Ahhh, he proposed!!! You’ve been waiting to get engaged for so long… This is one of the most exciting days of your life, and you just can’t wait to share your happiness with everyone that you know!!

But as soon as the news is out there on the internet, you’ll have so many notifications coming your way, you won’t even get a second to enjoy the moment together!

So before you choose a date or post your ring selfie all over Facebook and Instagram, you might want to do these things first!

1. Celebrate!!

Whether you’re alone with your new fiancé or you’re surrounded by your closest friends and family, take a little while to celebrate right then and there. Pop the bubbly, go out for lunch/dinner/ice cream/drinks, maybe even just make out a little… 😉 But tuck your phones away for a while (this is important!)! Have fun spending time together, and don’t stress about telling everyone right away!

There’s no rule on timing for this! You can spend as long as you want in the celebration stage! Who says you can’t enjoy the secret for a day or two before you tell the world? Chris and I got engaged at around nine in the morning, and we didn’t post about it until almost midnight that night. But if we could do it over, we would have waited until the next day! It was hard to go to bed with the notifications pouring in!

If people are with you when you get engaged, ask them not to share until you do—it’s your news, so if they love you, they will gladly respect your wishes no matter how excited they are!

2. Mark down your engagement date!

The day you get engaged is a very special day with a story that you will be telling for the rest of your life! It deserves to be commemorated every year. After you intentionally celebrate together, cell-phone-free, the next thing you should do is pull out your phone (for only a minute or two) and open your calendar app.

Put an event in the calendar with the title “Engaged!!” followed by the year it happened. In the notes section, jot down a quick few things you want to remember about the engagement, like exactly where it happened and how. Then set it to recur every year on the same date, and set a reminder for it! Then, every year, you’ll get a notification that reminds you of one of the best moments of your life!

Micaela and I actually started doing this before we got engaged, with smaller events from our relationship. We put in recurring events for the first time we kissed, the first time we said “I love you…” Even little things like the first time we baked something together. We use a shared calendar, so on the same days every year we both get notifications about special past moments in our relationship! Just remember to always mark the year and a few little notes about why each event was so memorable!

3. Choose a weekly date night!

If you don’t already have a date night every week, now is the time! The next few months are going to be stressful, and there is so much to plan and to prepare for… It’s super important for you to spend time together and continue prioritizing your relationship!

Money might be tight now that you’re saving for the wedding, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have a lot of fun at home! 

There are three rules for weekly date night:

1. No cell phones. Your future spouse is so much more important to you than that blinking notification. Just put it away.
2. No wedding talk! Date night is meant to be a fun and stress-free time for you to be together, and wedding talk can add stress to your night. Keep the wedding planning out of your romantic evenings—period!
3. No skipping weeks. Spending quality time together is the most important thing you can do for your relationship, so stick to your date night religiously! Pick a night that you’re almost always both free, and then have your date on the same night. Every week. No matter what. (But if one week there’s something really important that night, don’t skip date night altogether! Switch it to a different evening for that week only, and then go back to the regular night the next week.)

And one bonus rule:

Don’t stop when you get married. The fun doesn’t end when you settle down! Make it a priority to never stop dating your favorite human, and they will thank you for always putting them first!

4. Talk about your plans!

There is one question you’re going to hear over and over (and over… and over…) until you get sick of it. “So have you picked a date?!”

Don’t feel pressure to pick a date right away (trust us, once you start trying to book venues and vendors, it will probably change anyway!), or any other super specific plans. But do feel free to get excited and start talking and dreaming about your wedding plans with your future spouse! There are so many possibilities, and it can be fun to explore them together!

Just remember to keep wedding talk far away from date night, and to pause the discussion any time one of you begins to feel overwhelmed. And ladies, be sure to be extra sensitive with your man, because he will probably get overwhelmed a lot more quickly than you will. Dreaming is fun! Stress is not.

5. Share the news—but with only the most important people first!

6. Tell the world!

Finally, once all the important people in your life have heard the news, and you’re ready to take on the storm of Facebook and Instagram love, put together a post to share publicly! Include a short version of your engagement story so you don’t have to repeat it a million times.

Once the comments start rolling in, don’t feel pressure to respond to every one! That can get overwhelming fast. Just like with Facebook birthday wishes, in some cases a blanket “thank you, everyone!” is enough. But closer friends and family members might deserve a specific response. Instead of reaching for your phone each time you get a new notification, block off a chunk of time to respond to them all at once! That way you won’t be a slave to your phone for the next few days.

7. Enjoy this season!

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This is such a special time in your life with each other, but you have no idea how fast it goes by! Adding wedding planning to the daily tasks you already have really makes the months speed by!

Seriously, before you know it, you’ll be married, and being engaged will feel like a dream. So pick a few ways to document this time well! Keep a journal or start a blog and take lots of photographs to remember going through the process together!

But most importantly, make sure you spend a lot of time just enjoying being with each other! Cultivating a healthy marriage starts long before you say I do. It is so important to start now by making a habit of putting each other first and spending quality time together!

Find ways to be romantic and spontaneous, to speak kindly and do nice things for one another, and to communicate clearly, giving each other your undivided attention! Your future marriage will thank you for it!