Courtship long, engagement short

[yellow m&m]

"if you have both agreed to be married some day in the future." If you are both talking about the wedding, planning the wedding, etc, then you are engaged. Yellow M&M, I don't know if that still applies to you, but I'm sorry to hear that. Breakups are always harder the longer or more involved they were.

We were planning a wedding together. We were trying to agree on a date. We had gone ring shopping, and even found a ring we both liked. But then he broke it off. It's still hard.

[Katya]

Dead Cat's example is mostly what I meant by my statement. Engaged means planning to get married. If you are planning to get married, call it engaged. Get over whatever problems you have with the name, call it what it is, and act accordingly. I knew people who were planning the wedding, but told me they weren't "engaged" because they hadn't found the right ring yet so he hadn't done an "official" proposal. If you have both agreed to be married some day in the future, calling that situation something else isn't going to change what it is.

Actually, I disagree with this and agree more with krebscout. The analogy I thought of this morning was that, for couples who have lived together before marriage, getting married doesn't necessarily mean a big change in lifestyle. (The wife might change her name and there might be some legal ramifications, but even those can vary, depending on the people involved and the state of residence.) And yet, people who have been living together in monogamous relationships still get married, because the name is important to them.

So, being engaged means one is "under a promise to marry" (thank you, OED), and that word and promise (often involving a ring and a formal proposal) are psychologically significant. I agree that it's a little ridiculous to have, say, set a date and bought a dress without considering oneself actually engaged and I consider it likewise foolish to enter into such a promise too early (by promising a to wait for a missionary, for example), but I wouldn't argue with someone about whether or not they were actually engaged, if they said they weren't. (And perhaps this is all you were saying, 42.)