Thanks, but this is really not the sort of advice I need. Me-and-the-relevant-person are, you know, in a healthy relationship that consists significantly of conversations. I do not need to do anything cloak and dagger here. I could probably just say "hey let's be engaged RIGHT NOW" and he'd probably say "okay!" after some amount of thought. I'm just trying to figure out if I risk torpedoing something I value by doing that now as opposed to in six months or a year or whatever.
Two years is the time frame one always hears, isn't it? I only did a very quick search but most of what I found seemed to be referring to the same study by Ted Huston, and I didn't even find the study itself. My impression is that 2 years (25 months, one article said) was the average time spent dating before marriage (not before engagement, as you asked) for happy, stable couples, however they judge that. So, not the most helpful.
But, it does kind of match my intuition that one should wait until New Relationship Energy is mostly over before making that dec...
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