Engagement Norms Are There To Make You Break Up

In praise of your aunt who keeps asking when the wedding is

There’s a tradition in American culture. You start dating. You introduce your new girlfriend to your friends and family; and after perhaps a year or two, those friends and family will start asking: “when’s the engagement? Are there wedding bells in our near future?”

That’s the cue for (stereotypically) the woman to turn to her partner and be like “hey yeah why don’t we get married” and then the partner is like “UHHHHH UHHHH WAIT HOLD UP,” cue cataclysmic engagement argument and subsequent breakup.

Which is the point of the norm.

It’s tempting for both men and women to stay in relationships that are okay I guess but which they don’t find fundamentally satisfying. If you’re not unhappy as such but have misgivings about this as your forever relationship, you’ll dig in your heels at the idea of engagement because regardless of how comfortable you are at this specific moment you know that you don’t want to get married and have this be your forever-partner.

Modern dating norms hurt people by making it easier and easier to just sort of drift into long marriage-like relationships with people you wouldn’t actually want to marry.

If you’re not in-your-gut feeling good about eventual marriage by month ~six it’s probably not gonna happen

I note that in my own case, I took a lack of in-my-gut certainty as an emotional hurdle to overcome instead of what it was: a signal that I was never ever going to feel okay about this.

I don’t mean to say you should get engaged this early; but if you’re not feeling gung-ho about eventual engagement at this time that’s probably quite ominous? Six months is within the honeymoon window; more time should be giving you the opportunity to disconfirm the false emotional impression that this is your life partner. If you’re not feeling some sense that “this is my life partner” at this point then I suspect that just won’t ever happen.

To put it another way: the three-to-six-month checkpoint is where your feelings about your partner should be at their most artificially inflated. If you’re still not feeling it at this time, you almost certainly won’t be later once you no longer have even this emotional handicap.

(Perhaps I’m overindexing from my own case as a negative example for waiting it out; but I also notice that couples I see who did get married claim to have felt quite certain about this decision fairly early on, whether or not they acted on it within this timeline.)

I’m unwilling to defend the specific “six months” mark, but this rule seems better to me than “oh just wait it out for a couple years bro, just another few months bro, bro just give yourself one more decade and maybe you’ll come around.” Those years aren’t costless! Especially for the woman.

Feel free to clown on me in the comments if you weren’t super into your relationship until way further than six months in, and then came around for some reason, and now it’s great. That’s valuable data!

Screaming Fights About Getting Engaged Are Also Bad

If you’re the partner who wants to get married and your partner is suddenly digging in their heels, that blows and is extremely painful and I’m sorry.

At this point you basically have three options: a marriage ultimatum, simply existing indefinitely as an unmarried couple forever, or dumping your partner.

I actually think the third option (immediate dumping) is best; it does the same thing as an ultimatum (your partner could respond to the dumping with actually-let’s-just-get-married, in principle) but it lacks the dynamics where the ultimatum is likely to extract a marriage from someone who doesn’t want to get married; succeeding in this goal, I suspect, is its own sort of hell.

Maybe the dragged-across-the-finish-line marriages are fine sometimes; I’m not sure. But if you’re having a really hard time making a decision and one of your options involves an immediate agonizing conversation and then months of tedious logistics, then probably the only reason you’re even considering the other option is to avoid this short-term pain.

“But What If My Partner Is Just Ideologically Opposed To Marriage As An Institution?”

Also Moving In Is Probably A Bigger Commitment Than Engagement?

Engagement is a theoretical promise to get married, after which you’re together ~forever. It’s legibly a serious commitment and people treat it as such.

“Moving in” is basically getting pseudo-married, but it’s perceived as lower-stakes. I note that when I moved in with my ex, we did this with the explicit idea of “well, it makes sense financially and also would tell us more about our long-term compatibility,” which felt defensible in-the-moment.

However, moving in carried with it logistics. We were consolidating our furniture, selling or giving away whatever didn’t fit in our shared life. I was selecting new jobs based on my new location. I was entangling our social lives even further. We were now both on a lease, which meant moving out would be expensive should we break up; either we wait until the lease ends to move out (psychically expensive) or we just eat the lease break fee (normal expensive.)

And either way, in any breakup situation I’d still be spending a bunch of time with my new ex while we disentangle from each others’ lives, and “regularly seeing your ex in person” is a leading indicator for “getting back together with your ex.” (Don’t be like me!)

Engagement rings are small-fry compared to this. The engagement fights started shortly after we moved in together, which is unfortunate; I suspect if we were having those engagement fights before moving in we would have broken up far faster than we did.

The Taxi Cab Theory Of Dating Is Cope

Here’s one of the first google image search results for Taxi Cab Theory:

In short: there’s an observed tendency for men to leave longstanding relationships and then settle down with the next person they start dating. The claim of Taxi Cab Theory is this is because men want a generically-shaped Desirable Woman for short-term stuff early in life and for long-term stuff later in life, in much the same way that a taxi cab is looking for a generic Paying Rider.

I think Taxicab Theory is wrong for the same reason that Hinge looking-for-life-partner badges are wrong: men are not taxis who are categorically interested/not-interested in a long term relationship with some faceless platonic Woman.

I believe the core observation is probably true: men probably do often marry the first person they end up with after a long relationship. But I think this is because in a long-term relationship you learn about your own preferences and what kind of life you want to lead and what you actually care about in a partner vs. what you feel you ought to care about in a partner, which are easily confused. (I suspect this learning is frontloaded in the first few months.)

The person you were previously in a relationship with will, necessarily, have been chosen by your previous, flawed, unexamined girlfriend-criteria, which you’ve been subconsciously revising. And then, when you start dating a new person, you’ll end up dating someone who ticks the boxes you now know you need checked.

And then you get married, presumably.

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