For all the things that 2018 was, it was not the year of the long engagement.
No, this year celebrities seemingly took it upon themselves to single-handedly pick up the slack for the regular people who studies show are waiting longer to get married, proving that you don’t need to get to know each other for years—or even a year—before taking the plunge.
What can we attribute this new trend to?
Let’s see, there’s baby fever, one-upping your friends, not wanting to be the last of your squad to get married, tax breaks, encroaching existential dread, wanting to lock in a partner so you don’t have to face the apocalypse alone…
Or were there just that many cases of two people falling head over heels in love and not wanting to wait another minute to spend forever together?
Let’s just say, love was in the air, and kudos to every person who captured a bit of it to call their own.
Of course, in that race to the altar, not every couple made it to the finish line. Some things that seemed like a great idea one day don’t always hold up after a few months. Still, cheers to those temporarily blinded by infatuation all the same.
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Emily Ratajkowski & Sebastian Bear-McClard
One minute Ratajkowski was dating Jeff Magid for years, and the next she was married to someone else altogether.
The actress-model wed the producer at New York City Hall on Feb. 23, reportedly after only a few weeks of dating. “Sooo I have a surprise. I got married today,” Emily shared on Instagram.
“When you don’t have a real wedding, it’s for you,” Ratajkowski told Harper’s Bazaar about her secret-for-about-four-hours big day. “I wore what I wanted to wear. It really felt like the outfit that was most me, and that made me feel good.”
But sure enough, the skeptics came calling.
“People came after my marriage, like, ‘Wow. I give it three weeks.’ I’m like, ‘What?'” Ratajkowski told Marie Claire. “No one can take women seriously on any choices that they make, especially if they’re unique to them and they don’t play into the way we think women should get married. It’s a constant writing-off.”
And it’s not as if she just bumped into Bear-McClard somewhere and decided he looked like the one. They were friends first—and she sensed a connection long before they became a couple.
“We knew each other for a long time before and he likes to joke, ‘yeah, everyone thinks we got married quickly, but you vetted me for two years,'” Ratajkowski told Busy Philipps on Busy Tonight in November. Asked when Sebastian became future husband material, Emily replied, “Who all of a sudden changes the way they look at someone? No. I was always, like, ‘I probably shouldn’t hang out with that guy alone.'”
Amy Schumer & Chris Fischer
Surprise! Schumer didn’t just get engaged only days after people found out she was dating again—she got married, too!
After going Instagram official with kissy photos taken at Ellen DeGeneres‘ 60th birthday party, the comedian turned up hitched on Feb. 13. The groom: a chef who presided over one of the hottest restaurants on Martha’s Vineyard, where he cooked for the Obamas and other hungry famous people. Also closing the gap from A to B, Fischer is the brother of Schumer’s longtime assistant. They appear to have started dating in November 2017.
“Part of the thing that’s good about us getting married so quickly is that we’re so in love,” Schumer said on a visit to SiriusXM’s You Up with Nikki Glaser. “Every girl I know, if they get proposed to they’re like, ‘Oh, now? Now that I can’t have kids!'”
Their first child together is due in 2019.
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Michelle Williams & Phil Elverum
Add Williams to the list of 2018 brides who did not see where their year was headed when the clock struck midnight on Jan. 1. Earlier this year the Oscar-nominated actress was dating a finance guy, and then Vanity Fair‘s September cover story on her revealed that Williams would be married by the time the article was published in July.
But not to the finance guy. To Elverum, the indie musician who performs as The Microphone and Mount Eerie. Because, surprise. They swapped vows in the Adirondacks in what was obviously a very private ceremony.
“I don’t really want to talk about any of it,” Williams told VF. “But there’s that tease, that lure, that’s like, What if this helps somebody? What if somebody who has always journeyed in this way, who has struggled as much as I struggled, and looked as much as I looked, finds something that helps them?”
Like Williams, who’s been raising daughter Matilda, now 13, on her own since the death of her ex-partner Heath Ledger in 2008, Elverum is a single parent—and he too knows from tragedy. He lost his wife of 13 years to cancer in 2016 when their daughter, Agathe, was 18 months old.
So really, it’s kind of a miracle that these two found each other.
“I never gave up on love,” Williams said. She added, “Obviously I’ve never once in my life talked about a relationship, but Phil isn’t anyone else. And that’s worth something. Ultimately the way he loves me is the way I want to live my life on the whole. I work to be free inside of the moment. I parent to let Matilda feel free to be herself, and I am finally loved by someone who makes me feel free.”
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Hailey Baldwin & Justin Bieber
We defy anyone who says they expected these two to actually get married—anytime soon, at least—after Bieber popped the question while they were vacationing in the Bahamas in July, just weeks after their on-again, off-again relationship looked to be back on in the form of an actual boyfriend-girlfriend arrangement. (Not to mention this was just months after Bieber and Selena Gomez appeared to be giving love a shot again.)
“Justin made arrangements for the ring when they were in NYC and knew that he wanted to propose to her,” a source explained. “It was a sudden decision but Justin always knew Hailey and him had a special bond that was incomparable.”
OK, fine, so they were engaged. But whoa, baby, the young couple could-not-would-not wait. They were endlessly cagey about it, but the pair swapped vows in a no-frills ceremony at the marriage bureau in a New York courthouse on Sept. 13. There may be frills in their future, so that all the Baldwins and Biebers can partake in the celebration, but so far Hailey has filed to trademark her married name and changed her appellation to Hailey Bieber on Instagram.
“My wife is awesome,” the Biebs informed his Instagram followers in October.
Denise Richards & Aaron Phypers
They started dating in 2017 and supposedly got engaged in January, but were in no rush to start wedding planning… until they were.
Planner to the stars Mindy Weiss whipped their big day into shape in 48 hours, in time for a special Sept. 8 ceremony on the beach in Malibu. The bride wore a lacy white romper, perfect for leaving the party on the back of her husband’s motorcycle.
“I love her,” Phypers told reporters at the premiere of his wife’s movie The Toybox. “She’s amazing. A dream come true.”
And actually, “September 8th meant a lot to my husband,” Richards told ExtraTV. “Means infinity, the number 8, and we just said, ‘you know what, let’s just do it.’ We threw it together and it was fun that we didn’t have to make certain decisions and make it about that instead of the hoopla of a wedding.”
She added to ET, “Yeah, we didn’t tell a lot of people. We kept it really private and we had talked about it for quite some time.”
Among the people they shared their plan with: Bravo. Denise and Aaron’s nuptials will be a part of the next season of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.
Karlie Kloss & Josh Kushner
It only took three months for these two krazy kids to tie the knot. Well, six years and three months.
But once the entrepreneur had asked the supermodel to marry him over the summer, the super-private couple wasted no time in planning a top-secret ceremony, attended by their nearest and dearest, in upstate New York in October, on a Thursday (though there may be a bigger soiree in the spring). Even the honeymoon was compact, as befitting their busy schedules—a 48-hour “mini-moon” to an undisclosed piece of paradise.
“They took our phones. It was like that,” wedding guest Ashley Graham divulged to People. “And I actually kind of love that idea. I think if I were to get married again I would totally do the take the phone and confiscate it thing.”
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Ariana Grande & Pete Davidson
These two were not meant to be, but for a heady four months, they certainly thought they were. Davidson started ring shopping in May, barely two weeks after he and Grande first went public as not even a couple, but as two people who were having a great time together and dating casually. By the beginning of June, they were engaged.
“I just think some people are meant to be together and some people aren’t,” Davidson explained to Howard Stern in September. “Even if they’re good people or not, some people just aren’t good in relationships together, and I just think we’re supposed to be together.”
Grande told Paper magazine, “All I know is that I’m happy with Pete, that’s all I really care about.”
By mid-October, however, the ring was back in Davidson’s possession. Grande “will always have a special place in her heart for him, but told him that right now is not the best time,” a source said.
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Priyanka Chopra & Nick Jonas
Did you hear, Nick and Priyanka got married! In a still unfinished onslaught of celebration, the “Jealous” singer and the Quantico star wed in India on Dec. 1…and on Dec. 2…and then had their first reception…and there’s reportedly a Los Angeles blowout to come.
“People will need vacations after this wedding,” Chopra joked to Vogue.
The planning took twice as long—four months—as it took for Nick to get down on one knee after he and the former Miss World started seriously dating. Actually, that’s not even the case. Though he didn’t place the Tiffany ring on her finger until July, while they were in Greece, he actually bent the knee the first time he ever saw her in person, more than a year beforehand.
They first met virtually when Nick DM’d Priyanka on Sept. 8, 2016, informing her that they had mutual friends who thought they should meet. They started texting and then, when he finally spied her at the 2017 Vanity Fair Oscar party almost six months later, “…I put my drink down, get on one knee—this is in front of a bunch of people—and I say, ‘You’re real. Where have you been all my life?’ Like, loud,” Jonas told Vogue.
They spent more than a year getting to know each other, but primarily long distance. In fact, they didn’t see each other in person at all between the Met Gala in 2017 and the one in 2018. Happily, once they were in the same city for more than a hot second, they just knew. Nick told his mom he was going to marry Priyanka after their third date, a Dodgers game.
When she at first met his proposal with silence, Nick went ahead and said after 45 seconds, “I’m going to put this ring on your finger now unless you have any objections.”
Overall, the appeal of an elopement or otherwise very private, small wedding is pretty obvious if you’re famous—no one knows about it till after the I-dos. But the theme that seems to apply to most of these couples, if not Nick and Priyanka’s traditional-meets-modern-meets-intimate-meets-blowout extravaganza, is that the brides and grooms enjoyed not having to make endless decisions and then wonder if everybody else was enjoying themselves.
But big or small, in the afternoon or over the course of a week, a wedding that happens in the heat of the moment can’t help but leave plenty of warm feelings in its wake.