To call off an engagement but stay together

[Lidale]

Is it weird? How many people have done it and if so did you ever end up with a happily ever after down the line with the same person?

And this is why you need to sort this kind of thing out before you bring a child into the relationship.

I think the issue is the "journey" is already tainted. You can't take back the first proposal, which is where your journey to marriage started... That's never going to go away. You also can't take back calling off the proposal and "rescheduling" (which is batshit by the way).

All of that history still exists and will always be a part of your journey. You can't just have a do over and it all goes away. Your entire relationship IS your journey. If you can't cope with that, no perfect proposal is going to magically fix it.

Hi when me and my husband got engaged we had planned a destination wedding but it caused so many Arguments with our families we said fine we won't get married. We then focused on having children instead and it wasn't until our little one was ten months old that we actually ran off and got married in secret only telling our families after the fact. That was five years after our initial engagement. We've been married ten years this year.

If it's going to happen it will but if it doesn't that's fine to. The DH says the children were always more a commitment than the marriage anyway x

I have been the one that had to call the church and cancel because my then partner decided he didn't want to go ahead with it.

I should've just drawn the line then rather than wasting more of my time.

We aren't partners anymore (I did eventually dump him for other reasons) but still live in each others' pockets.

He regrets it deeply now, the poor lamb.

Some people are ok with a relationship that isn't going anywhere though I suppose.

You didn't but the relationship is at the root of your proposal issue, they are intrinsically linked so it's hardly surprising if people comment on the relationship.

Your partner lies, you argue and you've been in therapy, it's great you've tried to make a go of it but after a year you're still not actually sure you want to be with this person although you do know at some point you want to be engaged and married but possibly not to him. If you've not worked through the issues in the last 12 months then at what point do you stop and think I deserve more than this.

Learn to read the OP's posts and what she actually said before being so rude maybe?

It's was nothing to do with razzmatazz at all

@Lidale are you having individual counselling too? Because there does seem to be an awful lot of red flags flying

These days an engagement means nothing, i know loads of people engaged for 10 years plus, a but stupid in my opinion but very common. The first ring is meaningless and sometimes men just give women a ring to shut them up with no intention of marrying them, maybe just don't do any wedding planning and technically stay engaged, don't make a big deal of it and you wont have to explain anything to anybody

You’re seeing the marriage as something separate which starts with the proposal, but it isn’t. It’s just your relationship with added rights and responsibilities that don’t really impact the interpersonal stuff. If your relationship is on the wrong foot, any marriage will be do. A redo of the proposal and a second engagement won’t change this.

We did this. DP was my first long-term boyfriend & basically I said ‘yes’ & then panicked!! My mum had died by then, but before she died had said that she was worried that I hadn’t been out with many others before I took this relationship so seriously, & so I then kept remembering her words & wondering whether it was the right thing to do. We stayed together, & DP said he would only propose once & so it was up to me to let him know when I changed my mind! A year later I decided I was sure after all….fast forward 34 years and we are incredibly happily married with 2 grown up children & 2 grandchildren! Your relationship is between you & your DP, nobody else 💕

It’s not a ridiculous concept really. I’ve been engaged for a long time, we don’t plan to get married but there is no issue in our relationship to cause this. I know many couples in this scenario.

sorry i've just read more of your posts, honestly I think its fuss about nothing, you live together and have a child together, as we would say locally, you're married but not churched, i wouldn't be holding much stock in an engagement of any kind, go and get married if you want and forget about what kind of engagement you have, its honestly no big deal, an engagement and in actual fact a wedding are meaningless, its your marriage you should thinking about and what kind of marriage it will be, an engagement is one day, a wedding is one day. Get married or dont its as simple as that.

An engagement is a plan to get married. So if you don’t actually plan to get married you’re not engaged 🤦‍♀️

I’ve met a woman once, a friend of a friend, who was showing off her substantial engagement ring.
When asked when they were getting married she said she wasn’t planning to.
In her particular case the ring seemed enough 🤷‍♀️

Staying together without being married is not ridiculous at all, nobody suggested it was.
Announcing your engagement when you don't actually plan to marry is downright weird.

Unless you imagine it means something other than a intention to marry?
It doesn't 🤷🏻‍♀️

God!

OP I think that it's not particularly weird to call off an engagement but stay together, if that's what feels right to you. It's really nobody elses business. Proposals, engagements and marriage isn't some altered state you enter into. It's still you, and them, arguing about who's turn it is to put the bins out, within a legal framework.

Whether you end up happily down the line with the same person isn't really related to the proposal, or the timeline, and everything to do with the relationship.

@Lidale

I think the issue is that you seem to be decoupling the proposal from the relationship itself as if the proposal is a living, breathing thing which has its own life.

The proposal is pretty irrelevant really: it all hinges on the quality of the relationship and whether you are compatible enough to go the distance and it doesn't sound like you are. Sort out where you stand on this before you worry about the proposal.

so your partner inarticulately told you he wanted to spend the rest of his life with you and make you his wife, he didn’t do it well enough so he tried again but again that wasn’t good enough?

I would see this as a major red flag if I were your partner. You sound demanding.

I understand you had issues with finances etc, but that’s life. You take the bad and the good of you are married. You clearly do not want to be married to your partner or you wouldn’t be making him jump through hoops.

is it not enough that he wants to spend the rest of his life with you?!

You don’t need to break off the engagement, just don’t set a date for the wedding until you both feel ready. My niece did this, they actually cancelled the wedding, stayed together then got married a few years later, they’re very happy.

To me I see a proposal as a start to the journey towards marriage. I didn't want it to start off tainted.

It's usually seen as more an announcement on intent rather than a journey.

We had an understanding that we would be getting married born of many conversations about the future and where we saw our relationship- DH then managed to actually make proposal a surprise to me but we spent 2 and half years engaged trying to get us and our careers in same place.

I wonder if your DP was trying similar - checking you were happy with a proposal before proposal and you were confused by this - or if he made no effort which indicated he didn't care how you felt or didn't know you'd want that which is a red flag.

My DM made a fuss of engagement but everyone else ignored it completely and families were nightmare around wedding. So family not being happy - your adults you have a child together so do what makes you happy not what others think you should be doing.

My Dsis has been engaged twice - not married once - it seems to be something her exs pulled out when relationship was in trouble and both times there was then a surprise unplanned pg and both times relationship ended. I'm wondering if this was the situation - papering over cracks and perhaps the relationship should have ended instead.

I have a friend who broke off an engagement after a year, and had been together for 4/5 years. They're still together but I, and all of our friends, don't think it will last.

Sounds like you need to work on your relationship before you entertain the idea of getting engaged again.

Hi OP. I think I understand where you’re coming from, but I do also think that undoing the engagement in totality is likely to further ‘taint’ the relationship.
You didn’t get engaged during your finest hour, sure, but as you say you’ve worked hard as a couple to get to a different and better place. That, to my mind, is a very important part of the journey towards a happy marriage, is it not?

I don’t think you can realistically expect to ‘re-do’ the engagement now without causing hurt in the short term that could lead to bigger problems, but perhaps you could reframe the whole thing in your head instead.

You’re engaged, but with no wedding date set. Could you and your partner perhaps agree that the next big step, when you’re both ready and feeling good about the future, would be for him (or you) to ‘propose’ the wedding date? That’s ultimately the goal here, so why not make that the big moment that demonstrates your love & commitment to each other? You don’t need to take a step backwards to move forwards together

You just need to talk about what you both want. I was with someone for a couple of years. He knew I wanted to get married. He said he wanted to get married and buy a house later that year, but then changed his mind as he wasn’t ready. He felt I had pushed him into it. I ended the relationship as I thought if he wasn’t sure I was the one I wasn’t wasting my time.

We were planning to get married when we got engaged, we didn’t formalise those plans by booking a venue (initially we did view venues and didn’t find anything we liked, so we held off … and held off … then we just stopped looking at venues. Or rather we do still occasionally look - we last viewed a venue about a year ago. We may get married one day, but we have no active plans to do so.

I think you need to make your peace with the circumstances of the engagement not being as you would have wished. To call it off altogether would be a vote of no confidence, and trying to recreate it as a perfect event wouldn't be a very genuine thing to do.