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I'm in the same boat as you mostly. FI and I did not utter the words "wedding" or "marriage" before he proposed. The only thing I ever said was a few weeks before he asked me. I said 'I want to be with you forever". I'm SOOO glad we didn't discuss getting married and being engaged first, just because like you, I was BLOWN AWAY and that was the best part. Knowing it's coming I think might just be stressful! I'm very happy with the way it happened for us.
i think that it is super sweet that he wanted everyting to be a surprise for you.
My FI and I discussed marriage and engagement about 9 months before his purposal. we even went ring shopping..many times. my ring was a total surprise though; but he is not too sneaky. but he really tried bless his heart.
his phone rang one night and he was talking all discrete and said i can run by tomorrow. when he got off i was like are you going to a friends tomorrow ( we lived together already) night? he was like no i just gotta run an eran and i just knew exactly what it was. also, this was 1 week before our trip to florida.so i figured he would do it in florida.
so we were at our house in florida and i touched his legg and felt the big ring box in his shorts cargo pocket! i jumped up and said what is that! he was like nothing. he asked me the next day.
he was really sweet and it was totally romantic and i was not expecting it at that time or anything.
he did a wonderful job just not very sneaky but he really really tried to be. he is so cute...
anyway...so i kind of do wish that it would have been a big surprise (always greener on the other side..hehe).
what am i saying? it was perfect :)
I think the majority of women who are here didn't bring it up extensively, if at all. LOL... I think even those of is on the waiting side don't really talk to our SOs as much as we chat it out on the board. It seems that the older the woman is, the more that marriage is talked about. For instance I'm 29, weddings are my business (literally) so of course we've spoken about it. I have NO idea when he'll propose nor what the ring will look like even though I hope it'll have a halo setting lol! We did however and do talk about our futures together because well we have a life we've built together now. And I honestly don't think of my future without him in it with me. We're a team, a unit and one day will be husband and wife. When, lol I have no idea, wish I did, what type of ring (dunno that either). How, Lol dunno that either, I have several wonderful weddings planned in my head :D....
When you say getting married, do you mean the wedding etc, or the life after the wedding?
Well, we didn't talk about anything really. I mean obviously we imagined our lives together and planned for things accordingly we just didnt share our ideas til we were engaged :) but we definitely didnt talk anything about a wedding. that was like a no-go zone for us lol.. but for the couples who live together already, or are a bit older than me (I am 21 right now, 22 at the wedding) I totally understand talking before the proposal. I feel like that would be a natural progression in that situation, but I guess because we are both in school (well I am in school, he just graduated TODAY! YAY!) it was much easier to not go there.
But its definitely fun to hear everyones stories. I am glad we did it the way we did, but I also didn't have much "waiting" time. I figured he wouldnt even think about proposing until after he graduated so I thought I would start "waiting" then, but he did it so early and caught me off guard! I don't know what I would've done had I actually had to wait for the ring lol..
My FI and I had discussed marriage at about 6 months of dating. We continued to talk about it hypothetically until we decided we definitely wanted to be married to each other at about the 1 year mark but we weren't financially ready to get married (both working only part time and going to school full time). So we put it on the back burner. That didn't stop us from talking about marriage and our wedding though. We actually had a lot of it planned before he officially asked me at about 3 years of dating. For me, the engagement was still a surprise, and a wonderful occasion. I don't think I'd want to be completely blown away by an engagement though, I wouldn't want to feel like he was making the decision without me because getting married is a big step that *I* feel should be made together.
Not trying to bash the OP or anything, just my feelings on the subject. :)
We actually talked about it a lot before. And we mutually decided that we should get married after I graduate (undergrad)...No real proposal, but I am okay with that. I feel like it was right for us to discuss it a lot before deciding to take the next step.
My FI and I talked about it a lot! But it was different for us we wanted to accomplish things before we got married and we did yet we were together while accomplishing things by the time he had proposed we had been living together for 4 years, owned a house together and had made many career and life decisions together. We had joint finances before he even started saving for my ring and so when he did start saving for my ring I knew about it and we decided on our wedding date and booked some vendors before the official proposal. It was more of a decision that we made together that this was the right time in our lives to get married.
The proposal itself was still a surprise as he threw me off and I didn't think it was happening until later in the fall.
Well, I definitely wouldnt say it was HIS idea and I had no say in it. We both knew this was what we wanted so it wasnt necessary that we talk about it. I guess we are a bit old fashioned, but thats our relationship and I'm very happy with it that way. He will be the leader of our household both financially and spiritually, I guess thats just how we like it :) SO, it only made sense that he take the lead. I totally understand the idea of talking about it because it is a big decision, but thats also why we waited for 2 years before getting engaged.
I feel like when you hit a certain age (marrying age I guess you could all it) and you meet THE person and you both can just feel it. I think that is talking enough and in that situation shouldn't you expect that it is inevitable no matter what. Kind of like I KNOW I am going to marry this man, so whats the rush in talking about the future. I know it will be there when we get ready to talk about it, I know its taken care of and it will be great. So, thats why we waited. It was important to the FI that he totally surprise me and I know that he thought long and hard about it on his own without me influencing him. Because when you REALLY get down to it, isn't it always us girls thinking about before it even crossing our guys minds? well, because a lot of times thats how it goes, I MADE myself keep my mouth shut about future talks. I knew what I wanted and I wanted him to be ready on his own also.
I think I am rambling trying to say what I mean lol.. But I TOTALLY see both sides, they both make perfect sense, but I have a friend who bugs her BF about getting engaged ALL the time and it just seems liek she pushes him further from it every time she mentions it. SO, who knows I guess its different for everyone?
were not married but we talk about getting married and talk about our future together frequently, we know were going to be together. were just two crazy kids in love haha.
we were together for 3 and a half years when we got engaged, and I'd say that from the 2.5 year point on, it was a fairly regular conversation (lots of our friends started getting engaged/married/pregnant and I was reeeeeeaally ready to make that step as well). Basically every major (or minor) holiday/time he looked at me funny I thought it was coming :)
the funny thing with me and FH is that i had a talk with himmonths before he proposed that i pretty much didnt care if i EVER got married - i was happy in life as it was, and if marriage happened or didnt i would be okay either way since i was happy. little did i know that he had already bought the ring! it was a total surprise when he proposed. i really truly was floored. did i mention how perfect he is for me???? 
@lns: i'm pretty sure that M would have appreciated if it was entirely his idea. However we are much older than you and your fi... M is 33 and as i stated previously i'm 29. Trust me when I say at my age if it was important to know that the guy that I am involved with wanted marriage because I did. it's hilarious because when we first started dating I didn't even want to be married well not until i was 31 or so. then hurricane gustav happened and i realized i wanted to spend the rest of my life with him. i told him and probably pushed until february or so of this year, i believe and then things changed and i just stopped talking about it...
he bought it up in june and we have loosely been discussing it ever since... i really think it depends on the couple and the relationship. M is definitely the leader of my house. However we are partners and we discuss everything with each other. He's my best friend so of course I like talking to him about my future and marriage, etc. I think he now understands that I am just excited lol and that I'm nervous and scared and happy because this is the only time in my life that I will get to experience this and I get to experience it with my soulmate. This man carries my heart with him wherever he is and I am blessed and lucky to say that I carry his with me. I don't think that has caused him to think I'm pushing him or anything like that. I think he knows i'm just a control freak and he has told me time and time again this is one thing i will have no control over. so i have NO IDEA when anything will happen lol!! or what the ring will look like....
As far as your friend, have her visit the waiting section, she may definitely be able to relax a bit more when she sees that there are other women in her same situation. I am sure it's hard for her because you're engaged and she's ready to be married so badly.
@lns -- I totally understand where you are coming from. I think we talked about it from the beginning simply because we knew that it was right. We are both very involved in our church, and in fact I prayed about him before I would even accept his invitation to go on our first date! So, I think from that standpoint, it just seemed natural to talk about the future since we knew we would be together.
We are actually both fairly young, and don't live together. So I would say we mutually discussed getting married in the future. I don't think I harped on him to propose because there were distinct reasons why early on was not the right time for us. And I knew the time would come.
Its so interesting to see everyones point of vieww! @crebre I am DEFINITELY going to tell her to visit the waiting section! I think she would love it! heck, I love it, I like the excitement of all the girls when they get engaged!
@manda I totally get where your coming from, I guess its a pretty similar situation. In actuality we talked about it often when we were first together because we were just SO infatuated! We couldnt wait to start our lives. it really stopped completely when it hit us how serious we actually both were about it. We were like woah! okay, its definitely happening now, lets stop talking about it. that sounds kinda weird tho huh? oh well lol...
but regardless it is definitely a partnership. getting here was a team effort, I was just completely surprised about the proposal lol. But when I say hes the leader, I guess I mean it more in a biblical sense. Not so much in a like old school dominating way. Just so no one takes that the wrong way lol..
@lns: i knew what you meant by leader :D... and omg the waiting section is soooooooooooooo fun!!! i think we've had like 20 or so ladies get engaged in the last few months!
ahhh! thats so exciting for them! My friend definitely needs to join because then when she does FINALLY (they've been together 5! years!) then I can comment! hahaha
thats also another thing kinda odd about my friends relationship her BF like WILL NOT talk about getting engaged but they have been together 5 years!! any advice for her? I have no idea what to tell her, or advice to give.. I've never been in that situation :(
@lns: no advise, but maybe he's waiting to become more stable or graduate from school or something like that?
@lns -- my fsil dated her (now husband) for 6 years before they got engaged. They were both in comfortable careers and he owned a house. It seemed like there was nothing holding them back. They talked about getting married at about the 3 year mark and then they didn't talk about it AT ALL. I can't imagine waiting three years for a proposal, and not even knowing when it will happen. It was getting to the point where friends where advising her to move back to her hometown (she had moved about 5 hours away to be closer to him) to make him reevaluate their relationship.
And then he proposed last Christmas. I guess I don't really have any advice for your friend. :/ I would say that unless she wants to wait x years, she needs to try to have an open conversation with him, just to try to understand where he is coming from.
I hate surprises - I notoriously react badly in the first few moments because I have trouble in new social situations.
So when I wanted to get married, I carried on the grand family tradition of telling my boyfriend when I thought he should propose if he wanted to get married on ___ day. Three months later he proposed and he managed to surprise me despite my best efforts! He still enjoys how flustered I was...
We talked about it very early and often. We both took a leap of faith and left long term relationships to be with each other, so I think we both knew that if we were going to do it, then this was for the long haul. It took almost four years before he actually proposed, but we knew that we'd get married from the beginning.
We knew it was coming sooner or later after dating for about 8 months, when we moved in together. Since I was in school and not sure where I would end up for grad school we held off weddings and engagements until things settled down this past year. Over the past 5ish years, it came up every couple of months, usually about our future kids or where we would live later on. No actual wedding or engagement planning, just talking about our future.
We talked about it a lot too. FI is divorced and was very cautious about getting remarried. We had lots of "discussions" about issues within our relationship. We even broke up after about 2 1/2 years because he thought he didn't want to get married or have kids.
Luckily, that helped him to realize he truly did (marriage and 1 kid-compromise) and we very organically/naturally got back together because it was right. He calls it a pre-divorce : )
We are also both very analytical...we think about all possibilities and plan things very practically so this was the right way for us and we have no doubts about getting married.
My FI is 8 years older than me...we were 30 & 38 when we started dating (I was a couple of weeks away from my 31st birthday) so it was important to him to know what my stance was on marriage and kids. He wanted marriage...wasn't sure about the kids (although now he is talking about 4 more!). So we had a conversation the first week but that was it until he proposed 2 months later.
We talked about it a TON. We probably would have gotten married a couple years before we did had we had more money and more job stability. Before we officially got engaged, we planned our wedding together. We thought up color schemes and the over style and decided what our priorities were.
I'm so glad we were able to be open about that weddings stuff because before meeting my husband, I never once thought about weddings. I didn't know what a receiving line was until three months into our engagement. I was overwhelmed by the wedding industry, and I definitely felt lucky to have a couple years to sort it out before having to make any definite decisions.
We ended up talking about it loads. I needed to know, because of my career, where the relationship was going and what we were comfortable with in terms of me being away and working during the days whilst he worked nights and how we would work our relationship out when I was unemployed, etc etc. So all the big things in our relationship were discussed intensively, when we decided to move in together, when we decided to open a joint bank account, when we both knew that we wanted to be with each other forever as man and wife, etc. We probably talked about it once a month - although I probably pushed him a lot to make a decision, which I wish I hadn't. We window ring shopped together but never tried anything on. We both knew it was going to happen but he proposed to me in his own sweet time and it was a total surprise still.
we might have had maybe 2 serious talks about it, besides something casual here or there. Casual as in, yeah it'd be better to wait 5 years for kids, or talking about next year's health insurance, or things like that. Related to how we thought about life and marriage, but not ours exactly. One of the 2 serious talks were early in our relationship ("let's go to vegas!!") and the one where I said that I knew he was worried about it, but that it was something I wanted, and that life would go on as usual if we married some day.. I think he felt like when people get married, they have kids, then they are stay at home people and all of that. Not necessarily! Seeing his close friends marry really helped show my husband that their lives were changing, but in a good way - becoming more rich and not restricted at all.
We never talked about it. We did talk about our future together and it was when he pretty much told me we'd move to California (my plan) whenever I wanted (with no regard for his own career and path! of course I wouldn't do that to him but wow did it move me) that I knew he was in it 100% for forever, that was also when I felt like it didn't matter if he proposed or we got married sooner or later because I was now sure about how he felt in terms of commitment.
I think both of us felt that to start a conversation about it would be to propose in a sense so if we were going to start a conversation we might as well propose. I wanted him to propose (it was his turn, I'd asked him to move in) so I was in no rush to do it myself (though I would have eventually) and he asked right around when I was ready.
We did have a couple of 'hints' like he'd tell me his aunt thought we should elope, I'd mention friend X who just got engaged but nothing remotely clear and straighforward. :)
It's funny Ins because I was wondering if anyone else was like me too (not having had conversations about marriage beforehand) but I'm completely opposite on the household leadership font. I never want a leader in our relationship and we don't have one but if I had to be in a relationship with a leader it had better be me! :) I feel the person being asked (as long as they didn't already say yes) is one with power in the proposal situation.
we talk about marriage and engagements and whatnot fairly often. its nice to sit down and discuss our visions for the future and our plans and make sure we're on the same page. we even went ring shopping together. only once though since he wants the final decision to be a surprise for me which is fine by me. we just wanted to make sure i get a ring that i love. i know the whole proposal will be a surprise no matter how often we discuss it so i'm not worried about that. i just like knowing that we're consciously making this decision together and that we've discussed it.
We did a lot because we were already planning our wedding before he proposed! We wanted to get engaged, just couldn't afford a ring yet.
We talked about marriage after about six months of dating. We both knew that this was it. However, in a effort to completely throw we off with the proposal even though he knew he was ready for marriage he repeatedly told me he wasn't so I would never expect anything. I told him that I would wait for him, and was okay with it. When he did propose, I was shocked! We were also forced to discuss our future together before the proposal when he was offered a job in Houston, 1,000 miles away from my home and family.
Kind of a funny story for me regarding this: about 4-5 months after we started dating, we had a conversation about getting married, what we thought about it, yada yada yada. Only thing is, I'm not sure we did actually have that conversation. It may or may not have been a dream. And of course, I didn't want to bring it up so early in our relationship, so I never asked him if it was a real conversation or not! To this day I have no idea if we did talk about marriage then.
But, I know we definitely DID talk about getting married not long after that. We went to the Isle of Skye, off the west coast of Scotland, for a long weekend away for my 21st. We were talking about his friend's wedding that we had gone to the week before. The groom was Scottish and the bride American (which is the same situation in our relationship), so my boy was asking about whether or not his friend would be able to get American citizenship. Then he said, "Whe...uh, if we were to get married..." and I interjected with "If? What do you mean 'if'?" (We had both had a few drinks at this point, which explains the slip here!). He just stopped and looked at me, and I was thinking, "Oh crap, I totally freaked him out!!” But then, he broke into the biggest smile, picked me up and swung me around. So, yeah. That was when we both knew we'd be getting married one day!! Definitely one of my favorite memories from the early stages of our relationship. 
We've talked about it several times, and more frequently as time goes on. Money is a big one (the reason we're not getting married this year), and we've also had conversations about the e-ring, honeymoons, etc. etc.. He said he was somewhat disappointed that he even brought up the ring because he wants it to be a surprise, but I told him I had plenty of time to forget about it. :P
None of the wedding conversations have been serious, more in passing. We both agree that it's something we shouldn't get into until a proposal, when it will be a reality. The marriage conversations are the ones we dig into more.
Well my boyfriend and I arent engaged yet but we talk about it very often. We have been friends for going on 9 years. We met online on a car forum, and finally met in person April 2009. We started talking about getting engaged in August of 2009 and its been a pretty common topic we talk about often. ALOT of our family and friends keep pestering us about when we are getting engaged and some of them even put bets on when they thing my boyfriend will do it. We finally picked out my ring the week before christmas and during the christmas break we picked out the wedding band he liked.. The funny thing is even though I know its coming.. Im sure im going to be shocked no matter when it happens..
We talked about it quite a bit. From about 5 months of dating his family was asking when we were going to get married (I was 19) and then 3.5 years later he proposed! We knew from pretty early on that we would someday get married and we would talk about it alot, but he just kept saying he wasnt ready. Then in February (2009) his best friend got engaged to a girl that he had been dating 1/2 the time we had. I was a little upset but realized that they are a few years older than me so it makes sense. At that time I asked him when the time was and he said probably another 2 years. Then he proposed in September. He said he finally realized that there was no reason for him to keep waiting because he knew he wanted to spend the rest of his life with me so why not now?
More than he would have liked! ;) I told him from the beginning I'd break up with him if we weren't engaged in 1.5 years and when that time frame got close there were several reminders. Boys are so forgetful!
We talked about it a lot after about 5 months of dating. We picked a ring together at around 7 months, and he purchased it. He told me that just because he had the ring, didn't mean I was going to get it right away. I went crazy trying to figure out when he planned on actually proposing. He kept me in suspense for 6 months!!! But, when he did finally ask, it was such a wonderful surprise. I honestly thought he had forgotten that he even had my ring. =)
We talked about it more often recently, and he also wanted to keep it surprise, which is why he didn't want to give me any timelines. He finally did give me some but he lied to throw me off and surprise me; which definitely worked. I would say that total we talked about it maybe 5 times?
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I was just wondering because it seems like most of the bees here talked with their FI's about getting engaged/married extensively before he actually proposed. I was just wanting to know how common that was with all of you? and what was your experience like?
For my FI and I, we hardly talked about it at all. The reason for this was because we both knew it was going to happen, and we (HE mainly) wanted it to be a huge surprise when he did, and he figured it was nearly impossible for me to be completely surprised if we talked about it often. So, before we got engaged, we didn't look at rings together, we didnt talk about our future together (such as where WE would live, or what WE would do), instead we talked about our futures individually (what I wanted to do after graduation, and such) I personally am SO glad we did it this way, because I was BLOWN AWAY when he proposed. I had no clue, and it was SO amazing to know that he made the decision all on his own without me pushing at all. PLUS, it gave us time to really think about we wanted individually and not just as a couple. I feel like he now knows what I want for myself out of life and not just the things I want out of our marriage.
SO, what I am saying is that obviously everyone is different, but was anyone else here in the same boat I was in? and for everyone who did get to talk about it before, what was your experience like? and how did you hint/bring it up?
BTW this really has no useful application for me, I just find it interesting to hear everyones stories :)