We got engaged 2 years ago, and we still aren’t married. To be honest, I’m not sure we ever will be. At first, I was confused and anxious about my cold feet. I was initially so excited about being engaged…
At the best of times, I told myself that maybe it was normal. At the worst of times, I thought I must not love my fiance enough, or there was something awfully wrong with me if I didn’t want to go through with the wedding I’d already agreed to.
I now know that neither of those is the case.
It wasn’t our relationship, it was the wedding and the institution of marriage that had me on edge… and I’m far from alone in feeling this way.
To be totally transparent, we haven’t ruled it out completely for our future…never say never. But we’ve used this time to take a closer look at our goals and figure out whether marriage today fits with those.
I’ve had conversations with friends that have echoed similar thoughts, but it’s still not something that we’re talking openly about. I thought it would be good to start changing that.
If this article hits home for just 1 bride-to-be, and can help make her feel less alone, this would all be worth it.
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Big disclaimer time:
If you’re married and you’re happy, that’s great.
If you never want to be in a committed relationship, that’s also great.
If you want a long-term relationship but are having a hard time figuring out where that puts you, this article is for you because we’ve also found ourselves in this weird in-between. I hope you’ll feel less alone after reading this, and maybe even walk away with some new thoughts to think through on the matter.
We put an indefinite hold on our wedding about a year and a half ago
Looking back on my own experience, there were 2 distinct phases that led to our decision not to get married anytime soon:
- I began planning our wedding and quickly became overwhelmed and disillusioned with the wedding industry
- We began to question what marriage would actually change for our relationship other than requiring a divorce if we decided to separate in the future, and we didn’t find much.
Mixing both of these with our own personal experiences with marriage and divorce, made it that much easier for us to press pause on our pending nuptials.
I thought that sharing our experiences and thoughts might help others that could be struggling with this as well; Or for those that can’t relate, to shed some light on our thought process.
Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash
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Getting engaged was everything we imagined…it was 100% about us and our relationship
2 years ago, I was taken on a surprise trip to New York City and proposed to at the top of the Rockefeller Center by my very best friend, overlooking our favorite city. It was perfect, and I was ecstatic. Not only because of how amazing the trip and proposal had been, but because our relationship was rock solid and I felt like I’d finally gotten the feedback I needed to know that he was in the exact same place that I was. Fully committed to each other.
I’d been burned in past relationships financially and emotionally by people that hadn’t been in the same place I was in terms of commitment, and I learned from those experiences. We can never be 100% sure of what’s going on in another person’s head, but the act of signaling to the world that we’re in a relationship for the rest of our lives is probably the closest we can get to feeling sure.
After our enegagement, I finally felt secure enough to start making the big moves that we’d been talking about. We started tackling our financial goals as a unit: getting out of debt and saving for a home together. We started actively building our lives together without holding back. We were in this together, and he wanted to tell the world that as much as I did.
Getting engaged, and the stable foundation it validated for our relationship, was the best part of this entire experience. Turns out, really the biggest thing we needed to start moving forward.
Our original engagement announcement to friends and family
Then we started planning our wedding…
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1.) Becoming disillusioned with the wedding industry
I started out excited, and ended this part of the process in tears of frustration. It marked the beginning of the end of my excitement about this process.
The dream we’re sold
From popular TV shows to our conversations with little girls playing dress up, our weddings are sold to us as the most important day of our lives. Although I’d long since shrugged that off as not being anywhere near the truth, it had still been drilled into me to treat it as a massively important event.
The internal and external pressures to make a wedding an event to remember were completely overwhelming. Not only in terms of stress and the sheer amount of planning, but also financially. In fact, the average wedding in the US cost $33,9000 last year…For 1 day…let that sink in.
The marketing has done a fantastic job of convincing us that this is what we need to spend in order for our wedding to be great, and in order for us to show how much we care about our upcoming marriage.
Photo by Photos by Lanty on Unsplash
A reality check
This huge price tag comes at a time when many young couples are starting to set themselves up financially for the rest of their lives: paying down student loan debt, saving for a house, and trying to start putting money aside for their futures. — The wedding is in direct competition with these other priorities.
As vendor prices and messages from venues started to roll in on my end, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the wedding had stopped being about us, and had quickly become about trying to squeeze us for as much money as possible. The industry wasn’t focused on a successful long-term marriage of course, it was built on FOMO (the fear of missing out).
In fact, 21% of Americans have gone into debt to finance their wedding.
Everywhere I turned, these outrageous prices were justified with “This is supposed to be the most important day of your life” and “You’ll only have your wedding day once!” (for the average American, this last one isn’t true, but I digress). I just couldn’t get behind this kind of mental hijacking. It felt dirty and it felt like it was severely tainting the entire point of this engagement — us building the life that we wanted together.
Altogether, the cost just didn’t seem worth it to us. But that logical decision wasn’t as easy for me to accept emotionally. Would I regret not having an event that we’d always remember on a day that would be so important to us? Spending anything less than we needed for the event that we wanted felt like I wasn’t just cheaping out on our wedding, but I was cheaping out on what we were celebrating…our relationship. I struggled with this for a while.
We eventually starting looking into a budget version, and thought that maybe that would take care of some of the stress. For a mid-week, afternoon brunch wedding with 25 guests (so only family, no friends), no alcohol, small snacks, and budget versions of practically everything else, we were still looking at around $10,000 — $12,000. All for an event that was stripped down so far (and required so much DIY work on my end), that I just wasn’t really all that excited about it.
Why pay such a huge lump sum for something that isn’t even what you want?
We decided that we wanted to plan the wedding that we wanted, and pay what it would cost. Which would probably put that price tag somewhere closer to the average.
Postponing the wedding
I knew that if we spent this kind of money on a wedding while we still had other financial obligations, I’d never be able to really enjoy that day. So we decided to shelf the idea until after debt-paydown. We could reassess then and save up the cash for the event that we wanted without the guilt of knowing that the money could have been better spent on our future.
That’s why we initially paused the wedding, but as time wore on and we continued living like we were already married, I couldn’t help but wonder what marriage was realistically going to change for us…
The ~$1,800 dress I fell in love with right before we decided to pause everything ❤
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2. Questioning marriage itself
At the time of our engagement, we’d already been living together for almost 3 years. Once we paused the wedding and combined our finances to start working towards shared financial goals, it really made us wonder what would really change if we did get married…and we didn’t see much.
So it left us wondering, why do people go through with this at all?
Why do people get married?
Most of us want to get married because we want a lifelong commitment. Knowing that someone wants to be with you for the rest of your life can really help give you the security that you need to start building a life together. Whether it’s moving across the country for a job offer with your partner, buying a house, or starting a family. For those that are religious, it can also be a required step in starting that family.
There are also tons of legal benefits that come with being married that are pretty convenient, like having access to your spouse in the hospital, having access to a healthcare plan through their employer, a lower tax bill in some situations, and inheriting their property automatically if they pass away. Many people also like knowing that you’re incentivized to make the relationship work if you want to avoid a divorce, so they feel safer.
Do any of those reasons pertain to us?
We already felt like we were living as a committed couple, so making it legal didn’t seem like it would do anything to change that commitment. What about everything else?
- Religion — Neither of us are religious at all, so this doesn’t pertain at all.
- Legal rights — There are some convenient rights that come with marriage, but turns out you can take care of all of that with getting a few of the right legal documents signed and notarized. Which we have.
- Tax breaks — In many situations, getting married will lower your tax bill. For us, that’s not the case. We’d actually pay the exact same amount in taxes that we already do separately.
The last piece that was left to address was whether or not we really thought that marriage would give us security. The answer to that is unfortunately a resounding “NO”.
The big one: Does Marriage give you security?
Let’s take a look at some numbers before we dive into our own personal experiences.
The divorce rate in the US is 50% for 1st marriages, 67% for 2nd marriages, and 74% for 3rd marriages. We do not in fact, learn from our mistakes it seems…and we get divorced here a lot.
When we do get divorced, it costs about $15,000 per person.
So there went that illusion as well. I’ve heard that nobody goes into a marriage expecting to get a divorce, but those stats clearly show that it might be a good idea for us to at least start thinking about it as the real possibility that it is.
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
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Our personal experiences with marriage & divorce
We both have very personal experiences with marriage and divorce that have shaped how we view things, and have made us very weary. Both of us currently have a parent that’s on their 3rd try at it, and based on those stats I mentioned above, it doesn’t really look good for either of them. Divorce has deadly consequences, but it’s not just about the outcome of a divorce itself that bothers us. It’s also about everything that we’ve seen accompany those marriages as well that’s made us take a step back.
Divorce has deadly consequences
My mom had me young (at 18) and got married shortly after. It didn’t last very long, and after the separation my biological father committed suicide. He was only 21 years old, and sadly, I will never know him because of that. I was only 3 when he passed away. My mom got together with the man I grew up referring to as my Dad after that, and it was an awful relationship to live through (although I didn’t know this wasn’t the norm at the time).
That relationship was fraught with drug abuse, constant infidelity, anger management issues, so many broken belongings, mental warfare through the kids, and multiple suicide attempts on my mom’s end. That marriage gave me my brothers (the only good thing that came out of it to be honest), but continued to show me that marriage insulates you from absolutely nothing. If anything, it kept them together longer than they should have been because of some false obligation to live a shitty life solely because they were married.
A few months after announcing our engagement, my Fiance and I were dragged through the divorce of his parent’s 30 year marriage, and it was brutal at times. Once again, it was a relationship that should have been either fixed or ended decades before, but coasted because of a false sense of security and a lack of urgency on putting in the effort it required.
Shortly after the divorce was finalized, his mom tragically passed away. Since they were newly divorced and it was no longer his problem, he and his brother were solely responsible for dealing with all of the affairs of their mother’s death; no help from the man who had built a life and family with her for the past 30 years. Within a few months of her cremation, his dad was remarried and working on his 3rd marriage.
Needless to say, neither of us is under any impression that marriage would do much for the security of our relationship.
And divorces? Well, they truly can ruin lives.
“When people divorce, it’s always such a tragedy. At the same time, if people stay together it can be even worse.” — Monica Bellucci
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A generation afraid of divorce
Divorce isn’t something that’s new to most Millenials. They peaked in the US from the 1980s to the 2000s; meaning that MANY of us were dragged through awful marriages and resulting divorces while we were kids. This undoubtedly shaped how we came to view marriages themselves and what it would mean in our own lives one day.
That probably helps to explain why 30% of millennials are actively choosing not to get married.
Seeing all of this, I can’t help but think that maybe our generation isn’t afraid of commitment, maybe we’re afraid of the dysfunctional relationships and catastrophic divorces we’ve been dragged through. Can you really blame us?
When marriages are crumbling like biscuits, and the outcomes are so grave, why not avoid it altogether and keep going with what’s been working? That’s what my anxiety over the issue boiled down to.
Why would I want to risk messing up an amazing relationship, when what we have is honestly going so well? Sure, it would still be an ordeal to split up, but much less of an ordeal than going through a full-on divorce. And that’s a pretty good reason for us.
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Conclusion
I don’t have a problem with marriage, but I do think that it’s worth taking stock of everything between you and your partner before you assume that it needs to be the next step for you to live your lives together. I know that unexpected pause helped us.
When it comes down to it, the goal for us isn’t a long marriage; it’s a long and successful partnership that we both get to enjoy. At the end of the day, I want to know that my partner’s with me because he wants to be, not because he feels like it’s too hard to leave. I trust that if we ever part ways, it will be after we’ve given it our all, as we always have. And if that time comes, I’d rather make that break earlier rather than holding on so long that we grow to hate each other and do irreparable damage because of a false sense of obligation to stay together.
Maybe I would feel cozier as man and wife, but currently, I’ve only felt that we’d be unnecessarily trapping ourselves when we’re basically already married. We’ve been together over 5 years now, have made it through huge life transitions, are the kinds of people to over-communicate, and have still managed to have a huge amount of romantic as well as pragmatic love in our daily lives. It’s been great. When it’s not, we find a way to make it great. That’s what I imagine makes a long and successful marriage anyway.
Until I’m given a valid reason that getting married will be a better version than what we already have going, I don’t see any reason to change it. Maybe one day we’ll get married ceremonially and have that big beautiful dress I fell in love with, but as of now I don’t see a reason to make it legal. We could wear the rings, say the vows, throw a small party or go on an extended vacation together. Either way, it would be about us and not the expectations that others have for our relationship, or societal pressures to validate it. We’ve got the level of commitment that we both need, and isn’t that really the goal?
Thanks for reading along.
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To my fiance:
I love you more than ever, and promise to always work my ass off so that we have the kind of relationship that so many others are constantly seeking.
I promise to keep loving you and appreciating you, because I won’t have a false sense that you are bound to me for life no matter what I do or how I act. I also promise to love myself enough to know when it’s right to leave a relationship, so that we never put ourselves through what we’ve seen and lived through…so that we never lose ourselves.
I will continue to be gentle with our compromises and to always keep working with and for each other. I will always be reminded of how much we trust each other and ourselves because we know that we don’t need a legal institution to give us the permission to decide when and how we want to move forward with our lives.
If we ever decide after all that work that we want to be apart, I will not drag you through a nasty separation that leaves us hating each other because we couldn’t live up to a legal contract, and stayed longer than we should have. I love you that much, and intend to always do so.
I promise that if we ever do decide to legally get married, it won’t be because I feel the need to trap you. I know where we stand, and I trust our commitment to each other. Expensive ass wedding and legal marriage aside.
Thanks for being my very best friend, and being so understanding as I’ve worked through all of my thoughts on this over the past 2 years, even after I agreed to marry you. I know it hasn’t always been easy, and I struggled with going back and forth so often. I questioned our relationship because I was terrified about what it meant for us that I was so worried about getting married. Turns out, it had nothing to do with our relationship after all.
“It’s amazing how one day someone walks into your life, and you cannot remember how you ever lived without them.” — Unknown
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This post was previously published on Medium.com.
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Photo credit: Author [Me & the love of my life right after we got engaged]
