Very late to the game here.
Plenty of people are still getting engaged the private way, haha. No big announcement or public scene. It’s very easy to see the flashy proposals in the age of social media and instant communication.
Niece just got engaged. He did it on the beach and she later posted a pic on fb. That’s it. I still think that sort of proposal is the norm, rather than the OTT flash mob stuff that was popular ten years ago.
I had a thought last night about the social media announcements. In my day, everyone put in their engagement picture (granted ours was from Sears with a coupon) and a blurb in the local paper. Same for wedding announcements. At some point, the paper started charging and participation dropped. Now the section is gone altogether, I suppose because of social media.
Was the local paper a thing in other areas?
It was a thing where I grew up too.
I mentioned above that my smallish town did that. One of my kids found my engagement pic recently and it’s hanging on the refrigerator! I look SO young!!
We were not fancy people, it’s just what everyone did!
H and I have seen a lot of proposals (and weddings) in the past few years. Since we walk to the beach in the evenings we see people setting up for proposals as well as witnessing actual proposals. We have seen simple ones and elaborate ones. Lately the ones we have seen include dogs!
Yeah. I think that was the social media of our day.
We just used a photo we had taken for our engagement newspaper photo. There was one for our wedding, birth of all of our children, and back in the day our christening photos were in the local paper, I can’t remember if my kids’ christenings were submitted.
As some upthread have said, couples should do what works for them and what they are comfortable with. I hope that this elaborate proposal craze doesn’t make people feel they have to do something like this if they don’t want to.
I think lots of couples do professional engagement photo shoots (not part of the proposal). These are often used on their wedding websites (and sometimes on the invitation as well).
The ones I’ve seen have used them for the save the dates.
D2 used her engagement photos on both her save the date and the wedding website. D1 did not have engagement photos taken.
Our S and his fiancée have not shown us any engagement photos. S does not like being photographed and hasn’t since he was pretty young.
They snap photos with their phone from time to time. We are glad fiancée is able to shoot some nice pictures.
Ah, I took the Save the Date/engagement pics for S1 and his fiancee. They both hate being photographed, and this was the least-worst option. Pics came out very well. They refused to get a wedding photographer who would style the pics and document every button and zipper. It took serious convincing to get them to take pictures in the library. That was as much frippery as they’d tolerate.
Won’t get to do that for S2, though I did take lots of informal pics of S2 and now-fiancee when they were here in September/October. Will have my camera with me for the wedding, and I expect they’ll hire a photographer. Fiancee is a journalist and loves to document everything – a woman after my own heart!
My mom put my wedding announcement in the local paper, no picture.
I found engagement/wedding announcements for all of my grandparents, aunts and uncles and my parents in my genealogical research. It’s definitely a pre-social media thing.
My son and his then girlfriend had talked about marriage but never the when. The only thing she told him was she either wanted everybody (both families) there or nobody there. He opted for nobody, but he did do a big proposal. They did not look for rings together, but he did go to her Pinterest page where he found she had pinned some pictures of rings she liked. He then went to the jeweler where he had the ring designed and made. She loves it.
The only thing I told him was that I absolutely did not want to learn of an engagement on social media. Luckily that was not an issue as I was the first person he called when he was making a plan and we had a great discussion about when and how. He had a few thoughts that she may have not liked as much and I gave him some things to think about, which he took to heart. I felt so blessed that he trusted me to have this discussion with him. He did talk to her father first which I find very respectful. I don’t believe he asked permission to marry her as much as asking /letting him know that he was going to propose.