Engagements

I've been thinking a lot about how I may not be called to be married. I feel at peace at this time with being single. But I am not going to predict what's gods plan is for me. However, in the meantime a lot of my friends are becoming engaged.
I had a really odd dream a few nights ago about a friend of mine who recently broke up with his long term girlfriend. In my dream he became engaged quickly to someone whom he did not really love or like. In my dream we tried to have a conversation about this dreamland engagement.
While my dream was fictional on most accounts it got me thinking about the time in our lives heading towards marriage that we call engagement. It is not simply a time to get us from point a to point b. It's a sesaon in your life, unlike and like any other in your life.
One of my firm teachings that I feel compelled to pass on to others is this: we need not rush from one phase of our life to another. The example I give is ironically, for this post, always about marriage. When you are in a romantic relationship with a person you rarely go from being single to married over night, at least not in American culture. You go through stages, each with a goal and should be respected. Sadly we are so focused on the goal to get to the next stage as quickly as possible that we do not relish the stages.
But especially with engagement. The goal in most people's minds is to plan the wedding. Right? Not so much. The stage exists to see if you fit together as you continue to work on towards s growing relationship. It is only a commitment to work towards this with an open mind. An open mind means excepting that you may not be the right person for one another. Contradictory to the way we do things.
We live in a day and age when 50 percent of couples become divorced. I wonder if this is because we don't honor that time of engagement. We don't learn how to fight well. We don't know how to live with a person who will change through time.
Another statistic: women who reach the age of 50 and have been single, that is to say never married, divorced, or widowed, are the most emotionally and mentally stable in comparison to their counterparts. Perhaps this is because single people learn how to accept stages of life in a different way.
Most of my friends who are married, have been married for less than 5 years. But they almost all say the same thing. It's not what they thought it would be. It's not just sex and living together. It's not simplistic happy love all the time. And I have friends who have already considered divorce because of this misnomer.
Can we learn to reframe the time of engagement? Can it be less about planning the wedding and premarital counseling and be more about getting to know each other and ask the had questions? More about learning how to fight well? More about thinking if we can really be with this person forever even if we don't do anything else forever in our generation? Can we learn to accept extending the time in this stage instead of rushing through? Can we learn to accept all of the stages in our lives. May it be so.