5 Year Engagement

[Barbellebeck]

Me and my Fiancé have been together for 10 years and engaged for 2. We met when we were young and moved into our first home together 2 years ago.
The house is old and in need of a complete renovation which we are in the middle of.
We have decided to postpone our wedding until 2025 due to the cost of BIG renovations starting soon, the cost of weddings these days and it also helps to have that extra time to really save, plan, organise and save for our amazing honeymoons!
Has anyone else been in this situation?
If feel like we have to justify why we are engaged for so long to everyone!

I think it's absolutely fine, obviously entirely up to you and your fiance when and how you get married. You don't have to justify yourself to anyone, in fact if it was me I would probably stop with the 'excuses' because you are kind of implying that you'll be paying for this amazing bells and whistles wedding that you need to save for for 5 years where you might actually prefer something more restrained which is absolutely fine too. 'We're planning on getting married in 2025' is all anyone really needs to know at this stage, the whys and wherefores are for you to work out! The only really important thing is to make sure you have sorted ownership of the house in a suitable way in case anything bad was to happen in the next few years (relationship breakdown, job loss, serious illness) before you get married to make sure you are both protected, and also of course if you are thinking of having kids and one of you might give up your job or scale back their career significantly, you might want to think about doing a quick register office job earlier and save the big party for further down the line?

Could not agree more with this! Our priority when it came to marriage, was the legal aspects of protecting one another in the event of any sort of major disaster; be that relationship breakdown, illness, job loss, death etc as we had invested in our first shared property shortly before we married.

You have to decide for yourselves if it's the party element that you're wanting to save for, rather than the actually wedding. I know quite a few people who have done a register office wedding during the pandemic or due to finances etc, and then have had a massive vow renewal party type celebration on their wedding anniversary 2-5 years down the line which seemed to fulfil their wishes.

If you want to delay the whole thing as is entirely reasonable, then you need to make sure that you're both legally protected in the interim period - especially as you're going to be spending serious coin on your renovations, you need to make sure every eventuality is prepared for.

For what it's worth, we waited 11 years to get married (had a 7 month-ish engagement as we wanted to get married on our anniversary of our first date) - we were very young when we got together, and we wanted to wait until we had matured and had established whether our long term goals were aligned rather than relying on the blinkers of teenage/early 20's love. We faced a lot of pressure and questions about it - they were shut down with "If we get married, it will be when it's the right time for us", we didn't deviate from this as it wasn't anyone else's business. Just rinse and repeat - you don't have to justify yourselves to anyone.

What’s the point?

just get married and have a party

its not the party that matters but the friends and the marriage