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Dear Annie: Is it OK to get engaged at 17? For some context, I am currently 16, and so is my boyfriend. I am graduating high school in 2025 at 17, and my boyfriend is graduating in 2026 at 18. I have always been one to want to get engaged young. Though it is unconventional, I still feel it is right for me.

My boyfriend and I have been together since we were 14. We genuinely do love each other, but we are afraid of what our families would think. Our idea is to hide it. We would have a small engagement, just us, with minimal costs spent on the ring due to the fact that I don't care about diamond size, but I do care about the intention behind it. We would not tell anyone and have it be a secret between us. Then around junior or senior year of college, we would have a second, larger engagement with family and friends involved. He will be my forever no matter what.

What are your thoughts? — Love Wins

Dear Love Wins: Young love is so powerful, intoxicating and exciting. While I can tell you and your boyfriend are eager to get engaged, I would be willing to bet you are seeking approval like this because, deep down, you know it's not the right thing to do. Anything in life you have to start "in secret" or "hide" should be a sign to you that it is not right.

If you two are meant to be together forever, like you say, there's no harm in waiting until you're older and really ready for this ultimate level of commitment.

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Oh god I do not miss being an adolescent.

Not that it'd do any good to tell LW this, but nobody should get engaged or married right out of high school. What seems like forever today might turn out not to really be forever in another five years when both of you have grown up a little more and in slightly different directions.

And if you need to hide it from your families... yeah, fucking no. Either your families are wonderful, in which case you should wait until you don't need to hide it, or they're terrible and your priorities should be on making yourselves fully independent. It may seem like marriage is a fast path to full adulthood and independence, but it's not.

LW can wait until when they were planning their "big" engagement anyway, and make that the real one... if they both still feel that way.

One further note that LW would also not understand or appreciate: You should never, ever, ever pick your after high school plans, such as your college, based on where your sweetie is going to be, especially if they're not graduating high school at the same time. Long distance relationships are tough, but it's better to have one that doesn't pan out than to make your plans based on being together and then break up three months later, at a school or in a job you really don't like.

Edited 2024-10-10 10:13 (UTC)

Further to this, some of "when does a person get married, when is it reasonable" is cultural, and having social/emotional support from either friends or family or ideally both makes things MUCH easier. Marriage is not just an agreement between individuals, it's a public and social commitment. If you're not feeling like you can get engaged publicly, that's telling you something, either about your relationship or about society.

I was engaged at 19, and that is STAGGERINGLY young for my current social circles, but it was totally normal for the milieu I was in at the time...and also I am very well aware of all the personal and social changes I went through in those two years. At 46, I'm still married to the person I got engaged to at 19. I am FB friends with one of the people I dated at 17 and have actively blocked the other. I would not encourage my godson (22) to get engaged right now even though I like my life, but I would be absolutely horrified if my younger godchild (17) got engaged, they are very much not ready--and they know it.

One of the other things that gives me pause is that LW says, "I have always been one to want to get engaged young." To my mind, wanting to get engaged/married should be about a specific person, not about a preconceived plan like that. Some of the unhappiest marriages and nastiest divorces I've seen were between people who had preconceptions of an age/relationship path that they adhered to regardless of what person/people were in their life at that time. It's bad enough when it's "I always thought I'd be married by 30." "I always wanted to get engaged at 17"? baby no. Unpack why you feel that way and deal with it.

Yep. I met my partner very early (we moved in together when I was 18 and he was barely older) and we’ve been together for 25+ years now, and I’d be hard-pressed to find anyone with a happier relationship than ours. (Like, we’ve been doing couple’s therapy for the past five years not because our relationship was/is in trouble, but because we were curious to see if it was possible to make the next twenty years even happier than our first twenty.)

We succeeded because we both had/have a strong commitment to making the right choices at the Y’s in the road. Our belief has always been that every day we’re presented with choices where one metaphorical path leads us closer to our partner’s path, and the other leads us away. A lot of these are small and don’t look like much at the time (do I do a nice little thing like make lunch for them along with my own, or let them handle it on their own later? Do I amicably listen to them nerd out about something they love or show my boredom?) and some are bigger (do I go to sleep without talking to them after a fight because I’m still mad, or do I force myself to act like the grown-up I am and calm myself down to discuss it properly?) and some are huge (do I bang my coworker or stay within my monogamous relationship?). The biggest ones can instantly torpedo a relationship with the wrong choice, but even just a lot of little choices add up over time with paths that gradually diverge more and more.

We’re both on our own independent paths just as all of us humans are, but because both of us shared that philosophy and were committed to it, we ensured we grew together and stayed parallel on close-together paths rather than drifting further and further apart. It required (and requires!) a lot of conscious decisions, often overriding our own trauma-created impulses, and caring deeply enough about each other and ourselves to put in the work. But I’m so grateful we’ve both done that and continue to, and I’m glad that we found each other so early and will have as many years together as our bodies grant us. Do I think many young people would be able to abide by that kind of philosophy? Well, no, but many older people can’t either. I don’t think being young is the factor that determines success or not; it’s how dedicated the two (or more) people are to making the relationship work, and how much understanding they have of what that takes on a daily basis. Some people understand that young. Many people die old without ever figuring it out.

Same trajectory. Engaged at 19, married at 21, still together and coming up on our 24th anniversary.

But then I look at my oldest who is 22 and nowhere near ready to be married and am struck by how badly it all could have gone for me. Because I was a dumbass back then. Lol

"I have always been one to want to get engaged young."

To me this says she wants to be engaged, to revel in whatever privileges and feelings that state brings her, rather than getting down to brass tacks: marrying, establishing her new family life with her spouse, and participating in adult society.

This kid is ripe for the tradwife pipeline. I would not even bet that she is already devouring all that nonsense and believing that there is a way for her to life as a seventeen-year-old forever, with another person responsible for income and that boring stuff while she arranges the refrigerator and waxes the sink.

Yeah, my spouse and I have said to each other that we are lucky we grew up in the same direction. We've been together since we were 19 and got married at 24/23. We have a fair number of friends who did similarly and got lucky, and a fair number who did similarly and did not. (At least 2 sets of friends lasted less than a year after getting married.)

Met at 19, married at 26 - but having done several years of long distance and overcome sundry other difficulties in between! Most of my university friends who took that trajectory are still together. I was saying the other day to one of them (who was very sadly widowed a couple of years ago), if you get together at that age, you do your learning to adult together, and as you say, hopefully in the same direction. Though this is making things more difficult for my friend now she is beginning to consider the possibility of another relationship.

Sometimes marriage leads to independence, though.

I'm thinking here of a lesbian who married a man she had no sexual/romantic relationship with, so they could both get Austudy (money for rent and food)

because being married = automatically being assessed as an adult

whereas unmarried people were assessed against their parents income, and unless your parents were barely scraping by, you couldn't get Austudy until you turned 26 - even if your parents wouldn't help pay for your rent and food.

"Austudy marriages" were a BIG thing when I was at uni in the 1990s/2000s.

(University enrollment/attendance fees are deferred until after graduation in Australia through HECS, and thus not part of the issue - it's like everyone in Australia has a student loan, except with no interest, only indexed for inflation, and it only covers your university fees, not your textbooks or food or rent.)

The problem there is with the laws.

You should never, ever, ever pick your after high school plans, such as your college, based on where your sweetie is going to be, especially if they're not graduating high school at the same time. Long distance relationships are tough, but it's better to have one that doesn't pan out than to make your plans based on being together and then break up three months later, at a school or in a job you really don't like.

So much this! And the one relationship I can think of that has survived since my friends were 16-17, they very deliberately did not base their university plans on where the other was going, for exactly those reasons. They're now in their early 30s, married for nearly ten years, with a 2-year-old.

I'm still mad at the high school classmate who gave up a full scholarship to Harvard because her boyfriend was going to a notoriously crummy satellite campus of a state school. they broke up in their first semester.

I didn't even LIKE her, I just thought (and still think) she was being very shortsighted.

Yeah, two of my friends have been together since that age (and engaged since very young too but they did a years-long engagement) and they did different unis deliberately as well. They're in their mid-30s and married.

1. LW is so very 16 omg.

2. (and Liesl thought Rolf was her forever too, until he became a literal Nazi)

3. LW should try figuring out why she wants early engagement -- it seems more about the idea than reality

4. "Anything in life you have to start "in secret" or "hide" should be a sign to you that it is not right." is maybe true in this case but as a generalization makes my hackles go up because what about gay relationships in a homophobic area or an interracial relationships in racist areas

4 is why I said "tells you something either about your relationship or about society" in my comment, yeah. But also I feel like if you are analogizing yourself to people who lack or historically have lacked civil rights, you need a darn good reason--so if LW wants to claim that she's in basically the same position as same-sex couples in homophobic areas, that's a pretty darn big lift.

Yeah I wasn't trying to say it applies here! That was just a gut reaction on my part. (But also it wouldn't have been great for the columnist to add "except for hiding from bigotry" because that's absolutely not the case with LW but also she'd probably latch onto "its totes the same, they're being ageist against me" as justification.)

Yeah, I was about to post something similar to 4. LW is a lot younger and more immature than she thinks she is, I agree with everyone on that, but the advice columnist was showing some serious Privilege Blinders with "anything in life you have to start 'in secret' or 'hide' should be a sign to you that it is not right" and it made me snarl.

There are a whole lot of things it's not safe or necessary to share with the world around you, not because they're "not right," but because a) society sucks, and/or b) it's no one else's business. Relationships targeted by bigotry, as you mentioned. People aren't morally required to announce to the world that they've started hormones for transitioning, and they may not want to invite commentary/judgement. Treatment for mental illness, or for that matter physical illness. Hell, people "hide" wanted pregnancies during their early months, because they're precarious and people don't want to play out their hope/fear/possible devastation drama on a stage! I feel like I could easily come up with a long, long list of reasons people don't share new things in their lives that having nothing to do with those things being *wrong*.

(Including fandom! A lot of people keep fandom life partitioned away from mundane life, for reasons ranging from bigotry (can still lose your job for writing sexy fanfic, in some places) to convenience ("I don't want to listen to annoying lectures about how I should be spending my hobby time on something I can sell" or "I don't want to teach Fandom 101 to people who find it incomprehensible")...)

4. "Anything in life you have to start "in secret" or "hide" should be a sign to you that it is not right." is maybe true in this case but as a generalization makes my hackles go up because what about gay relationships in a homophobic area or an interracial relationships in racist areas

I agree - I was like

"but what about same sex relationships?"

"but what about heterosexual relationships where you're having sex without being married, and your parents are Very Religious no sex before marriage types"

"but what if your parents are abusive, and just can't be trusted with meeting your partner?"

Whatever happened to promise rings? You know, a nice but inexpensive ring you get as a teenager as a promise that'll you'll get engaged when you're older (usually out of college). Is that a regional thing? I know a couple of people who did that. Some relationships worked out, some didn't.

There is a whiff of purity culture / trad wife pipeline to this that I'm concerned about.

I thought promise rings were some purity culture nonsense about promising not to have sex.

Those are called "purity rings" or something like that.

There has been some co-opting of terms so it might be different now (and it could also be regional) but, when I was in high school (class of '01) a purity ring was not having sex and a promise ring was we'll get engaged in the future.

Oh my darlings. I'm so glad you're happy together, and I'm so glad you're planning a long engagement. Can I also suggest an unconventional ring, one you can pass off as "just my favorite ring" when your family asks about it? I also got engaged at a very young age -- I was 15 and my fiancee was 14, and it was long distance as well. You can define your relationship any way you want to.

There's no harm in deciding on your person early, unless it interferes with dreams that are just as big, for either of you. But you can figure that out if it happens. You may discover, when you hit college, that each of you wants different things out of life -- and if that happens, please don't consider the relationship a "failure" -- it will have been beautiful and sweet and meaningful while it lasted.

Okay someone explain to me in small words why being engaged young is such a big problem? It's them stating their intentions, right? Young people are allowed to have intentions, make plans, etc. There's nothing about considering themselves "engaged" that traps them into this any more than dating with the intention to get engaged someday--not even social pressure, if it's secret! Like...it sounds like they already intend to get married one day, ARE THEY NOT ALREADY FUNCTIONALLY ENGAGED?

Because people are dumb, the younger you are the less time you've had to learn better, and being engaged adds another layer of "Oh, it's for real, I need a real reason to end it" that does not need to be there.

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