I've heard of some couples being engaged for at least 2 years at the max. 5 years is a bit much, but hey I guess you marry when you get ready. That is like that one celebrity couple Jennifer Hudson and her finance David have been engaged for about 1 and half almost. Other celebrities have done the same thing hold an engagement.
In my family, I think the longest an engagement has been held was maybe until almost a year or 6 to 8 months.
I've been officially engaged since October 2009. I met my fiancee 9 years ago this May 10th and we were "unofficially" engaged in 2007. We don't even have any date (or even year) planned.
We are still both in school and don't have the time and money to have a wedding (don't want to elope). It'll probably still be another 2 years or so before we are able to plan a wedding.
For the both of us marriage is just a ceremony. We have lived together for about 4 years and are practically married already.
"We play on your obsession with candy, and you do what we want you to."
Do the 2 of you want to *be married* or do you just want a wedding?
In the movie, at first, the ceremony and party was a priority to them. Then they moved, the grandparents died off one by one, and what was the point of the party anymore??
When they finally got married they decided on everything on the spur of the moment.
I loved Tom's analogy of the donut experiment to real life. I also loved his mother's speech about her own marriage.
Nothing, it's whatever works for the people concerned.
"Your mother puts license plates in your underwear? How do you sit?!"
There isn't anything "wrong" with it per se because there are no hard or fast rules about how long an engagement must be (unless you live in the middle ages and you were engaged and married within 2 weeks to that "nice young lass" you just met 3 weeks ago and your parents traded a cow for) but if a young couple like Violet and Tom told me they were engaged for 5 years I would be worried.
I already started a thread about this on this board, but really, there wasn't any reason why Violet and Tom couldn't get married after the first year or so of moving state. At first year, sure, absolutly delay the wedding, moving across the country is a huge move and you want to get settled in. But after a year or so, when both had stable jobs (ok, so working at a deli isn't exactly going to win Tom a Michelin star and a $100,000+ income but he still had steady work with a steady wage) and had a house there wasn't really any reason to put of the wedding.
To me, an engagement is the step before marriage. If you want to get engaged, that shows you want to get married. The engagement period is just to plan out the wedding and show a commitment to yourselves and to others that you are and want to be marrying your significant other.
Sure, today people take a couple of years to get married because of trying to find a venue and saving up money etc, but to me, for a young couple without kids that both have stable jobs and their own house, 5 years is a bit too much. It shows that one or both of the couple are having second thoughts and are finding excuses. For someone in Violet and Tom's position, I would expect an engagement to last 2 years tops, maybe 3. Any longer and I would start to question if they actually want to get married.