Dating Advice: How Long Should You Date Before Marriage?

The honest dating advice on marriage timing: couples date for close to five years before getting married, on average. According to a Bridebook survey of UK couples, the median path runs 17 months of dating before moving in together, 22 months of cohabitation before an engagement, and another 20 months of engagement before the wedding. Longer than most people expect.

• Average time from first date to marriage: 4.9 years (Bridebook, 2017)
• 17 months dating → 22 months living together → 20 months engaged → wedding
• Average marriage age has shifted from 22.6 (women) and 24.6 (men) in the 1970s to 30.8 and 32.7 today
• 90% of survey respondents felt less pressure to marry than their parents' generation
• Wedding ceremonies are still rising — up roughly 2.7% per year despite the longer runway

Why Couples Take Longer to Get Married Now

The timeline has stretched for two reasons that compound each other. First, people genuinely want more data before committing — more shared experiences, more stressful situations survived together, more evidence that the person they are in love with is also someone they can live beside. Second, weddings are expensive. The average spend has climbed sharply, and saving for a wedding while managing rent is a slow process.

Neither of these is a bad reason. Couples who moved in together during the late 2010s had a cohabitation phase that effectively served as an extended compatibility test — something previous generations skipped entirely or kept very short. The result shows up in the divorce data: marriages formed after longer dating periods tend to be more stable. Rushing into a wedding before you've seen each other stressed, broke, or sick is a reliable way to discover incompatibility on the other side of a ceremony.

What doesn't work: treating a specific year count as the goal. "We've been together three years, so we should probably get engaged" is a worse basis for marriage than "we've navigated four serious conflicts and I'd still pick this person." Time is a proxy for shared experience, not a substitute for it. Couples who race to a milestone on schedule, without building genuine ways to build the serious relationship you want, often find the milestone hollow.

What the Age Shift Actually Means for Dating Advice

The jump in average marriage age — from the early-to-mid twenties to the early thirties — is the most significant structural change in modern relationships. It means people entering the dating pool now are spending most of their twenties figuring out who they are before they decide who they want to build a life with. That's a different kind of dating than the previous generation did.

It also means cohabitation is now a standard step, not an unconventional one. Living together before engagement used to be the exception. Now the Bridebook data shows it's built into the expected timeline for the majority of couples. If you're on a dating app looking for something serious, understanding this shift matters — the person you're matching with probably isn't thinking about marriage on a two-year horizon anymore. Neither should you feel pressure to be.

The age at which you start dating someone also affects the math. Someone who meets a partner at 26 and follows the average 4.9-year timeline gets married around 31. Someone who meets at 31 may compress a stage or two — living together comes faster, engagement follows sooner. Context shapes the clock. For a practical read on whether dating is just a game or something more, that framing matters.

Practical Dating Advice: Reading the Timeline for Your Situation

The 4.9-year average is just that — an average. Some couples know within eighteen months. Others spend seven years getting there and have a rock-solid marriage. The number by itself tells you almost nothing useful. What the stages tell you is more helpful.

The cohabitation stage — 22 months on average — is where most incompatibilities surface or get resolved. Who does the dishes, how money gets handled, what happens when one person wants to go out and the other doesn't, how conflict actually plays out face to face dating rather than over text. If you can get through 18–24 months of sharing a space and still genuinely like each other, that's meaningful evidence.

The engagement stage — 20 months — is often underestimated. It's not just planning. It's the first extended period of publicly being a committed unit while also managing the specific stress of wedding logistics. Couples who find a date for the wedding within the first six months of engagement and then use the remaining time to actually be together — rather than just planning — tend to arrive at the wedding in better shape.

One move worth making right now if you're serious about someone: have the explicit conversation about timelines, not as an ultimatum, but as information. "I'd want to be engaged by X, living together by Y" is the kind of data that lets two people figure out early whether they're running on compatible clocks. Avoiding that conversation doesn't make the mismatch disappear — it just surfaces it later, at higher cost. If you're still figuring out signs you've met the one, that conversation can also help clarify things.

Worth noting: 90% of couples in the Bridebook survey reported feeling less pressure to marry than their parents felt. That's striking. The social urgency that pushed previous generations to the altar quickly has largely evaporated — and marriages formed without that external pressure appear, on the data, to be sturdier. Knowing how to handle introducing your new partner to family is a smaller but real part of managing those timelines, especially when family expectations run traditional.

You can also learn something from the extremes. What arranged marriages reveal about commitment timelines is genuinely interesting: outcomes are often comparable to or better than self-selected marriages, which suggests the timeline itself matters less than the intentionality going in. Short or long, rushed or careful — the quality of the decision is what holds.

FAQ

How long should couples date before getting engaged?

The Bridebook data puts it at roughly 39 months — about 17 months of dating plus 22 months of living together before the engagement. Realistically, the right answer is after you've shared enough high-stress situations to have genuine evidence about compatibility, not after a fixed number of months. For most couples using dating apps today, that process takes two to four years.

Does living together before marriage improve the odds?

Recent research suggests cohabitation before engagement is associated with better outcomes — it's the couples who move in together after getting engaged, compressing the compatibility-testing phase, who show slightly weaker outcomes. Living together for a meaningful stretch before committing, enough time to face to face dating reality rather than the honeymoon version of each other, gives you better data.

Is it a red flag if someone wants to get married very quickly?

Not automatically, but it warrants a direct conversation. Someone who's had serious long-term relationships and knows what they want by their mid-thirties can reasonably move faster than someone who's never lived with a partner. The flag isn't the speed — it's whether they can explain what they know about you and themselves that makes them confident. Pressure without reasoning is the red flag.

The marriages most likely to last aren't the ones that happened fastest or slowest. They're the ones where both people had enough shared reality — conflict, boredom, logistics, the unglamorous stuff — to make an informed decision. If you're looking for someone worth building that with, Meetville connects you with singles nearby, which is where most of that real-life compatibility testing actually happens.

Sources

• Bridebook UK Marriage Report, 2017 — bridebook.com