Do Long Engagements Really Bulletproof Your Marriage?

My substantial and purely anecdotal evidence for breaking the rules

Love at first sight — is it ever legit?

Anne Marie, my Facebook friend, was feeling sketched out. The guy she had been dating for a few months had let the “L” word slip. Worse yet, she feared he might be floating a proposal her way in the near future. She was ready to run, and most of her online friends were egging her on.

I was the lone voice in the wilderness. “Hey, wait,” I said. “Maybe he knows what he wants out of life, and realizes it’s you? Isn’t it worth exploring, to at least see what he’s got in mind?”

Mine was the minority opinion. This is often the case, in terms of love and relationships. Why? My parents were lovebirds. The man who would become my dad proposed on their second date. My mother cautioned that they “shouldn’t jump into anything,” and “needed time to get to know each other,” so they waited a full two (2) months before heading to Vegas.

Sixty happy years on, it seems those crazy kids might just make it. Not everyone wins the lottery…but someone does.

See, I have put some thought into this

Back in the day, I used to co-lead communications skills classes for couples. My supervisor and I led small groups of couples through weekly meetings where they discussed their relationships, shared their experiences, and ran through exercises. They offered each other advice, praise, comfort, and support. It was transformative.

I recommend everyone participate in a group like this, especially those who think they’re “in good shape.” Everyone needs reminders. Everyone needs a place where they can talk openly about their relationship in front of their spouse, where they will receive love and support.

By the way

I recommend that couples wait two to three years between meeting and getting married.

What I’m here to say is, however, that life is difficult to game. Following the rules won’t guarantee you success. Those who break the rules sometimes win. Let me tell you some stories.

Playing the Long Game

Some couples try to outsmart the statistics by putting off marriage as long as possible. This leads to them dating — and usually living together — five to ten years or more before walking down the aisle. They reason that it takes a handful of years to know your partner, to make sure the relationship is solid and that there are no hidden time bombs waiting to detonate somewhere in the distant future.

This path must have success stories. In my experience, those relationships don’t have any more chance of success than others.

Sometimes the planes with the longest runway crash a few miles away.

The long runway

My friends Ruby and Jock met in college and lived together for eleven years before getting married. Cute as kittens, everyone knew their pet names for each other.

Fast forward another ten years. Jock had moved his sick and aging mother into the house he shared with Ruby. A few months later, he moved to Paris to study painting at the Sorbonne. Ruby, a lawyer with a heavy caseload, found herself carrying the weight at home as well as at work.

To make a short story even shorter, Ruby stuck it out as long as she could. When was Jack coming home? Maybe after this next exam session, but maybe not.

Ruby found a hospice for her mother-in-law and filed for divorce. Shortly after that, she was pregnant and married to someone else.

So why didn’t their long period of living together prevent this breakup?

Ruby and Jack, like most people in love, focused primarily on their many remarkable similarities. However, their differences didn’t fit the narrative and were glossed over. These two didn’t know they needed to establish healthy ways of settling disagreements as they came up. After all, since they planned to never have disagreements, what would be the point?

Given all that, the result is no surprise. As life got more complicated, Ruby and Jack didn’t have sufficient relationship tools to handle the increasing stressors. Their relationship died.

Other people make a shorter trip

The Monterey Institute of Marriage

I’ve never known anyone who planned on jumping into marriage. I have known people, however, who got married before anyone knew they were dating.

When I was in the Army, I attended the Defense Language School in Monterey, California. On our first week there, our Battalion Commander called all the new students in for a briefing. “One out of every two people here will be married when you leave,” she said. “The issue is so pervasive that we’ve started calling this place the Monterey Institute of Marriage.” My friends and I all smirked and glanced around at each other. Surely none of us would fall for that.

A month later, my best friend Genie came to class with a small gold band on her ring finger. “We went to Vegas.”

“Who?” I asked. “Who the hell did you marry?”

“Tom!” she said. “We knew we were right for each other, so we said, why wait?”

A month ago, neither Genie nor Tom had known the other existed. “Well good luck to you both!” I said. That’ll last a month, I thought.

In the thirty-five years since then, Genie and Tom’s dual careers as linguists took them to all over the world. Both worked with nuclear disarmament after the fall of the Soviet Union, served as translators in Bosnia, and were on the ground in Kuwait in 1990 and in Uzbekistan in 2001.

They are now retired from the Army. They own a small ranch in the Texas panhandle and raise miniature cattle.

“We never knew each other as anything other than spouses,” Genie told me later. “I have a lot of friends, but Tom was never one of them; he’s always been my husband.” She shrugged. “For whatever reason, that seems to have made the difference.”

Let me say here that plenty of other couples got married while we were stationed at Monterey, and not all progressed happily. However, Genie and Tom remained focused on their roles as husband and wife and got to know each other along the way.

Sometimes you make the wrong turn

My friend Oscar remembers the moment he first saw the woman who would become his wife. Delphine was standing in the shade of a sugar maple tree, fanning herself with her broad-brimmed straw hat and raising her glass in a toast. It was early June and unusually hot for New England, so the wedding reception guests had fanned out from beneath the party tent and were wandering off down toward the river, where there was a little bit of a breeze.

She had already seen Oscar. He was thirty yards away, but as the bridegroom, he and his longtime girlfriend-now-wife Jenn had been at the center of the party all afternoon.

Delphine was someone’s plus-one, but Oscar couldn’t figure out whose.

Despite this inauspicious start, the story of Delphine and Oscar is a love story that’s lasted 30 years and counting.

Oscar is analytical and decisive. He soon realized that his marriage to Jenn was not sustainable. Despite how long they had been together, how well they knew each other, and how much both extended families wanted them to succeed, they filed for an amicable divorce within a few months. Soon, Oscar rented a small duplex. Delphine moved in, bringing a beaten-up velvet couch and her pet African parrot.

Oscar, who in earlier generations would have lost his position because of this “mess,” was able to keep working at his first job out of college, working at an investment house; Delphine, who had stopped going to school after her freshman year, went back and finished her Bachelor of Science, and later a Master’s, and later a Ph.D. She now works as a child psychologist.

Today they own a Queen Anne Victorian, where they raised their three kids.

Make the right choice, and then make the choice right

Most couples don’t seem to use the engagement /living together years well. They may see red flags out of the corner of their eye, don’t investigate. It’s just easier to ignore an issue and keep on stepping around it rather than disrupt the life they have already got going.

Breaking up a household and dividing the assets and friends are not things we do lightly, whether married or not. For that reason, couples often waste the “getting to know you” phase before marriage, robbing themselves of the benefits of waiting.

That is, unless

That is, unless they actively put thought into the strength and potential of their relationship. Read books on how to have healthy relationships. Find and take diagnostic tests — personality tests for themselves as individuals and relationship tests for couples. Are they willing to change their habits, predispositions, plans — and even their goals — in order to make the relationship succeed?

They should ask themselves whether they are staying together because it’s the path of least resistance or because we actively choose the person we’re with over all others. What about those luscious people we haven’t met yet?

Most importantly: Do they have the guts to move out and move on if they uncover an uncomfortable truth during the pre-marriage discernment period?

If yes, then they have a chance of success.

By the way, I recommend everyone participate in a group like the couples group I mentioned above. It’s best to do a thing when you think you don’t need it. Keeping your relationship skills well-tuned will help your marriage avoid the rapids that topple other boats.

Run a search for marriage support groups in your area now — yes, right now — and get tight with Dr. Gottman.