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"There are pluses and minuses to each engagement length that you may not know about. Consider these before you book a thing. The Short Engagement Pros: You can score major deals with venues and vendors who are desperate to book fast-approaching dates. That&amp;amp;#8217;s how Paul and I were able to afford our venue--because we wound up reserving it just four months before our wedding (despite having a two-year-long engagement!). The stress of planning will only last for a few months rather than a year or more as with other brides. And the people you&amp;amp;#8217;re close with at the start of your engagement will likely still be part of your circle when you mail out invites. Cons: You may have to settle for less-than-stellar venues and vendors because the best ones for your price range may already be booked up. You also may spend pretty much every moment planning. If it&amp;amp;#8217;s a really short engagement (a few months or less), your guests may not have enough notice to make it to your wedding. Plus, you may not be able to find the wedding dress of your dreams. More minuses: You may have to pay fees for rush jobs on your stationery, and DIY items may not be possible since those take oodles of time to make. The Long Engagement Pros: You get your pick of vendors. You may even book them for less because you can reserve them for the current year&amp;amp;#8217;s pricing instead of the sure-to-be-higher fee in your wedding year. You also have more time to save money. This was key in my and Paul&amp;amp;#8217;s decision for having a drawn-out engagement; in fact, our salaries nearly doubled from proposal day to wedding day. Another bright side: You get to spread out the many events instead of cramming in an engagement party, shower, bachelorette party, rehearsal dinner, and a wedding in just a few months. Lastly, you don&amp;amp;#8217;t have to spend every single weekend planning your party. Paul and I went months at a time without doing a single thing for the wedding which kept things (relatively) low stress. Cons: You&amp;amp;#8217;ll see so many wedding ideas that you may change your mind about everything from colors to cakes. I definitely fell into this camp. There&amp;amp;#8217;s also this downside: Your friends may wind up getting engaged after you but getting married before you and use your brilliant ideas that they swear were their own. (That didn&amp;amp;#8217;t happen to me, luckily.) Yet another con: The people on your initial guest list may change by the time are ready to go out (so resist the temptation to mail save-the-dates more than a year in advance!). Of course, short and long are relative, but if I had to do it all over again, I would have planned my wedding in about a year. No, we wouldn&amp;amp;#8217;t have been earning as much money as we were at the two-year point, yet we still would have had plenty of time to save up. We wouldn&amp;amp;#8217;t have enjoyed long wedding-free periods, but it&amp;amp;#8217;s not like we would have been forced to spend every second planning, either. How long will your engagement be? Which engagement length do you think is ideal? Any pros or cons to add? More About Wedding Planning Would You Plan Your Wedding Before You Get Engaged? A Little Piece of Advice About Wedding Websites Last-Minute Details You Can&amp;amp;#8217;t Forget About More Ways to Get Glamour Visit Shopglamour.com for cute stuff starting at just $10! Enter the latest Glamour sweepstakes! Follow us on Twitter Add us to your iGoogle homepage Photo: Comstock"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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