Getting engaged after you’ve been dating is one of the most joyful feelings in the world! You’re so in love and now you know for certain that you’ll be with your boyfriend or girlfriend for the rest of your life! It feels like walking around in a cloud of excitement and you constantly feel like you might be dreaming. I remember the morning after I got engaged, the first thing I did was check to see if I still had a ring on my finger because I was just sure that I had dreamt it. But it was real, and it was such a great feeling!
However, shortly after the proposal, excitement can turn into stress as you realize all that comes with planning a wedding. The to-do list gets started and all of a sudden you can find yourself feeling more like partners in the wedding planning business instead of fiancé’s who are in love with each other. If you’re in the season of life in between dating and being married, here are some tips for dating while engaged!
Pick a Time Each Week To Avoid Wedding Talk
One of the key mistakes we can make when we’re engaged is that our conversations become dictated by wedding planning. It’s easy to do when you’re needing to make decisions together and you have deadlines that are approaching. The effects that this can have on your relationship can be hard! You’ll find yourself burnt out on wedding planning, and once the wedding is over you may find yourself not knowing what to talk about. I would recommend making sure that there is at least one night a week where there is no wedding talk! Or if it’s unavoidable, set the boundary that wedding conversations will occur within the first 30 minutes of your night and after that, it’s off-limits. This will allow for you to continue to grow in your love of one another and to maintain the excitement that you’re about to commit to forever with your person. Not to mention, it’s a great weekly reminder of why you wanted to marry them in the first place!
Treat Everything Like a Date
Whether it’s an actual date night with dinner and a movie, or it’s a wedding planning task that you need to get done. When you treat it all like a date, it will make the task that much more enjoyable and will make your nights together feel even more special. Whether it’s dressing up, planning to get drinks or dessert after the appointment, or making games out of the task at hand (envelope packing races for example), do what you can to make it fun and enjoy that time together! Your wedding day is one of the most important days of your life, so you don’t want the prep and planning to feel like a drag! You want it to feel fun and joyful and like it’s bringing you both closer together as you prepare for the big day!
Read a Marriage Book Together
It may not feel like it when you’re engaged, but I promise you that getting married is one of the biggest life transitions that you’ll go through. Both physically, especially if you’ve never lived together, and emotionally as you commit to that person forever. It never hurts to be prepared for this, and it’s even sweeter if you can prepare together. Pick a book about marriage and walk through the material together! Some of the books will even include reflection questions that you can answer together. Not only does this prepare you for the rest of your life, but it will inevitably increase your relational communication skills! It will also help you have the correct expectations of your future spouse as you learn how they feel about things and how they think you should approach situations. My husband and I took a full class together through our local church and it was such a gift to walk through that material together to prepare us for the rest of our life. This is something that should be taken seriously and it’s worth it to put in the work beforehand!
Wedding Planning is a Team Sport
Often when wedding planning, it’s easy for one person to make all (or most) of the decisions. Often it’s the bride who takes the brunt of the wedding planning responsibility and it’s easy to run with that without taking your fiance’s opinions into consideration. It’s important to ask at the beginning of engagement what things each person cares a lot about to make sure that you’re both being heard as you prepare for the big day. You never want to assume that the other person won’t care about a certain thing without at least asking. If it happens that you both care a lot about a certain aspect of the day, do your best to not end up with a “winner” and a “loser,” but find a compromise or middle ground that you both can be excited about! It’s also totally okay to outsource or delegate tasks. If you have family members or friends that want to help, lean on them! There’s nothing wrong with asking for help! And ultimately, it will be better for your relationship if you’re not having to do every single thing for the wedding. Stress can be taxing, and if the people that love you both want to relieve some of that stress, take them up on it!
Being engaged is such a fun season of life! If you’re the type of person that has dreamt about your wedding for a lot of your life, you don’t want this season to fly by. Take your time and soak it all in as you prepare for one of the greatest days of your life! Or if you’re the type of person who has dreamt about the person that you’d spend the rest of your life with, you want to enjoy this season with that person! If you’re intentional about your time together during engagement, your relationship is only going to grow deeper. Which is exactly what you want if you’re about to spend the rest of your life with this person!
If you’re deep in wedding planning, click here for more wedding tips!
