How do we know when it’s the right time? It’s a question every couple who sticks together long enough will eventually find themselves asking. Getting engaged is a big step in a relationship – the biggest aside from having kids – so it’s important to think long and hard before doing it. Have you really spent enough time together and experienced enough of life together to know with certainty that you want to spend forever together?
These are the questions you have to ask yourselves before you ask – or say yes to – the big one. And it’s more than just figuring out if you’ve been together for some imaginary requisite number of years, too. Making sure you’ve gone through the types of experiences that really help a couple to understand who the other person is and how they mesh together is more important than just raw time spent together. This goes beyond identifying shared hobbies and enters the realm of figuring out how you each respond during fun, important and even trivial but commonplace experiences and whether or not the other person is OK with that response.
Here are five experiences every couple should have before getting engaged.
Build Furniture Together
Relax – we’re not talking about chopping down the wood, designing a chaise lounge and building it from scratch. You probably don’t have to get that intense with this one. Instead, just head to IKEA to pick out a new piece of furniture you need, take it home, dump out all those crazy little pieces and tools and assemble the thing as a couple. If you end up at each other’s throats while doing this, then you’re definitely not ready to get engaged yet. But if the dresser gets built just fine with only minor or no squabbling, you’re in good shape!
Meet the Family
Pretend like you’re Ben Stiller and “meet the parents.” In fact, you should meet as much of the family as you can, and not just in passing either. Spend a few holidays with each other’s families. Take a day trip or three with them or even go on a vacation with one or both of the families. You’re both going to have to be spending a lot of time with these people for the rest of your lives if you get married. You don’t have to love your in-laws as much as you love your spouse, but it would certainly help if you didn’t hate them. Making it through family traditions and/or vacations are the quickest ways to get to know the new family and make sure you both understand and can at least respect one another.
Just Drive
Get in the car and drive somewhere together. Going to the grocery store or carpooling to work doesn’t count. You need to get a little adventurous and head somewhere you’ve never been before in the car together. The longer the trip, the better. Can you handle navigating the directions and having no one to talk to but each other on a long car trip? The longer the trip lasts, the more of a chance you’ll have to get into long, serious conversation about all sorts of things that you may not normally have time for with your busy working lives. If you’re still able to laugh together when you reach your destination, you’re in good shape.
Travel Somewhere
Whether you’re taking the aforementioned drive to get there or some other means, you should take a vacation together before getting engaged. Vacations can be great fun, but they can also be filled with bad restaurant choices, rained-out entertainment, unexpected costs, disagreements about how to spend your leisure time and any number of other pitfalls. You’ll learn not just if you can get through those things together, but also how you’ll get through them together.
Support Each Other Through Hard Times
In case you haven’t gotten the theme by now, it’s this: surviving through the good times is easy, but it’s surviving through the tough ones that really measures whether or not you’re right for each other. If one of you gets extremely sick, how does the other handle that? What about if someone loses their job or even just gets skipped over for a big promotion or doesn’t get a dream job they were interviewing for? These are just a few examples, but you have to go through something like this together to see whether or not you each support each other in your times of need.
Cubic Zirconia Jewelry
If you get through all that stuff and still feel the same love and desire to spend forever with each other, congrats – marriage may be right for you two! Now you just need to find the right ring. Don’t forget to consider high-quality cubic zirconia jewelry, which has all the beauty of real diamonds for a fraction of the cost.