@mattyanon

It's not a honeymoon phase though...... there are a lot of public announcements (her family, your family, your friends, her friends). There is a lot of wedding booking and planning.

We ended up eloping because the logistics for both families was too much, and I had an upcoming deployment to Iraq. My mom still gives me grief for eloping, and her sister to her, but everyone else understood.

It eliminated a lot of the problems you mentioned.

And we fucked like rabbits the entire time.

I keep seeing others in this thread saying things about the honeymoon phase, and engagement and cohabiting both being new honeymoon phases, but that was not my experience.

Our honeymoon phase lasted from our first date all the way until about 9 or 10 years of marriage.

However, I had 3 tours of Iraq and lots of training missions and schools that would separate us here and there, so it's not like we were physically together the entire time. "Absence makes the heart grow fonder" combined with the corollary "how can I miss you if you don't go away?".

CC: @Vermillion-Rx, @Durek_The_Bald (I forgot who else I saw talking about "honeymoon phase")

@Vermillion-Rx as I said in another thread on this:

there really isn't a prefect arbitrary amount of time at which you completely eliminate the gamble such a commitment is.

Fuck, we'd already been married 10 years before my wife suddenly changed (hormone issues).

And as I said upthread in that same thread:

Really, my only objection to it is that getting married without our nations doing a serious overhaul of the laws governing marriage is a terrible idea, and marriage/LTR shouldn't be a man's goal anyway (religious needs aside for now).

So again, with the caveat that it is not in a man's interests to get married in most western countries, here's how my engagement went back before I knew any of this stuff.

The woman who would become my wife was one of several plates I was spinning at the time (2004). I was fucking several and had even more in the works (OLD was awesome back then). She was older than me and divorced, so I didn't take her seriously at all. Every other woman closer to my own age always ended up doing or saying things that made me not take any of them seriously, either.

However, since my wife and I never put on any airs or did any kind of pretending with each other, we accidentally got really close really fast. Additionally, she was the best sex partner I'd ever had. Only 2 others came even close. The rest were mediocre at best, whereas she was just awesome. I fell iN LuuUuuUuuRrrRv and so did she. We had already become de facto exclusive by the third month because we had both just kind of dropped everyone else over time, but made it official then.

A couple of months later, I moved in with her and her mom, as they had a house together. We got engaged. I think I asked her to marry me before I moved in, but she had asked me to move in like a month before that and I had declined at first. I don't remember for sure because this was 21 years ago, and I've had an eventful life since then.

Anyway, we got engaged and I moved in right before Christmas, but I still followed through on plans to visit my family back home. We were married the following July (2005), and have been married ever since.

Some factors at play that were likely unique to just us, or at least are highly unlikely to come into play for anyone reading this:

• she was able to prove to me that her divorce was her ex's fault. She "had the receipts" as the young people say. Bad on her for marrying him in the first place, but she really thought he was a good man at first. Dumb mistake on her part.

• I had an upcoming deployment to Iraq looming on the horizon, so that put a bit of a rush on things. I'd have normally wanted to live together longer (like at least a year) before getting married, but that just wasn't in the cards.

Holy fuck this is long.