Agreed! Just talk. My now husband and I had discussed wanting to get married quite a bit over the four years we dated but both always felt like it wasn’t the right time financially. I was not opposed to a long engagement but had these grand ideas of what I wanted and where and who I wanted to be there and it wasn’t possible at the time. He was not a fan of a long engagement, and I knew that, so he never asked because he knew I would not get the wedding I wanted if he did Late December, I finally just felt so stressed about wanting all the details right, that I abandoned the idea altogether and I asked him outright “Why don’t we have a different kind of new year celebration this year?” We planned our private ceremony in less than a week and were married. There was no fuss. We both knew that that was the plan all along and so when the time came, neither was stressed or tired of waiting or shocked by the suggestion. The romantic spontaneous proposal sounds nice, but realistically you have to know that you are both truly on the same page before just expecting something that may never come.

It doesn't mean romance is dead. In fact, it's quite the opposite. Marriage often kills romance because it binds the couple legally, socially and financially, so there's no incentive to keep the love alive. How much more romantic is it to choose to stay with someone of your own free will, as opposed to being stuck with them to avoid government punishment?

I’m not sure how it is where you are, but in America, divorce is a brutal, punishing affair. It forces people to stay married to people they hate. Marriage with a pre-nup could work.