Fourth Date Marriage

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Robert: How long have you known your Prince Charming?
Giselle: Oh, about a day.
Robert: You mean it feels like a day 'cause you're so in love?
Giselle: No, it's been a day. And tomorrow will be two days...
Robert: You're kidding. You're going to marry someone after a day because you fell in love with him?
Giselle: Yes. Yes!

—Enchanted

Once Upon A Time Love At First Sight was all the romantic setup the audience needed, especially in Disney Movies and early romantic movies. But times have changed and we now demand a more realistic build up for our on screen couples... three days or so should do it.

It seems in your general 90 minute movie, audiences are pretty willing to accept that a couple will progress to the point of getting engaged, or at least to a fairly intense point, in a matter of days or weeks, rarely more than a month. This isn't all that realistic: not that relationships with short courtships prior to the engagement haven't worked in real life, but successful ones are fairly rare.

Compare "Falling in Love" Montage for other ways to get a couple together without spending a lot of screen time on the process. Also compare Engaging Conversation.

In the gay community there is a stereotype of "Lesbian U-Haul Syndrome," in which a lesbian couple will move in together very early in a relationship, leading to many of the same problems.

Sometimes Truth in Television, especially for shows set in a time period where long relationships before marriage were considered "absolutely lunatic and idiotic," such as the 1950s.

Examples of Fourth Date Marriage include:

Anime and Manga

Comic Books

  • In the Marvel Universe, Hawkeye and Mockingbird got married a couple of days after they met. Admittedly it was a very intense couple of days.
  • Hulk and Caiera hit it off pretty fast in Planet Hulk. The exact amount of time is hard to pin down but it doesn't seem more than a few weeks, though they are engaged in some fairly intense flirting during their second meeting. It didn't last long, though.

Fan Works

  • Noticibly averted in 'Nexus' when June tells Jack that his father didn't even like her when they met and only seemed to start warming up to her after a month as she states thats how long it took him to stop calling her 'girl.' Seeing as who the father is though, this implies that Jack's parents knew each other way before he was born.
  • Through a Diamond Sky: It's stated that Flynn and Jordan hit City Hall within three months of meeting. Yes, Sam was a factor. The author did the math on the Flynn Lives ARG and realized that there was less than two years between their meeting and her death...


Disney Animated Canon

  • The Little Mermaid - Actually it was Love At First Sight on her part. He took about two days to come around but was then brainwashed.
  • Aladdin - He fell head over heels for her after an afternoon. She was ready to smooch him at that point, but it took about three days to decide she wanted to marry him. That being said, their engagement did last the entirety of the Animated Series and two Direct-to-Video movies.
  • Pocahontas - A few days, again, but here it's subverted because they end up not getting together forever at the end. In Pocahontas II: Journey to the New World she gets together with John Rolfe, the man the historical Pocahontas actually married, but her getting to the point where she's willing to sacrifice her life for him counts.
  • Brother Bear II - Okay, they were childhood friends, but she hadn't seen him in years and few days with him was enough to make her give up her humanity and get herself turned into a bear to be with him!
  • Sleeping Beauty - Aurora and Prince Phillip meet in the woods, he chats her up with some cheesy pick-up lines ("You have met me before - in your dreams"), and they immediately go home to tell their parents/guardians that they are in love and are going to get married. Without even knowing the first names of their chosen one!
    • The fact that Aurora and Phillip managed to have a conversation before "happily ever after" (and Phillip actually having a name) was the equivalent of a six-month courtship compared to previous Disney Princesses.
  • Cinderella is literally a one date marriage. Ditto for Snow White. To be fair, the Prince was going to be in more scenes, but those got cut when the animators were having a difficult time animating him in that primitive era.
    • In the second Cinderella sequel, this is justified by the fact that holding a woman's hand should tell the prince if she's the one. He doesn't feel it when he's made to think Anastasia was the girl he danced with, or when Anastasia is magically made to look like Cindy.
      • To be very fair to A Twist in Time, Cinderella and the Prince had been Happily Married for a year before Lady Tremaine magically turned back the clock and they had to fall in love all over again. The movie seemed to imply that something of their memories of that year remained.
  • As far as we know, both of the main couples in One Hundred and One Dalmatians. But, hey, maybe they had some offscreen dates.
  • Lady and the Tramp: Technically they had only one really long date. And a lot of fights. But things work out in the end!
  • Subverted in Beauty and the Beast, where it's strongly indicated that Belle was in the castle for at least a few months, during which she and the Beast gradually fell in love, and then married some unspecified time after his transformation.
    • It couldn't have been very long, because of Maurice- are we to believe he spent months wandering around in the woods looking for her? One of the creators said they wanted the courtship to last longer, but couldn't figure out what to do with Maurice.
      • Why not? Belle is all Maurice has, and he is incredibly devoted to her. But even that aside, it's possible there was a significant engagement period between Beast's transformation and their wedding.
      • We never actually see them get married. However we know that they do eventually because the stained glass window at the end shows Belle wearing a tiara. They could have gotten married years after movie ends.
  • The Princess and the Frog: Prince Naveen and Tiana seem to spend a couple days together before Naveen proposes and they get married some unspecified time after. Unlike the Beauty and the Beast example above, there's no way this could actually take place over a long period because of time framing with Mardi Gras which, accurately in this movie, is not always.
  • Subverted in Tangled. Flynn and Rapunzel are clearly smitten with each other nearly as soon as they meet, with Rapunzel saying "I think he likes me!" less than 24 hours after they start to travel together but the ending of the movie implies that Flynn and Rapunzel actually had a decently long courtship before they got married.
  • Played straight at the end of Atlantis: The Lost Empire where the film's heroine is actually still 8500 Atlantean years old (approximately equal to her early 20s) when she got married and became a queen.
  • Definitely played with in Frozen. Anna decides she wants to marry Prince Hans the day she met him -- but everyone from her sister Elsa on down tell her just how bad an idea it is. Still she persists with this through most of the action of the film, until Hans reveals his true colors.

Film

  • Romancing the Stone - though somewhat justified in that Joan Wilder is herself a romance novelist and a self-confessed hopeless romantic.
    • Further justified in that she doesn't marry him, she just runs off on a cruise around the world with him. The sequel shows them having the relationship problems that come up when strangers run off with each other.
  • She knows How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days but he can make a woman fall in love with him that same length of time.
  • Failure to Launch
  • Averted in Two Weeks Notice: the central couple, George and Lucy, knew each other for a year before romance developed.
  • The Princess Diaries 2: A Royal Engagement
    • Played straight via plot device with Mia and Andrew, but obviously thanks to No Sparks that didn't actually happen. Notably averted with Mia and Nicholas: he confesses his love for her right before her coronation but it's implied that they merely continued dating and got married somewhere down the line as opposed to getting married right away, which fits in with Mia's Character Development as an independent woman. No, he was not proposing when he knelt down.
  • The Mummy - Rick and Evie seem to fall in love pretty quickly.
  • Speed - Subversion Because they cited statistics that indicated that how their relationship started meant it wouldn't last. And indeed, it didn't.
  • Practical Magic is another subversion.The first time one of the sisters falls, we don't know how long it took. The second time the same woman falls, it's her own doing because she sent for him herself.
  • The Saint The Movie also had this happen. He counted her as a mark, romanced her to get to his target, and found himself falling in love with her. She took longer because she was pissed off at him stealing from her. But by the end of the week, they were in love.
  • Splash - Four or five days is enough for him to completely abandon his life on land to be with her.
  • Enchanted at first makes fun of Love At First Sight, but by the end, the main couple ends up with a textbook Fourth Date Marriage and the Beta Couple run off and get married (one of them leaving her entire life behind) after knowing each other for about an hour.
    • Arguably Robert and Giselle don't get married immediately. The montage that shows them living together also shows that several characters have published books that are bestsellers, and that Giselle has been manufacturing a popular line of dresses for young girls.
    • The Beta Couple was going to get some justification (the one that leaves her entire life behind was intended to have scenes showing her to have a tendency towards hopeless romanticism), but the relevant scenes were cut. On the up side, they leave for a world operating under Disney Animation logic, and there is evidence she could go back to her old world, should she want to.
  • The Heartbreak Kid: Subverted in that the girl Eddie marries after around a month suddenly has a disturbingly quick and negative personality shift. Then, it's played straight when Eddie decides to divorce said wife when he falls in love with a girl after two days.
  • Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese have two days to fall in love and conceive John in The Terminator. Somewhat justified in that he'd been pining over her photo for years, but she'd only just met him.
    • Well, he did make a heck of a first impression.
      • Plus, the entirety of their acquaintance takes place over those same two days, which also involve running for their lives. That sort of thing tends to make for intense emotions and not having time to notice how annoying it is that he never hangs up his towels. It's less than clear that the relationship would have lasted if he'd lived.
  • The Santa Clause II, Scott has all of one month to marry somebody.
  • Goldfish Memory features one couple meeting, getting together and planning a family in less time then it takes one partner to realise she's already pregnant from a one-night stand just before they met. Multiple other couples manage to meet, break up, get engaged, and all manner of other things in the same period.
  • 27 Dresses - Two subversions done two different ways. The first couple plays it straight at first, but doesn't end up marrying. The second couple falls in love within a matter of weeks, but doesn't marry until a year later.
  • In Made Of Honor (the gender-swapped My Best Friend's Wedding), Hannah hooks up with Colin, a guy she meets in Scotland on a business trip. They get engaged at most five weeks later, to be wed a fortnight onward. She realizes on the eve of the wedding that she has no idea who he is and breaks off the engagement by making out with the titular flirty-best-friend of ten years and Man of Honor in the middle of the ceremony
  • Inverted in the original Stargate movie. Daniel Jackson is given Sha'uri as a gift, but it isn't until a day or so later that he even realizes that they're already married. By the end of the movie, he's fallen in love and decided to stay on Abydos with her.
    • Further justified in that staying on Abydos would have been his dream come true even without a beautiful woman involved, since he's an archaeologist with a ruined career and no family to go back to.
  • Hitch All it takes is three dates to sweep a woman off her feet. Hitch says he can get you past the first three dates, but you're on your own after that. Of the relationships in the movie, only two end up in marriage, and only one of them is a Fourth Date Marriage. Maybe.
  • Played with in While You Were Sleeping, in which Peter dramatically proposes to Lucy despite having properly met her twice, and plans to get married to her what would appear to be a few days later, because he thinks they're already engaged and he merely has Laser-Guided Amnesia about her (they weren't and he hasn't, but thinks he does due to a rather tangled series of events).
  • Shrek, while subverting so much else, plays this trope straight: he and Fiona have only two days together before their "true love's first kiss" at the end, which is more apparent since the passage of time is a plot point due to Fiona's curse. There's a scene skip before they leave for their honeymoon that could have been a long engagement, but from the context it was probably Why Waste a Wedding? if anything.
  • In One Night Wth The King, Esther meets the king face to face only once to fall in love with him. It takes a second meeting for the king to propose to her and marry her.
  • In Monster-in-Law, Kevin and Charlie had dated for about a month before he proposed to her. Kevin's mother was not pleased.
  • Kind of the whole point of Designing Woman (not to be confused with Designing Women). Gregory Peck and Lauren Bacall meet and marry after a few days, and hijinks ensue once they realize how different they are. It works out OK in the end.
  • When In Rome starts out at the wedding of the protagonist's sister. Whilst she and the best man are dancing, they both admit they don't think it'll last 'cause the couple have known each other for two weeks.
  • In Love Actually, Jamie proposes to Aurelia despite knowing her for roughly a month and not even speaking the same language.

Literature

  • In Anansi Boys, Charlie proposes to Daisy after just a few meetings. Granted, proposing to her on the spot was about the only way he could save their lives (It Makes Sense in Context), but after the threat has passed, he doesn't pull out of it but instead solidifies it with an actual engagement ring instead of the symbolic engagement lime. Similarly, it takes Spider only a couple of days to realize that Rosie's the one woman for him, and it doesn't take too long for Rosie to come around after leaving him for the whole "I pretended to be your fiance" shtick.
  • In Mastiff, by Tamora Pierce, Beka falls wildly in love with Farmer after knowing him for two freaking weeks. And she meets him the night she buried her fiance. And she decides she trusts him more than her partner of many years. After a week!
  • In Lois McMaster Bujold's Shards of Honor, Aral and Cordelia have known each other for only a few days when he proposes (he says it was Love At First Sight, despite the unromantic circumstances).
    • Towards the end of his series, Miles' marriage proposals were heading for this territory as he became increasingly desperate. Elena, he waited seventeen years to propose. Elli, although they'd known each other for several years, he proposed on their first date (and kept on proposing even after being shot down repeatedly.) And with Ekaterin, he proposed before she even knew she was being courted. (He panicked.)
  • Twilight: Protagonists Edward and Bella know each other for all of what—a month or two at most? -- and by the end of it Bella's begging to be vampirized so she can stay with Edward. Not just married. Vampirized. Two months is too short a courtship to justify giving up her humanity.
  • Faulkner's As I Lay Dying - Anse is married again by the end of the novel. This is played as an extreme Jerkass move, however, as he'd only just buried his previous wife.
  • In the Deep Space Nine relaunch series, Jake Sisko marries a Bajoran artist that he's known for about three weeks.
  • Garth Nix's Sabriel has the main characters getting together after roughly a month of knowing each other. Then again, it was a very intense month....
    • It happens quicker than a month—the book explicitly states in the climax it had only been six days since Sabriel started on her quest, and she didn't meet Touchstone until at least a day later. There may have been a bit more time between the declaration of love and the proposal of marriage, but there was hardly any time for them to get to know each other.
  • At least five Nora Roberts books have main characters who get engaged after about three weeks. The longest two relationships were probably Montana Sky, which had two that had known each other since childhood, and two who dated for a year before marrying.
  • Played several times in Stephen King's The Stand where a number of couples become committed (though not technically marry, since there aren't any churches or officials around...unless you count Judge Farris)within weeks to a month of the plague. Or six weeks in Stu and Frannie's case.
  • In Heian Japan, the setting of the Tale of Genji, three nights of sex and eating some cakes together constituted a legal marriage.
  • In Rose Daughter, it takes seven days for Beauty to fall in love with the Beast and tell him she wants to marry him. Compare that with Robin McKinley's previous Beauty and The Beast retelling, Beauty, where Beauty has known the Beast for several months before she decides to marry him.
  • While Karl Oskar and Kristina have known each other for a few years by the time they get married in The Emigrants they've only actually met a handful of times. Kristina points this out the first time he proposes and once more the second time.
  • In Tales of the Frog Princess, it took a total of three days for Li'l and Garrid to fall for each other.
  • The couples in most PG Wodehouse stories--justified, of course, in that that's exactly the way it was done at the time. Couples didn't really go steady unless they were engaged, so it wasn't uncommon for young men to propose to girls that they'd only met recently.
  • In 1632, Jeff rescues Gretchen at the Battle of the Crapper. They get engaged that night, and married four days later. Despite not having a common language. Nevertheless, their relationship works, and is still going strong five years later.
  • Blind Waves by Steven Gould: When Thomas proposes to Patricia, it happens to be right in front of her mother. Patricia was in disguise (she's a witness the bad guys want to murder), and her mom didn't recognize her, but Thomas saw through it at first glance. So once he pops the question, Mom asks how long they've known each other; Patricia replies truthfully, "Four days now." Thomas points out that, "They've been a very intense four days."


Live-Action TV

  • In the sitcom Becker, John's friend Jake marries a woman he met the day before. Throughout the season their marriage has been on the rocks.
  • A Sex and the City episode "The Chicken Dance" has Miranda invite a friend to stay at her apartment for a week with the hope of wooing him. He and Miranda's interior decorator hit it off and they got engaged a week later. Their wedding becomes the topic of conversation for the rest of the episode.
  • Bewitched - It's established in the early seasons of the show that Samantha and Darrin's romance was pretty rapid. Short enough for neither set of parents, nor Darrin's social circle, to know till after the wedding.
  • Ross and Emily from Friends. The marriage lasted about as long as the courtship.
  • Don't forget Matt and Sarah's first date marriage on Seventh Heaven, though they did have a big wedding several months later.
  • The final episode of The Vicar of Dibley.
  • The main plot of Dharma and Greg is that the Odd Couple got married after only one date. If you want to be technical, they got married while on their first date!
    • Dharma seems to think they knew each other in a past life or something, though. Plus the cute little kiddy prologue. Not that either really makes the situation saner...
    • They were once surprised to meet another couple that got married the same day they met. It turns out she was a Mail Order Bride.
  • Subverted in How I Met Your Mother when Ted gets engaged to Stella after only a few months of dating, and very few visible dates, but then Stella calls off the wedding at the last minute. Multiple episodes leading up to the wedding call attention to the rush to the altar.
  • Kind of played with in a Venezuelan telenovela. The mismatched couple of a pampered architect and a construction worker meet and fall in love with passion and true honesty, then get a quick marriage using the looophole of "legalizing" a long concubinary relationship, although they have known each other less than a month, so she can get away from her family. Unfortunately they get in an accident which not only separates them, but also gives her Easy Amnesia and puts her in the custody of a millionaire who finds her. The Love Triangle ensues when she falls in love with this second man, and then her husband (now a rich man) finally finds her.
  • Noah's Arc: Fourth date is an exaggeration, but its revealed early on that Chance and Eddie have only known each other for six months at the start of the series, considering marriage (and get married very soon into the series) and are moving in together. This is also notable for being portayed as a Fourth Date Marriage in-universe.
  • The Sarah Jane Adventures has "The Wedding of Sarah Jane", where the title character is about to marry a man she's known for at best a few months, and a single episode. Of course, Genre Savvy viewers immediately know that things can't possibly be right.
  • A literal example occurs in Grey's Anatomy: a heart patient is brought in at Thanksgiving and told she has to hold on until New Year's, when she has a good chance of receiving a donor heart. Her very new boyfriend remains by her bedside for weeks, and proposes when they hear a heart has been found. She points out that they have had only four dates, then says yes.
  • In Hercules the Legendary Journeys, Hercules meets his love Serena in one episode and the two share a kiss by the end of that episode. By the middle of the very next episode he proposes marriage to her and marries her in same episode.
  • In My Name Is Earl, Earl is playing pool at the Crab Shack with his brother. Not far away, looking at them, is a pregnant Joy and her two friends. She's telling them how she got thrown out of her parents' house because of her premarital pregnancy, and how she needs to find a husband to provide for her and the kid ASAP. The women scope out the men at the bar, initially choosing Randy, but Joy rejects him because he's rather a Cloudcuckoolander. She is, however, attracted to Earl, but she is Genre Savvy enough to know most men won't marry a woman who's six months pregnant with another man's baby. So she enlists her Girl Posse to get him drunk, which they do, and she introduces herself to Earl. Joy drives him to Las Vegas, where they have a quickie-wedding.
  • In True Blood, each episode takes place over the course of about 24 hours, and each one follows right after the other with a two-week time skip at the end of Season 1. This means that Bill and Sookie have sex for the first time about a week after meeting. Then, when Bill proposes to Sookie at the end of Season 2, they had known each other for a total of 43 days.
  • Often seen in soap operas, most notably The Bold And The Beautiful, which will have characters planning a wedding within a month of meeting.
  • The first scene of Army Wives has Trevor propose to Roxy having dated her for four days. They marry shortly after that.
  • In Mahou Sentai Magiranger, Hikaru and Urara marry on the same day they first confess their feelings for each other, although they'd had half a season of Ship Tease in advance.
    • Plus, N Ma had revived and proclaimed that he would destroy all life in a matter of days, so it's not like they had a lot of time to devote to the courtship.
  • On Parks and Recreation, April and Andy decide to get married out of the blue after a season of Ship Tease and Will They or Won't They? and about a month of actual dating. Played with in that Leslie spends a whole episode trying to convince them how wrong their decision must be and that they're rushing into it, and finally realizes that maybe she should just give them a chance and let them do what they want.
  • On Community, Abed attempts to invoke this trope with Jeff and Britta. He has a wedding party with a best man and musical performers standing by just in case.
  • Fourth date near-marriages are fairly common in The Golden Girls with each of the women having at least one man propose to them within a week of meeting them. They almost always consider it a strong possibility, and get angry with their friends for not being happy for them. The only time it's completely Played Straight is in the season finale, when Dorothy actually goes through with it.
  • In My Family, a psychic tells Janey she will meet her true love at a wedding she's due to attend. She does meet a guy there, and marries him ten days later. She runs off with another man at the reception for her own wedding, and asks her husband for a divorce on the same day.
  • In the classic Star Trek: The Original Series episode "For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky," the female alien leader is totally ready to marry McCoy after spending a few hours with him (even though he's dying of a rare disease), but then for her it was Love At First Sight.
  • In the first episode of Robin of Sherwood, Robin and Marian meet while Robin is trying to escape from the Sheriff of Nottingham (Marian is his ward). He bursts into her bedroom, looking for a place to hide, and they immediately fall in love. Marian helps him escape, and when he later he saves her, she decides to stay in Sherwood Forest with him and his band. They get married at the end of the second episode.


Oral Tradition

  • A lot of Fairy Tales, due to the Rule of Three, have the romantic leads meeting three times before being united for good and all the fourth time they meet. As the obvious examples, there are versions of "Cinderella" where Cinderella attends three balls in disguise, and only loses her slipper (or whatever it is in that version) on the third occasion.


Theater

  • Anthony and Johanna in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Anthony in particular is ready to elope with Johanna after meeting her once and exchanging a grand total of no words with her. Possibly deconstructed, in that a running theme of the play is the naivety of youth versus the cynicism of experience.
    • Depending on how it's performed, there's also the justification on Johanna's side that she's desperate to escape the depraved Judge Turpin.
  • William Shakespeare was fond of playing this trope straight in his comedies and deconstructing it in his tragedies:
    • Famously deconstructed in Romeo and Juliet; two hormonal teenagers are driven to elopement AND a suicide pact, all because of their families' pointless feuding (Romeo's previous infatuation at the top of the play suggests that, if things had taken their natural course, his affair with Juliet would have burned out of its own accord). The Prince of Verona publicly calls the Montagues and Capulets out on this at the end of the play.
      • Played somewhat straighter in the musical adaptation West Side Story, though with a similar message at the end.
    • Like everything else, played with and played straight in A Midsummer Nights Dream: Demetrius's Love At First Sight with Helena half-way through the play is brought about by a literal plot device, the love potion; nonetheless, it sticks, and they are ready to be married by the end of the play.
      • The play does hint that Demetrius and Helena had a relationship before he started pursuing Hermia, which explains why Helena is so convinced that he really loves her. It still has him thrown back into love with her, though.


Video Games

  • Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride makes The Hero choose between three girls: Bianca, Nera, and Debora. Of those three, the only one he's spent any time with is childhood friend Bianca (whom he hasn't seen since he was six), and the game seems geared towards her as the "right choice".
  • Possible in The Sims. Heck, it's possible to have a first-date marriage, if you're so inclined. With enough hacking, two Sims that don't even know each other can be married.
    • Sort of necessary in The Sims 2, since the sims' lifespans are measured in days.
  • Neverwinter Nights 2 has no way of showing the passage of time in most of the main campaign, but it seems like it takes place over maybe a month. And in the space of a month, you can get an elf (notoriously patient species) for males or a paladin (very cautious about this sort of thing) for females to be declaring undying love for you by the end. Then again, Elanee actually makes more sense than most examples, and being thrown into a waterfall of life-or-death situations would tend to make romantic involvement progress rather quickly.
    • Mask of the Betrayer takes place over around three weeks, given its internal traveling time estimates. Then again, both of the possible love interests have a decent excuse.
  • It is ambiguous how long you spend wandering around the Underdark with Nathyrra (or Valen if your character is female), but somehow it doesn't seem long enough for what results. The timeframe for the player character and either Aribeth or Arin (depending on gender) in the original campaign is a lot more feasible.
    • This trope quite frequently lampshaded by Diana on her romance path in the community module Sanctum of the Archmage, which combines this with Love Before First Sight.
  • Justified for a male player character and Bastila in Knights of the Old Republic, due to their force bond. Less so for a female player character and Carth.
    • It's possibly averted. It's not really clear how long the quest for the star maps takes.
  • Potentially averted in Dragon Age, as the events of the Blight take place over roughly a year. This allows the Warden to make a move immediately, or spend fairly good span of time to develop their relationship with Alistair/Morrigan/Leliana/Zevran. The characters each take a different span of time to fall in love, even if their approval is very high; "love" requires their personal quest to be completed, which for Alistair could be done the first time you enter Denerim, but for Zevran requires the Landsmeet to have been called, approaching end-game.
    • Completely averted in Dragon Age II. The events of the game take place over ten years, and it takes three for Hawke's relationship with his/her chosen significant other to move to a physical level. The end of the game takes place ten years after the beginning, and Hawke's love interest is the sole companion to remain by his/her side after the events of the endgame.
  • Mostly averted in Baldur's Gate II. The romance dialogues (which there are about 20 for each option) happen roughly every half hour or so in realtime. In game time this usually translates in more than three months.
  • You can invoke this in certain Harvest Moon games due to Good Bad Bugs. Arguably, a lot of Harvest Moon games feature this unless you believe all events involving you two romantically are dates.
    • If one figures out what items the various love interests like, it can be ridiculously easy to get them to love you in very short periods of time, with minimal interaction.
  • The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, in which all marriage requires is having completed a quest for a given NPC and then speaking to them while wearing an amulet that signifies you're available and looking. Some require you complete whole questlines, which presumably would give you time to get to know each other (not much, but some time) while others require only a simple fetch quest, and some require only that you beat your potential spouse in a bare-knuckle brawl. The priest of Mara who explains this to you points out that this is not unusual at all in Skyrim, as, well, its freaking Skyrim, one of the most dangerous regions in the world, and people don't involve themselves in long courtships when death is literally right down the road.


Webcomics

Faye: When we first married, you asked if I regretted rushing into it after just two months of dating. I said no, but I do ... Two months was too long. I'd have married you after the first date.


Web Original

  • In Echo Chamber, Tom seems to have a very juvenile idea of what love is. He thinks he has a future with Porn Girl, and says he loves her after one date. It doesn't end well. Mostly because Tom asked Zack to film all of their dates.
  • From a chain letter in this Snopes article: "Richard S. Willis sent this letter within 45 minutes of reading it. Not even 4 hours later walking along the street to his new job interview with a really big company, he ran into Cynthia Bell, his secret love for 5 years. Cynthia came up to him and told him of her passionate crush on him that she had had on him for 2 years. Three days later, he proposed to her and they got married."


Western Animation

  • Fairly Oddparents: Vicky and Ricky fell in love pretty quickly too, but then again, Timmy wished for the perfect man for Vicky.
    • Plus the relationship fell apart by the end of the episode, with a definite implication that he never loved her that much anyway. They are teenagers, after all.
  • In Thumbelina, the titular character falls in love with a fairy prince after half an hour and goes on a quest to find him and marry him. This is all just because he's the same size as she.

Thumby: I think I'm gonna marry him.
The Nostalgia Chick: I mean I've known him for all of twelve hours!

    • Incidentally, this is a step up from the Hans Christian Anderson fairytale, which has Thumbelina meet the prince for the first time, fall in love with him, and marry him at the very end of the story.


Real Life

  • French president Nicolas Sarkozy: get divorced in October 2007, find a new girlfriend in December of the same year, get married in February 2008: the whole process took little more than 100 days.
    • Of course, he is the president of France and she is Carla Bruni.
  • Saturday Night Live‍'‍s Fred Armisen and Mad Men‍'‍s Elisabeth Moss: SNL does a Mad Men sketch. Amy Poehler is supposed to play Moss' character but she goes into labor a few hours before showtime. Moss happens to be in New York, so they bring her in at the last minute to do the sketch. She meets the cast members, and when she meets Armisen, in the words of someone else, "it was like a bolt of electricity. Everyone in the room felt it." They start dating and three months later announce their engagement; they married in October 2009 and have since separated.
  • The infamous 2000 Reality TV show Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire—which saw 50 contestants try to win the heart of a millionaire whom they had never even seen, let alone met—resulted in a woman marrying a stranger in front of 22 million people. The total length of the marriage? About a month and a half.
    • The makers of the show, being a bit Genre Savvy about the whole thing, had them sign annulment agreements before they got married.
  • Happens a lot in the Ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jewish community where people believe that engagement comes after three dates. There is a teacher whose daughter met a man on the second day of Passover and married him the day after Shavous, a holiday that takes place exactly seven weeks after the second day of Passover.
  • In the 1950s, if you were dating someone for longer than a few months without getting married, it was usually considered improper, as they were "trying to have it all."
  • David Duchovny and Tea Leoni got married after dating for about nine weeks, which is even more amazing when you consider that for much of that time Duchovny was in Canada shooting The X Files and Leoni was in California shooting The Naked Truth. They've been married for over 13 years.
  • Buddy Holly proposed to Maria Elena Santiago on their very first date. They met in June 1958. They married on August 15th of the same year. Of course, we all know how that turned out...
  • Writers harvey Pekar (of American Splendor fame) and Joyce Brabner decided to get married after meeting each other once, after a long phone and mail courtship. They were married on their third date. They were married for over 25 years until Pekar died in 2010.
  • Reality staple Kim Kardashian met New Jersey Nets player Kris Humphries on the opening game of 2010 and was engaged to him by the end of the season. After a massively hyped (and expensive) wedding in August 2011, Kim dropped divorce papers on him after only 72 days.
  • While marriage is not expected immediately, the premise of the series Millionaire Matchmaker is that the matchmaker sets up a millionaire and a girl or guy who fits what said millionaire is looking for in a partner out on a series of dates. The matchmaker asks both how they felt the dates went and gives advice on how to make the relationship work better. Generally, the idea is at least for the couple to continue to see each other after the first few dates.
  • The Bachelor and The Bachelorette are notorious for this sort of thinking, even if the winning couple aren't expected to marry right away.
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