I met my fiancé about 10 days after my 20th birthday. Me, being very prepared to meet my future husband and settle down, I asked all of the important questions that you should never ask on a first date ;
“How many kids do you want?”
“What’s your political stance?”
“Do you value a college education?”
“How do you feel about buying me lots of diamonds and luxury leather goods?”
And since he answered all of these questions In a way that worked well with my goals, we decided to continue seeing each other. From there, we spoke about how long a couple should be together before getting engaged and we thought 2-3 years was appropriate for our age bracket. Fast forward 2 years and we’re ring shopping and engaged shortly after! Such an exciting time, I was bored of saying “my boyfriend” and my whole life was settling in such a nice way that the last thing I wanted was to be floating around in boyfriend land forever.
Being engaged was a big step, a step we were both ready and excited for. We made conscious decisions to live like a married couple after that, we no longer made any decisions without each others opinion, we shared all of our finances with each other creating a very strong feeling of “we” instead of “me” and we became very dependent on each other (in a good way) we socialize as a couple, and we are a team. This is all so wonderful, why should we get married so fast? There’s no rush, especially being in a male same-sex relationship where we can choose when to start our family more liberally than a heterosexual couple.
We decided to get married around November of 2020 when we got engaged, which would have us together for 7 years and engaged for 4. Honestly, it’s been the best 4 years of my life. We grew together, we had fun, we went through hard times and supported each other through them. We opened businesses, finished school and entered into graduate programs, we had 4 years to formulate our life plan all before getting married. Besides all of that, we had a significantly longer time to save than we would have if we got married within 2 years.
We got a lot of questions about why we waited so long, or are getting married after meeting each other so young, or whatever the fuck else people have to say about everyone’s relationship other than their own(fa real tho, whys everyone gotta worry about what other people do?!) , but honestly, it doesn’t even matter. This is what we chose, it made us so happy to do it, and you should consider a long engagement because this is a part of your life that is so short and offers so much. We will get married and have everything planned already, be totally set in our life plan and on our way to living the life we want to live. Do it the right way, and that means whatever is right for you.