but your time period around your wedding is likely going to be a set of extremely difficult feats in social event planning.
Actually, I’m curious what the effects of being more familiar with Less Wrong when I got married would have been. I would have had more practice in lowering my expectations and dispelling overly idealistic fantasies based on no evidence, both of which from my current perspective seem like they would have been amazing useful skills to have during wedding planning.
This is not to say you can’t have a perfect series of parties topped off by a fantastic honeymoon. That actually does happen. I sincerely wish it happens for you. But If I were to couch this in terms of advice to Michaelos 2008, I would tell him that he should not EXPECT it to happen, because he’s never done it before and planning social events was never his or his soon to be wife’s forte. But honestly I’m not sure he would have had enough context to get that advice.
So in terms of your actual question about doing it now, six months from now, or a year from now, I would say first discuss it in terms of the best way to handle those tricky social feats with other people. In addition, possibly discuss it with the other people as well, or someone you think of as a skilled master at tricky social situations.
Thank you! I will update in favor of getting help from my socially-adept friends, especially married ones. I will also attempt to aim my drive-to-do-overcomplicated-socially-dramatic-things at this challenge when it appears rather than expecting to accomplish it all with more ordinary planning-of-stuff skills.
Two years is the time frame one always hears, isn’t it? I only did a very quick search but most of what I found seemed to be referring to the same study by Ted Huston, and I didn’t even find the study itself. My impression is that 2 years (25 months, one article said) was the average time spent dating before marriage (not before engagement, as you asked) for happy, stable couples, however they judge that. So, not the most helpful.
But, it does kind of match my intuition that one should wait until New Relationship Energy is mostly over before making that decision, and I often read that NRE (though it’s usually not called that in these articles) typically lasts about 2 years (this matches my limited experience). Also, I’m monogamous, but I’d guess that even if your NRE with Partner A has faded, NRE with Partner B could spill over onto your other relationship(s) and affect your judgment there too?
I don’t remember hearing 2 years, although it is relevant data that you have done so. One complication is that we started dating two years ago, but were broken up for somewhat more than a year in the middle before getting back together. So we’ve spent less than two years dating, but about two years conducting an extended empirical observation about whether we prefer being together or not.
I’m afraid I was projecting my own goals into your situation. Sorry.
I didn’t mean to suggest your relationship was unhealthy. All I meant to say was that you shouldn’t let logistics become a trivial inconvenience.
I’m not sure which answer points to “Engage” here! I would guess “yes”, since it allows you to reason ”...and I’m still around, which means I believe it has long-term potential, which means we should get engaged”. But “no” indicates attachment to the person and a willingness to make the relationship work even if it’s rocky.