You said YES! How To Announce Your Engagement
Here Comes The Guide to announcing your engagement. It's a celebration, bishes!
Tell your nearest and dearest first.
After you and your newly minted fiancé bask in that post-engagement glow for a while, it's time to tell your friends and family! You'll want to let the closest people in your lives know first. This could mean your parents, your children if you have any, your grandparents, siblings, fave cousin, or BFFs. And if there was ever a time to pick up the phone and actually call them instead of texting, this would be it!
Text the rest.
If there are other people besides immediate family and ride-or-die besties that you'd like to share the news with before posting to social media, go ahead and text them! Photos of the ring, obnoxious use of emojis, and ALL the exclamation marks are fair game here.
Take to social media.
Share the news via social media! It's the modern-day equivalent of publishing an announcement in the newspaper. Post a great photo with a short-but-sweet caption, update your status to "Engaged", and watch the likes roll in. Once you complete this step, pretty much everyone will know the good news. (However, this step is totally optional! If you're not into social media, don't feel obligated to use it.)
Party it up!
An engagement party is NOT required, but it IS a lot of fun! It doesn't have to be anything fancy, but it's a great way to formally celebrate your engagement with loved ones. Not to mention an effective means of introducing your two families—especially if they haven't officially met. If you do decide to have an engagement party, you get to tackle one of the more enjoyable parts of wedding planning right away—registering for some gifts!
Launch that wedding website.
A wedding website is a convenient way to keep guests informed of wedding details, and it's also the perfect place to share the details of your proposal story! Once you've created your website (we're partial to these gorgeous free options from Minted), you can send friends and family the URL. Just be sure you're only sharing it with people who will actually be invited to the wedding.
Consider engagement photos.
Engagement photos are the ultimate multi-taskers. First, they give you an opportunity to connect with your wedding photographer to ensure he or she will be a good fit for the actual wedding day. Second, they can be used in tons of different places, from your wedding website and save-the-date cards, to your invitation suite or even reception décor. You can also use them for more "formal" engagement announcement cards if you want to be super fancy.
Tips
- Immediately after you announce your engagement you'll start getting bombarded with questions from excited friends and family members. Very sweet, but also overwhelming! Here's a great response when you want to keep the interrogations at bay: "We’re just having a really fun time being engaged right now, so we’re putting off the stress of planning for a while."
- You may also encounter nosy questions about your ring, be it the carat size or the cost. Tacky, but true. Here's a great response for side-stepping those awkward conversations, "Those details aren't what's important to me. I'm just in love with my ring and everything it represents."
- Remember that Thank-You Etiquette applies to engagement gifts as well. The best practice is to write a thank-you note as soon as you receive a gift—though we know that's not always possible. Ideally, these pre-wedding thank-you notes should be sent off within 2–3 weeks after receiving the gift, and if they go out later they should definitely arrive prior to your wedding.
→ Congrats! Now that you're engaged, check out the 5 Things You Need To Do First.
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