How Soon Is Too Soon To Get Engaged?
A proposal used to mean marriage. But, says Kate Spicer, these days it's just a way to say, “I love you” - for now

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Engagement (a pledge to marry) has a history stretching back to the birth of Christ. Then came along a few overexcitable celebrities and suddenly, it's reduced to the level of a cheap romantic gesture, no more serious than, say, covering your loved one's bed with rose petals. For them, it's just another way of saying, 'I love you.'

Increasingly, a wedding is not necessarily expected to follow an engagement. Engagement has become a stand-alone entity, a declaration of passion that often leads everywhere but to the altar. A stand-alone engagement (or SAE – you can send it back without hassle) is popular among the rich and famous, who can afford to be flippant about life.

When celebrities announce their new engagements (almost weekly) they clearly don't refer to Debrett's New Guide to Etiquette & Modern Manners by John Morgan. It says, “Silence, until a firm decision on future plans has been made, is always preferable to a hasty announcement followed by a sad retraction.”

Those wishing to enter into the frivolous and very public SAE would, of course, totally disregard such advice. For them, it has nothing to do with setting a marriage date and everything to do with drawing attention to the early, exciting, sexually charged stage of a love affair.

It's the result of a man racking his brains to find another way to tell his partner how much he really, really loves her, more than the world and the stars, times one billion million trillion. So what does he do? He proposes.

And then he has second thoughts – like the boyfriend who looks at his supposed beloved's ring and says, “That's my wide-screen TV.” In the end they split up, she gives the ring back and... he buys a wide-screen TV.

Or the cunning, female CEO who, knowing her boyfriend was cheating on her, talked him into buying her an engagement ring. As soon as it was on her finger she told him to get lost, sold the ring and got on with getting over the whole thing.

Perhaps it's a good thing. A long engagement that doesn't culminate in signing the marriage certificate is preferable to a short engagment and impulsive marriage, followed by the sound of divorce lawyers rubbing their hands together.

In centuries past, a rash engagement might've seen the father stepping in and asking , 'Have you got my little girl pregnant?' But parents are almost entirely out of the process now. Perhaps that's why engagement has lost so much importance. It used to be the moment you announced to the world you were getting married. Then your mother started arranging the wedding and your father took out a second mortgage to pay for it.

Now couples are paying for their own weddings and the parents approval isn't really an issue either way.

I've been engaged twice, both times in certain knowledge, deep down, that I had not found the mythical 'one'. But it was great fun being asked. I was young and perhaps I backed out because I sensed what a sex-starved and hard-work commitment marriage would really be, It is not, as my mother might say, to be taken lightly.

The more friends of mine that marry, the more I recognise what an impressive institution it is – if, that is, you do it properly.

Being in a long-term, loving relationship is a million per cent better than being alone. But it takes selfless compromise – which cuts your average self-obsessed celeb out of the picture. It's not for the immature or the selfish. What the immature and the selfish get is the SAE, a fabulous ring with a huge rock and a great sex life. Little wonder then, really, that it's so popular.

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