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It's the start of the holiday season. You're full of tryptophan and ready for a nap. OR you're totally celebrating your freshly diamond-ed finger because your spouse (or you!) has just proposed. It's the holidays, love is in the air. It's engagement season, y'all.
If this is you, CONGRATS! We're so happy for you! And we want all your friends and family to be happy, too. So here are five ways NOT to announce your engagement on social media so you don't wreck all the fun with your wild antics and get everyone all:
Before it's official
You definitely don't want any premature engagement-ulation. I don't know what that is either, but wait until it's official. If you think it'll happen, it might happen, you're just drafting a post in case it happens… don't hit submit just yet.
Without letting your partner know
Hey, it's official! This means you can totally post and celebrate. Just make sure to give your partner a heads up before the notifications start rolling in. This is especially true if you haven't notified your main crew of friends and family who will want to know before the general Facebook public.
During someone else's hard time
If someone else just had a big break up, a job loss, an election loss (just kidding, totally announce it — we all need it!), wait a little while to announce. You don't want to give off any “I don't care, bishes, admire me” vibes.
With a (super) gratuitous ring shot
Gratuitous is the key word here. A ring shot with both of you smiling? Awesome. A hug with the ring shown behind your partner? Cute. A big ol' close-up of your 3-carat cushion cut surrounded by glitter and mink? Sure, but don't forget to include your partner! 😉
RIGHT after someone else
It IS engagement season after all, so you may not be the only couple basking in post-proposal joy. If you do see a rogue announcement slip out right when you wanted to post your announcement, give it a few days. Give them a bit thumbs up, too, so they know you're rooting for them. Then share with them this link since they'll need it, too!
DO announce it if you want to
None of these tips mean you shouldn't announce on social media if you want to. It's how a lot of us share our life updates. Be sneaky with a surprise, toss in an animated gif, throw in a photo of you and your cat celebrating (oh wait, that's me), and post away! Then tell us how it all went down.
About the Author: Catherine Clark
Catherine Clark loiters at her local library, makes art, watches movies en masse, plays video and tabletop games, poorly cooks healthy things, cuddles with her feline fur babies, and blogs at BijouxandBits.com.
Also, don’t announce it for a friend. Someone filmed our engagement, uploaded it to Facebook, and tagged us as it happened. My friends, family, co-workers, neighbors, former teachers, (you get the point) knew as soon as I did. It all turned out fine and honestly I’m glad to have the moment recorded video. But we didn’t get to tell anyone ourselves or control how the news got out.
I fully support close-ups with glitter and mink, but the rest of this list is on point! Consent and consideration are key.
You’re totally right. Close-ups and fancy should totally be good to go. 🙂
I fully support a close-up of that bling – more glitter and mink? Ok. You do you. However, MULTIPLE photos of that bling? No. I don’t need to go through 10 photos of various angles of your ring.
Agreed!
Don’t feel like you can’t celebrate or share news because so and so is going through a breakup/hard time. You’re allowed to feel happy and to celebrate it! However don’t go to that person to complain about anything engagement or wedding related, THAT’S not cool. I’m struggling with infertility right now, and pregnancy announcements sting, sometimes bring me to tears, but I’m honestly happy for the person. UNTIL they complain endlessly about the discomforts of pregnancy (girl in mind is NOT having a rough pregnancy, she was complaining about the things she’s temporarily not allowed to eat, NOT something to complain to a person struggling with fertility.) Also texting this kind of news is great if you know someone is struggling, gives the person times to process the news, maybe ugly cry in private.
I honestly wish that we had waited to announce our engagement on Facebook. We called our mothers right after it happened, took a picture, and posted away. It was really awesome to see the wave of congratulations and good lucks and best wishes and all that but I sometimes feel like we shared way too soon. If I had to do it over again I think I would’ve waited until we’d told all our close family/friends either in person, via phone, or even by text before posting it for the whole FB universe. But, hindsight is 20/20!
I don’t necessarily agree or disagree with any of these, but I do wish I could at least figure out what we should have done instead… I’m sorry this is so long, I hope this is okay, but 8 years is a long time… I should preface all this with the fact that I am the eldest of 15 grandchildren. I was the first of my generation to get engaged, back in March 2011, when I was 22, he was 21, and we were living together in Philly. I only vaguely remember when my youngest aunts and uncles were still getting married. My now-husband has been estranged from most of his family. So we did not have any example to follow.
I was always under the impression at least, and had read nearly everywhere else, that it’s the parents’ job to announce it to the rest of the family. When we got engaged, there was no ring, so I figured we should wait to tell anyone until we got our engagement ringS. (He’s making this promise for a future marriage, too, so why shouldn’t he have a ring?) He called his dad the next day, and he congratulated us just as normally as we expected. I didn’t want to allow any room for snide comments about not having any kind of ring. Well, we told our friends nearly right away anyway, just as it came up or as we saw them. I told my mom a couple months later while I was home visiting, while we were still saving up for and still even trying to decide on rings. My mom is a big part of the vast grapevines of both my hometown and extended family. So with the cat out of the bag, we finally put it on facebook.
…to zero response. We didn’t have a picture at all to go with it, cuz it wasn’t a big theatrical moment, it was a quiet conversation on the couch one evening. We’re also not big selfie people. But it was out there. I figured that the social media angle just wasn’t like, *it,* for my family, for the “torrent of congratulations.” Plus with facebook’s algorithms and whatever… Basically I barely noticed it at the time. For whatever the next family party was, I braced myself for a formal announcement from my mom, or for everyone to suddenly congratulate us.
…but that didn’t happen either.
Over a year passed. We finally got our rings, custom designed, in time for New Years 2013. Okay, I thought, now it is sooo official. We got rings! With our birthstones, but my birthstone happens to also be a diamond, so I still had a diamond ring I was suddenly wearing on my left ring finger. I tried to show my parents when we were over, when the ball dropped. My dad didn’t want to be bothered by anything on his way to bed. My mom gave them a cursory glance in the dark with sleepy eyes and no glasses. “Oh that’s nice.” …I thought, well, they’re sleepy. Surely, tomorrow. Once they’re not too sleepy and it’s daylight again, right?
…I still couldn’t get either of them to look at it.
For 5 and a half yeeears, this cold shoulder ignoring went on. Sometimes it would erupt into full blown fights and screaming matches. I just tried to distance myself more and more from my entire family.
In October 2016, my brother got engaged. He had planned it for over a year, and livestreamed it on facebook as he surprised her out of the blue in front of Cinderella’s castle with an ugly ring that cost thousands upon thousands of dollars. I still have never watched the video, because it sparked hundreds of likes in minutes, and hundreds of comments everywhere from bland congratulations from people he hadn’t seen in decades, people they didn’t know, and, full essays from our family members. I unfriended him and everyone within that week because it hurt so bad and I just could not bear to see it.
We skipped Thanksgiving, to avoid my brother, his new fiance, and my entire family. I didn’t want to see what kind of blubbering childish mess that would have turned me into, and then that probably would have been an issue itself. No. We went to my now-husband’s father’s for Thanksgiving, and Black Friday shopping after. At the mall, something happened, and we realized that his father had forgotten that we were engaged. Minutes later, while reeling about that, I got a text from my mom that, after she had formally announced my brother’s engagement to our entire family, she added us in as footnote, with no elaboration, just, eh, yeah btw they’re engaged too. Nothing about how, the date, our rings, nothing else.
On Christmas, 2016, 3 people from my family (of 30) told me, alone, congratulations, in literal whispers, and asked, “When did this happen?” Uh, 5 and a half years ago. My mom just never told anybody, would get in fights with us, and then I didn’t want to go over her head and make it worse.
…if you made it this far, thank you. We finally got papers signed and did a snippet of what we wanted for a wedding in April 2019, exactly 1 month before my brother’s, because I would’ve been damned to let them get married before us after waiting 8 long years. But I still wonder, what should we have done differently with announcing our engagement? Should we have gone over my mom’s head, taking away her place to announce it to the family? Should we have been more aggressive on facebook?