When a couple first announces they’re engaged, the immediate reaction (all being well) is mostly “congratulations”. But the next phrase to come out of the well-wisher’s mouth is often a little more logistical: “So, when’s the wedding?” Historically, you could bet on the answer to this sitting somewhere between a year or 16 months on from the proposal. But, today, ceremonies can sit multiple years away from the day the person in love gets down on one knee.
One couple living in Los Angeles, Jody Watkins and Nicholas Brucculeri, were betrothed for so long that they even threw a party celebrating one year until they’d walk down the aisle (the halfway point of their engagement) rather than simply throwing the wedding itself. “We have to relish this engaged time we have together,” the bride-to-be told the New York Times of the celebration, which is becoming known as a “negative-one” or “minus-one anniversary” party.
Two years – or even three – is, of course, nothing compared to the long engagements of celebrities that have previously hit the headlines: Jean Todt and Michelle Yeoh were engaged for almost two decades. It took Amy Adams and Darren Le Gallo seven years to get down the aisle. Meanwhile, Orlando Bloom and Katy Perry, had a son in 2020 and split last June after getting engaged in 2019, with the latter now (bizarrely) coupled up with the former Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau.
While this is not to say that all elongated engagements end in disaster, the practice extending beyond celebrities does mark a notable shift in how and why we get married today. One big change, says wedding planner and host of the Let’s Get You Wed! podcast Hannah Rose, is that people are tying the knot later. In the UK, marriage age has been steadily climbing since the Seventies, with the media age for men being 25 for men and 23 for women in 1972, according to the ONS. By 2023, this had increased to almost 35 for men and 33 for women – a whopping 10-year increase.
“When people get engaged older, they often want to have a family quickly, so they focus on babies and buying a house,” says Rose of the biological clock hanging over humanity’s head. “Even 10 years ago, it was the norm to meet someone when you were young and start having children, whereas now it’s really shifted,” she adds. Baby now, wedding later, with a proposal and a big diamond ring signifying just enough commitment that one party is hitching their wagon to the other’s. “It’s quite rare that we see people in their early twenties now,” she adds. “And actually, if we do get a couple that age, we think, ‘ooh, they’re young.’”
Cameron and Jess, a 30-year-old couple who’ve been engaged for just under two years – and have since welcomed their first child, Philip – won’t get married any time soon. “If we’re blessed enough, we want to have maybe three or four children,” Cameron explains, adding they’d like to have “little gaps” in between each child. “That obliged us to start when we did,” he says. “Jess doesn’t want to be pregnant or trying for a baby when we get married. She just wants to be able to have a drink, enjoy the day and look beautiful. She would look beautiful regardless of it she was pregnant or not,” he adds. “But she wants to be able to enjoy it.”
Money, of course, is another hurdle to manoeuvre, with the average wedding predicted to cost £32,000 by 2028. “People get engaged and then they actually start to realise just how much things cost,” says Rose. “It’s not cheap to get married. So, often people will have an engagement party if they’re not getting married for a few years because they want to celebrate with their friends and family now and then to save up properly.”
This is true for Cameron and Jess. “We thought we might get married not so long after we got engaged – and then we looked at the cost for what we’d want, with a quick turnaround, and we wouldn’t have been able to have the type of wedding we want to have,” Cameron explains. “We don’t want to get married for the sake of getting married. We want to enjoy the day and have the wedding we’d like with all of our friends and family around.” This, in theory, should be a reasonable enough request.
The other sticking point is being too busy with work to deal with the admin of wedding planning. Research has shown that wedding planning disproportionately falls to women in heterosexual couples – “another form of unpaid and unappreciated women’s work, not that unlike housework,” the research published in Qualitative Sociology reads. With women now outstripping men in the college-educated workforce, you do the maths.
“Sometimes, couples come to me who’ve been engaged for a year and have the money to book the ceremony but haven’t done a thing,” says Rose. “They’re normally really strong professional people with big careers who just do not have the time to plan and haven’t even had the time to think about what they’d like. It’s time – people don’t have any.”
Young finance professionals Emma and James have been engaged since September 2024 and are yet to name a date for their nuptials. “We work 8am until 6pm every day in London and it takes us an hour to commute home, so we’re out of the house 7am until 7pm every day,” says Emma. “By the time we get home, all we want to do is veg out on the sofa. Even cooking dinner is an ordeal. By the time you’ve eaten, the day is gone. That’s definitely made wedding planning a lot harder.”
On top of being time poor, we live in an age of option overload, which leaves everyone with choice paralysis. “We’ve really noticed in the wedding industry that decisions are taking longer now,” says Rose. “People are sitting on things, going on TikTok, on Instagram, looking at other options and reviews. Whereas, a decade ago, you’d have gone to a wedding fair, seen a photographer and booked them. That’s not really a thing any more. People don’t have time. Yet, they want to research.”
Emma has fallen victim to this overwhelming decision fatigue. “In hindsight, I wish I’d hired a wedding planner,” she says. “At the time, I was like, ‘that’s £6k that I don’t need to spend’ but now I’ve realised how much a wedding is, that’s just a fraction.” So far, the couple have researched venues in Italy, Spain, Portugal and South Africa. “There’s just unbelievable levels of choice and then wading through to find out how much each of them is is an absolute nightmare,” Emma says.
“No website gives you the price on anything,” she complains of the cloak and dagger approach to cost. “You enquire, get a brochure, wade through it, only to find out the cost of each thing is more than you’ve ever spent on anything. Even a standard videographer is £3.5k – that’s more than any holiday I’ve ever been on. It’s the most demoralising experience ever.”
Licensed relationship coach and therapist Jaime Bronstein has mixed feelings about the length of time it can now take couples to get down the aisle after a proposal. “If you know your ‘why’ for the long engagement and you’re clear on that and keep moving forwards, then it’s all okay,” she says. “But if you’re stuck, with no planning going on, in this kind of limbo, not sure what’s going on, it’s unnecessary elongating… it’s fear.”
Bronstein notes that, although work and family life can be a legitimate reason for some, it’s just an excuse for others. “Be really open with each other,” she says. “It can be like when a guy says he hasn’t texted a girl back because he’s ‘too busy at work’. Work hasn’t changed. The same as with dating or exercise: whenever you say you don’t have time to do something in life, it’s not the real truth. You’ve got to be honest with yourself.”