Wedding date help!

Would the venue let you change the date without penalty? (Not saying you should do this, but seeing if it's even an option.)

Then just keep your date, and make sure you send out save the dates so that your friends can start planning on coming to your wedding.

Our date was our current anniversary and was not up for debate. All wedding plans were made around our date. If the date is important to you, keep it.

If your date is important to you, then don't change it. Just know that some of your mutual friends may choose to go to the other wedding instead of yours. If you're ok with that, then go for it!!

So did you actually book a venue or just say you did to encourage your other friends to choose something else so you could have the date you wanted?

If your venue is booked, I'd leave it and perhaps send out the STDs a little early so that any mutual friends who are invited to both weddings see your wedding first and that ends up being the first one on their mind. If you didn't actually book a venue and were just saying you did, and its important to you that the majority of those you invite actually go to your wedding, I'd choose another date.

One of my closest friends is getting married on the same day as we are, but on the West Coast (she grew up on the East Coast, where we are, and all her family is still here). She was engaged first and set her date first, but my FH and I are older and have been together longer, we have a home together and established careers, and we didn't want to have a long engagement because we wanted to be married before trying for kids and that clock is running out. I only knew what her date was because I asked her because I was trying to avoid any conflict, otherwise I probably would have booked our wedding for the same date without having any knowledge of when her wedding was until we got her STD in the mail. The date she picked was the date I wanted, and it ended up being one of the few dates our venue had remaining. I was willing to choose a different date if she was realistically going to attempt to make our wedding, but logistically it seemed unlikely that she'd fly across the country to come to our wedding right before or after her own, and the other dates the venue had didn't work for her, so I just ended up booking the same date. I figured it would save us both the stress of paying a couple grand for travel when we each had our own wedding to plan and pay for, and if we couldn't attend each others weddings having the same date would be something special we would share and we could do a double-date-vacation for our anniversary to celebrate with each other. We do have mutual friends, but she's having a very small wedding so I don't think we have too much overlap on our guest list, if any, and those guests who do overlap might not go to her wedding anyway because of the cost involved.

Weddings are complex. There is no way you are going to make everyone happy and unless you have a very small wedding it is impossible choose a date that works for every single guest you invite. If you stick with the same date, you'll just need to understand some will choose your wedding and some will choose the other couples. Be prepared for that, and do your best not to let people's choices influence your friendship with them going forward.

Oh I think you should just say you are engaged then! You don't need a ring to be "official." My mom never had an engagement ring and when we got engaged and I told her about my ring she was like "oh you got a ring, I forgot people do that."

If you already have the venue booked, then I don't think you need to change anything. If anything, I'd just let people know you are engaged and go through with planning and STDs as if you are engaged and getting married just like any couple with a proposal and ring would. Some people expect a proposal and a ring to go with an "engagement", but you aren't under any obligation to wait for those things to happen if you are both on the same page and planning your wedding.