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Fourth-Date Marriage

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Hackensacker: You don't marry someone you just met the day before; at least I don't.
Princess: But that's the only way, dear. If you get to know too much about them you'd never marry them.

Once Upon a Time, in a younger, more innocent day, 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 even married, if not in real time, then over the course of a few weeks, tops. Contrary to how it is portrayed, an engagement should not be thought of as an extended dating phase; more realistically it is the time period it takes to arrange your wedding (the planning itself may take months) and prepare to integrate your lives while you make the ultimate Relationship Upgrade. While it happens in real life, it is incredibly immature, and successful relationships based upon this are pretty 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.

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. Contrast Arranged Marriage, where the couple may not have even met before the wedding, and Perfectly Arranged Marriage where it works out just fine anyway. May also result in a Starter Marriage.


Examples:

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    Anime & Manga 
  • Claire Stanfield and Chane Laforet from Baccano! become informally engaged after all but two meetings, and this was after they tried to kill each other when they first crossed paths. Of course, much of this can be attributed to Claire's unorthodox flirting strategy, which consists of proposing to complete strangers that he thinks are cute and hoping one of them eventually says yes. Chane, meanwhile, was raised as an experiment by her emotionally manipulative father, and wasn't accustomed to genuine affection. For an inversion, we have Firo and Ennis — a relationship which involved a fifty year courtship before they got serious.
  • In Emma: A Victorian Romance, Emma learns that her mistress, Madam Stowner, had only met her late husband three times before her parents married them off.
  • In Fly Me to the Moon, Tsukasa and Nasa get married after their second meeting, essentially making this a zeroth date marriage. It works out well for them.
  • According to Saya Takagi from Highschool of the Dead, her parents Soichiro and Yuriko got married the day after they met. Though they're pretty Happily Married, at least...
  • Kaguya-sama: Love Is War: It's shown in a flashback that Osaragi's parents were a celebrity couple that only dated for about a month before getting married. It's all but stated that they ended up getting divorced after news of her mother having an affair was published in the tabloids, so it's safe to say that it wasn't exactly a healthy relationship.
  • Kyo Kara Maoh! has Shoma proposing to Jennifer on their fifth date. She accepts because it's so "bold" of him, and also because he's a demon and she thought it would be awesome to have kids with wings or little horns.
  • In Nura: Rise of the Yokai Clan, Rikuo's grandparents got married after they only had one date.
  • In Sand Chronicles, Sakura and Ann become engaged after only meeting each other a few times. On top of that, though the bride has developed feelings for him and it's implied they're reciprocated, they haven't even begun a relationship when the question is popped. Them not knowing each other well is a minor plot point and becomes an issue. The bride's friend's bewilderment sums it up nicely:
    Friend: Now... hold on a sec! You weren't even dating...
    Bride in question: Nope.
    Friend: ... And you haven't kissed.
    Bride in question: Nope, not once.
  • Super Dimension Fortress Macross: In episode 25, Max Jenius falls for Milia at first sight when he meets her in an arcade and narrowly beats her in a Valkyrie simulation game. He gets her to agree to meet him in a park later, not realizing she's a Zentradi pilot who holds a grudge against him for having beaten her in two separate dogfights. There she challenges him to a Knife Fight, which he wins, and then—undeterred by the fact that she's an alien enemy who infiltrated the ship specifically to kill him—he succeeds right then and there in making her fall head over heels for him! Max goes to his best friend Hikaru for advice and tells him they've already decided to get married, and when Hikaru tells him that he can't marry someone he just met—especially since she's a Zentradi whose species' psychology and way of life are totally different from humans—Max insists that love will overcome their differences. Captain Global sponsors a lavish and highly publicized wedding for them because he sees it as a good opportunity to promote the idea that humans and Zentradi can coexist peacefully.note 
  • Justified in Ushio and Tora: Ushio Aotsuki's mother Sumako vaguely knew his father Shigure for a couple of days before agreeing to marry him, but it turns out Sumako only had two years to marry and have a child before returning to hold up Hakumen no Mono's barrier.

    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.
  • Deadpool and Shiklah. They met, and Word of God states literally got married after their first date. Even though they had genuine feelings for one another, the marriage was more a Marriage of Convenience to stop Dracula from marrying her. They seemed to have a "play house" mentality toward it, underestimating what it would really mean to be married in general, let alone to each other.
    • May be subverted since their marriage goes down hill hard after about a year. Word of God states they didn't get to know one another that well before the marriage -saying they traveled and had lots of fun, but that wasn't what their normal lives entailed. However, Deadpool and Shiklah disagree with Word of God. After Deadpool catches Shiklah cheating on him with Werewolf by Night, he shoots the wolf in the head. Shiklah admits to all the different monsters she's slept with, and simply tells Deadpool he knew who he was marrying. Deadpool replies that she also knew who she was marrying because he explained to her that he mainly knows how to fight and screw up.
  • The Incredible Hulk: The 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.
  • Robin (1993): Tim's father married his physical therapist less than a year after being widowed when Tim's mother was murdered.
  • Mickey Mouse Comic Universe: The 1990 Topolino story "I Married a Witch" (a parody of the film of the same name) has Mickey striking up a relationship with a Hot Witch named Samantha after a break-up with Minnie. He proposes only a month into the relationship, but her father puts the two through a vision of what would happen afterwards showing that society won't accept them, prompting a break-up. The story was banned after its initial publication due to Disney's disapproval of Mickey with another woman and Italian tabloids joking about off-panel sex.

    Comic Strips 
  • Exaggerated in the finale of The Adventures of Prudence Prim, when protagonist Prudence meets and falls in Love at First Sight with Dicky Dare. Dicky proposes, and the two elope after having known each other for an hour (and a grand total of 5 panels). Even the caption comments on how quickly their romance blossoms:
    She brought the two together, and they fell in love with speed!
    Oh never did a love affair at such a rate proceed!
    Dicky proposed within the hour! (You must admit, that's quick!)
    He said, "I love you, Prudy!" and she said, "I love you, Dick!"

    Fairy Tales 
  • 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" and "Donkeyskin" where the protagonist attends three balls in disguise, and only loses her slipper (or whatever it is in that version) on the third occasion.

    Fan Works 
  • Seen in "Accidentally in Matrimony," a Story Within a Story written by two of the students in Skyhold Academy Yearbook. The sweetly absurd yarn is about two of their teachers, Cullen and Evvy, who on their first date decide to play a joke on their colleagues and pretend to elope, complete with fake marriage license. Of course, the license isn't as fake as they think it is, and Hilarity Ensues. The real teachers, hearing the story read out loud to them, think it's hysterical. (Cullen and Evvy are already married at the time the story is written, so they can afford to be amused.)
  • In "A Perfect Disaster" from the After the Jungle Series by Flower princess11, it's revealed that Olga (Helga's older sister) and Patrick (Olga's husband/Helga's brother-in-law) met when they were in their late-20s/early-30s and got married after only six months dating. While Olga and her husband really do love and care about each other, they're shown to have kind of a rocky relationship and Olga's family aren't really all that fond of Patrick (Bob and Miriam especially).note 
  • Bait and Switch (STO): Eleya has only known Gaarra for roughly six months when they get married, and they never traditionally dated because she's his superior officer. Justified: their wedding is stated in one story to have been a spur-of-the-moment decision before the Battle of Iconia, which it's strongly implied they didn't expect to actually survive (the canon version in Star Trek Online all but wiped out The Alliance).
  • Exaggerated in Blind Courage. Zelda and Ganondorf meet each other less than six times before Ganondorf proposes. This is excused as Reincarnation Romance and Love at First Sight making them naturally drawn to one another. Zelda's childhood nursemaid and Parental Substitute Impa lampshades this trope when she asks Ganondorf why he wants to marry a woman he's known for a week.
  • In Darwin, Cornelia and Euphemia functionally marry Lelouch within days of learning he's alive again. Word of God admits he rushed the relationship because he wanted it done before ending the first season.
  • Deconstructed in Fairest (Afterandalasia). Snow White's husband regrets marrying her so quickly after seeing her vicious side come to light.
  • Goin' KABOOM!: Downplayed and Deconstruction. On their first meeting, Katie Kaboom and Danny Fenton are instantly attracted to each other and soon go on a date. While the first date seemed successful, it ends with Katie and Danny having an Accidental Kiss...which soon results in Katie becoming wild, and it ends with Danny being Covered in Kisses, much to his shock. Danny becomes a little wary of Katie but still agrees to a second date with her and even agrees to be her boyfriend after she asks him out, but soon questions himself if it's too soon. It becomes even more complicated when days later, Katie admits she has fallen in love with him, even those they have known each other for a few days. Danny is understandably shocked but tries to make it work, even if Katie soon becomes clingy, smothering and even gives him an Embarrassing Nickname to boot. However, Danny initially tries to make it work due to being genuinely attracted to Katie and genuinely enjoying their dates and making out with her. However, he becomes very uncomfortable with how fast their relationship is going and soon is exhausted by constantly making out and spending time with her, to the point where he ultimately decides to break up with her because he feels the relationship isn't working. However, he is initially hesitant to break up with her due to not wanting to hurt her feelings but is encouraged by Sam to do so, and Tucker and Jazz just advise him to be gentle.
    • Things become worse when Danny discovers Katie's powers to transform into a monster (the same one that has been attacking Amity Park and whom he has been facing). Danny becomes horrified to discover Katie's powers and soon just admits that he wants to get as far away from her as possible, even calling her a monster in private. Some reviewers believe that Danny was being too harsh, but Flower princess11 answered a review stating that his reaction, while a bit extreme, is due to stress and shock...after all, it's been less than a week into the relationship with Katie saying she loves him, on top of the recent discovery.
  • Brutally deconstructed in In Lantern's Day, In Canary's Night: Months after their break up and the benefit of hindsight force Oliver and Felicity to recognize that their whirlwind relationship was ill-thought out and wasn't going to last. They barely knew each other, were fighting all the time, and as proven recently, Oliver still wasn't over Laurel. Oliver is noticeably regretful upon this realization, while Felicity is bitter about how she wasted so much time with a guy that was never going to love her the way she wanted him to.
  • Deconstructed and subverted in Loved and Lost. After first meeting each other, Twilight Sparkle becomes engaged to Prince Jewelius (who's partially similar to Prince Hans) only one week later. Before meeting him, Twilight has heard about him from her beloved foalsitter Princess Cadance who regards him as her younger brother, unaware that the noble prince is actually a manipulative sociopath. He reinforces this good impression and wins Twilight's trust by treating her nicely while she becomes alienated from her brother, friends and mentor at the same time. After he seizes Equestria's throne and manipulates Twilight into losing all trust towards her disgraced loved ones, she accepts his offer to become his student and later his queen to recover from "losing" her loved ones. Jewelius himself wants the magical prodigy to bear him powerful heirs and is open to the possibility of getting rid of her if he finds a more powerful unicorn mare to seduce. Fortunately, as Jewelius starts showing his true colors to everypony, Twilight begins acknowledging that he's not behaving like the noble stallion she first met. When he finally reveals to Twilight that he's just as evil as her loved ones tried to tell her, she breaks off their engagement and turns against him.
  • In My Brother's Best Friend (Is Not My Boyfriend, Jeez!) George mentions that his parents got married after dating for three months post-Hogwarts.
  • Downplayed in Our Mrs. Monkey. Nami almost marries Luffy right after he defeated Arlong (a couple weeks after meeting him at most) but stops the wedding before it starts, claiming it was a Freudian Slip. They later marry just after Enies Lobby, making thier courtship a couple months insteadnote .
  • Over the Rainbow is set in 1920s Kansas. Dorothy knows Bud from church, but the two aren't exactly friends and don't talk much. He claims to be in love with her and plans on proposing to her if her uncle agrees. Dorothy doesn't like Bud back, but she doesn't know what to do besides agree to his proposal.
  • In A Second Chance at Happiness? Maybe? Harry and Regulus get married five weeks after Harry ended up in the past.
  • 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...
  • Deconstructed in Wicked Wiles. Snow White and Alexander getting married right away wasn't a good idea. They don't get along as well as they thought they would.
  • Lampshaded in Yandere Sumia, which points out that Chrom has only just met Olivia, a reference to how Olivia canonically joins just before Chapter 11 of Fire Emblem: Awakening, in which Chrom chooses a bride at the end. It's said that Chrom chooses Olivia because of her "NICE ass," and as a replacement for Maribelle and Sully, whom Sumia had killed. Naturally, Sumia ends up killing Olivia, too, leading Chrom to hastily move on to the Female Avatar and then the "generic village girl."

    Films — Animation 
  • Disney Animated Canon:
    • Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: Snow White and her prince sing a duet, but never actually speak to each other in the whole darn movie. She rides off with him about two days after meeting him. The fact that some scenes that suggested them having met before were scrapped somehow makes it even worse.
    • Cinderella is a one-date marriage. Originally Prince Charming 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. 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.
    • Lady and the Tramp: Technically they had only one really long date, and a lot of fights, but things work out in the end! (Then again, they're dogs, so we need to measure the length of their relationship in dog years.)
    • 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! They have actually had an Arranged Marriage looming since Aurora was born, but neither of them are aware that it's with each other.
    • The Little Mermaid (1989): Eric only barely sees Ariel (and hears her as well) for a couple of seconds, with the sun shining behind her. That's enough for him to decide that he'll marry her. No matter if he doesn't know she's not human, her name, or if she wasn't a hallucination. It is double subverted by how his adviser talks him out of his fantasy about Ariel and into marrying... well, Ariel, who he has known for three days. Ursula's disguise doesn't count because brainwashing was involved.
    • Aladdin is a curious case, as it initially justifies the trope, then ultimately subverts it. The law in Agrabah says that Jasmine must marry by her next birthday, which is three days away at the beginning of the movie. Over those three days, she has a grand total of two encounters with Aladdin before she decides he is the suitor she wants. However, the sultan repeals the law at the end of the movie, and while Aladdin and Jasmine are now engaged, they end up having adventures covered in a sequel movie, a multi-season TV series and another sequel movie until they're finally married.
    • The Lion King (1994): This is zig-zagged with Simba and Nala. They were childhood best friends, but when they were told by Zazu that they were betrothed to be married they were both disgusted, finding the idea of marrying their best friend too weird. Years later, when they reunite as adults after Nala had previously believed Simba had died with his father, they almost instantly fall in love. Simba ends up taking Nala on a tour around the jungle, that is basically a "first date" between them. This is a Falling-in-Love Montage of them playing around and flirting together, such as pulling each other into water, playfully wrestling together, and Nala surprising Simba with a lick/kiss on the cheek and gazing seductively at him. It is also heavily implied that they mated together during this, resulting in Nala becoming pregnant with their first child. After Simba defeats Scar and becomes king, he and Nala get married as was originally planned for them.
    • At the end of Atlantis: The Lost Empire Milo decides to stay in Atlantis with Kida after knowing her for a couple of days.
    • 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 some disputable examples, there's no way this could actually take place over a long period because of time framing with Mardi Gras which, as the movie accurately shows, is not always.
    • Frozen (2013):
      • Lampshaded, subverted, and deconstructed with Anna and Hans becoming engaged very quickly, and every character who knows about it (including even Anna and Hans themselves) acknowledges how unusual it is. Rather than this trope being the cure for isolation and abuse, this movie treats it rather as a symptom, for both Anna and Hans. After years of isolation and neglect (as Elsa was deliberately acting aloof in order to keep her powers controlled and secret), Anna Desperately Craves Affection and Thinks Like a Romance Novel and so confuses companionability for True Love, not having much reference for an actual healthy relationship. The engagement ends before the wedding, since Hans turns out to be a Gold Digger, his own neglect as the youngest of Massively Numbered Siblings turning him ruthless. This is actually lampshaded and vaguely foreshadowed when Elsa provides a real-life warning: "You can't marry a man you just met."
      • Played with further when Kristoff brings Anna to his family of trolls and they assume it's because the two, who have barely known each other a day, are romantically involved. When the trolls find out that's not the case, they try to conduct a wedding for them on the spot, despite the fact that neither of them is interested. The two become an Official Couple later, but take things slowly when they do, and don't actually become engaged until Frozen II, which takes place three years later.
  • Faeries (1999) has the Prince and Brigid who marry the same day they meet.
  • Rugrats in Paris: Chas is almost roped into marrying Coco LaBouche, whom he's known for a few weeks tops. They're seconds away from tying the knot before Coco's true nature as a child-hating shrew is revealed and Chas calls off the wedding. Then he marries Coco's assistant Kira at the end of the film. While some time had passed between the two weddings, it probably wasn't more than a few months since the babies hadn't really aged.
  • 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 The Swan Princess, the hero and the heroine, Prince Derek and Princess Odette, are introduced to each other as children and hate each other the whole time. After reaching adulthood Derek sees Odette is all grown up and proposes to her, but that turns out to be a shallow love that sees only her beauty and nothing else. But then after being kidnapped, Odette suddenly thinks of Derek as her true love and Derek likewise, so the trope ultimately ends up being played straight due to their lack of real interaction.
  • In Thumbelina, the title 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 her.
    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 Andersen 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.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • 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.
  • This turns out to be the twist in (500) Days of Summer. Summer breaks up with Tom and marries another man several months later. She tells Tom that it felt right with her husband.
  • Ajnabee: Priya and Raj have a whirlwind romance and get married very quickly, with the first 10 minutes of the film showing them from the first meeting to their wedding.
  • Played with and ultimately subverted in Batman & Robin. Robin falls in love with Poison Ivy in the short time he met her and believes she loves him enough to switch sides to be with him. Their "dates" include, Robin getting into a bidding war with Batman over her after just meeting her, him being seduced by her at Freeze's lair when he was supposed to arrest her and attacking Batman for thinking he's jealous of their love, and meeting Ivy alone in her lair where they finally share their first kiss together. When Robin meets with Ivy in her lair, just their third meeting together and a few days after their initial meeting, he tells her he "wants for them to be together," implying he already wants to marry her. However, this is all justified by Ivy using her pheromone dust on Robin, which quickly turned his crush on her into blind love and made him make a lot of stupid decisions under the belief that she loves him. Ivy was also purposely rushing their "relationship" to simply get Robin to kiss her faster. What Ivy didn't know was Robin had snapped out of his blind love state by the time he arrived at her lair, and their kiss was a Secret Test of Character for him to see if her love for him was real. After Ivy failed she quickly "broke up" with Robin by trying to drown him, and after he survived he left Ivy and his love for her trapped in her own lair, finally over his crush and satisfied with the one kiss he got.
  • Blue Valentine deconstructs this trope in the harshest way possible. After the opening makes it clear Dean and Cindy can't stand each other and are on the cusp of divorce, a Happier Times Montage shows them falling in love and getting married after knowing each other just a few weeks or months. They didn't take any time to really get to know each other and so, when their conflicting personalities surface, their marriage is strained beyond repair.
  • Zig-zagged in The Book of Masters, where, technically, Ivan and Katya marry at least a year after their first meeting, except that they only meet three times during said year (not counting a dream that Ivan has) and their actual interactions take several minutes in total. Chronologically: after their first encounter, they are drawn to each other, during their one-year-long separation they realize they are in love, and during the second encounter, they are already willing to get married right away.
  • Bull Durham: Straitlaced born-again Christian evangelist Jimmy has known Ethical Slut Milly for a grand total of twelve hours before he asks her to marry him.
  • Carry On Up the Khyber had the powerful CPT Keene from the British Army, who finds out that the beautiful Princess Jheli from the occupied Indian state of Khalabar is in love with him, and he falls in love with her too. They meet up about three or four times and then they later reveal that they are engaged at the British governors' dinner party.
  • The Nicholas Sparks offering, The Choice has the hero declaring his love for the heroine after only a month and proposing to her in that time. The next scene is of their wedding (in all fairness, there may have been a Time Skip).
  • In Christmas with the Kranks, the Kranks' daughter Blair leaves to join the Peace Corps, flying out right after Thanksgiving. She is engaged by Christmas Eve, less than a month later.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • In George of the Jungle, the romantic arc unfolds in about a week. George falls for Ursula Stanhope within a day or two of meeting her, while it takes Ursula a couple days longer to realize her feelings. They're even married "on the following new moon," which would be about a month after they confess their love for each other.
  • 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. Notably, one character romances two women, the women themselves get together and then break up, and go on to new relationships. Meanwhile, the man has met a third woman, who's subverted his usual methods (including a spiel which is the source of the Title Drop) six ways from Sunday. Last Girl Wins.
  • In The Great Houdinis, Harry and Bess get married after knowing each other for only ten days. She doesn't even know his real name is Erich Weiss until she meets his mother.
  • In Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, Joanna and John are engaged after ten days.
  • Heartbreakers:
    • Exploited by Max for her schemes; she convinces wealthy men to marry her in the space of three months, and then she sets up her daughter to seduce them so she can catch them cheating and thus clear them out in a divorce. She usually targets shady figures who would be more likely to go for out of court settlements.
    • Paige sets up her boyfriend Jack for a similar scheme; they've only known each other a couple of months and she doesn't even meet his mother until the day of the wedding. This one ends on a Maybe Ever After.
  • The Heartbreak Kid (2007): 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. For Kyle’s part he had already fallen in Love Before First Sight from a photograph of her and the stories of her future heroism, but she'd only just met him. Well, he does make a heck of a first impression by saving her life There's also a difference between sex between two people in a stressful situation and committing to marriage.
  • Hell Fighters, the John Wayne homage to Oil Well firefigther Red Adair, has him as Chance Buckman, the best oil well fire fighter in the world, who has as his best employee Greg Parker, a man who's found a sure-fire method to get women he meets to go to bed with him: he brings them to the fire. When Chance is critically injured in an accident, his friend tells Greg to go get Chance's previously unknown daughter Tish (who was living with her mother) so she can see him in case he dies. Chance is still under anaesthesia when their office gets called that a fire has broken out. It's money, so everyone goes, except Tish, who wants to go, but everyone in the company (including Greg) who knows about Greg's womanizing, realize it wouldn't be a good idea if Chance found out that Greg took his daughter to a fire. She then shows up on her own anyway. When she goes back to see her father when he wakes up from anaesthesia after surgery, she innocently tells her father that she went to a fire with Greg. Chance calls Greg into the hospital room and cold cocks him for taking his daughter to a fire, only to discover that almost immediately after they met at the fire, Greg and Tish got married.
  • 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.
  • In Irreconcilable Differences, Albert and Lucy knew each other for four days before they got married.
  • John Carter has the Big Bad (actually, he's The Dragon) offer to marry Dejah in order to stop the ancient feud between the city-states of Helium and Zodanga. Naturally, it's only a political marriage and doesn't fit this trope, except John Carter offers to marry Dejah after knowing her for only a few days. We never find out how their marriage would have turned out, as he is sent back to Earth by the real Big Bad the following night and spends the next 10 years looking for a way to return to Mars.
  • Kiss of the Damned: Although they don't get formally engaged or married, after just a few days Paolo moves in with Djuna and is willing to spend the rest of his eternal life with her. That's some very intense Love at First Sight.
  • Charles is quick on his decision in The Lady Eve. He proposes to Jean after a couple of dates on the boat. Later he proposes to Eve after seeing her for a couple of weeks.
  • Most of Love Actually is set during the month before Christmas, with a month-long Time Skip near the end, so this happens in a couple of the subplots:
    • Jamie proposes to Aurelia despite knowing her for roughly a month and not even speaking the same language. Note that he was living with another woman (who cheated on him with his brother) just before meeting her.
    • John and Judy are also married at the end. While they seem to have known each other for a while, their relationship was only about a month old.
    • In a variant, Daniel and Carol are only dating at the end, having met a month earlier on Christmas Eve... but that meeting came only a month after Daniel's wife died.
  • 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
  • The The Marrying Kind has Chet and Florence getting married very quickly, as per usual in a film from The Golden Age of Hollywood.
  • In the Chinese film The Mermaid, Xuan proposes to Shan on the second day they meet. Shan incredulously replies that this is coming far too soon, but Xuan insists that this qualifies as going slow for him because he spent an entire night agonizing over the decision instead of following his impulses right away. It ends up taking quite a bit longer for them to marry.
  • In Monster-in-Law, Kevin and Charlie had dated for about a month before he proposed to her. Kevin's mother was not pleased.
  • In Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears, it's invoked and actively discussed in the second part of the film (although we aren't shown when the actual marriage takes place, it's considered a settled affair in the end).
    Gosha: Getting married after two days of knowing each other is simply the height of foolishness. You must think it over very well. Say, for five days. So don't hurry – you still have time until Wednesday.
  • The Mummy - Rick and Evie fall in love less than three days after they first met. And it's implied they marry very soon (if not immediately) after the ending, since The Mummy Returns shows that their son Alex is exactly as old as their relationship.
  • Notorious: Honey Trap Ingrid Bergman gets the villain to propose to her after a couple of dates, although they had met before and it's implied he'd been carrying a torch for years.
  • In One Night with 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.
  • The 1991 Made-for-TV Movie Thriller The Perfect Bride (originally aired on USA Network, but later picked up for reruns by Lifetime) plays this for drama. Ted plans to marry Stepford Smiler Stephanie just three months after meeting her, and his family is all enthused except for his sister Laura (Kelly Preston), who's worried that he's marrying a woman he barely knows, and senses something wrong with Stephanie. She does some digging around and learns that Stephanie murdered two previous fiances, and struggles to warn Ted and the rest of the family, while Stephanie murders other people who seem to have caught on to her secret.
  • 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.
  • Princess O'Rourke: Maria and Eddie have known each for only a day, and Eddie pops the question that night. He doesn't even know that she's a princess.
  • In the Marx Brothers comedy Room Service (1938), Leo and Hilda plan to get married after the opening of Leo's play "Hail and Farewell," which is less than a week after they first met.
  • The Saint (1997) 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.
  • The Santa Clause 2, Scott has all of one month to marry somebody. Technically, he had several years to do this, but nobody noticed the deadline until it was only one month away.
  • Invoked in Seven Chances, where the hero, being single, is required to be married the same day by 7 p.m. in order to get an Unexpected Inheritance of Seven million dollars.
  • The Shop Around the Corner: The female lead falls in love with the hero by reading his letters and considers getting engaged without having even seen him once.
  • In The Sign of Four: Sherlock Holmes' Greatest Case, Watson proposes to Mary at the end of what has been essentially one very long (and eventful) day of acquaintance.
  • The Singles 2nd Ward: Dallen and Christine get engaged after dating for two days.
  • Spaceballs has this happen between Lone Star and Princess Vespa. When they meet, she's the spoiled royal brat, and he the less-than-thrilled mercenary who's only there because her father promised him a bucketload of money. Rescue Romance quickly ensues as they first run from, then fight the evil eponymous Spaceballs over the course of perhaps a few in-universe days, and finally they end up getting somewhat spontaneously married at the end. (The last part is actually somewhat justified since finding another prince also allows Vespa to legitimately get out of her arranged marriage to Prince Valium at the very last second... and of course it is a comedy.)
  • Splash - Four or five days is enough for him to completely abandon his life on land to be with her.
  • 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.
  • Czech fairy tale movie Tři oříšky pro Popelku ("Three nuts/riddles for Cinderella") has the prince propose on the first date, as far as he knows, seeing as he's unaware they have met twice before. When he meets her again she is wearing a wedding dress.
  • In Test Pilot, Jim and Ann get married after one day together.
  • In Ticket to Paradise, Lily goes to Bali in her post-graduation trip, falls in love with a local, and 37 days later sends an e-mail to her parents saying she's getting married. This prompts them to form an uneasy partnership hoping to changing Lily's mind, as they know rushing into a wedding was what led to their acrimonious split and decades of hatred for each other.
  • Titanic (1997): Right before the ship hits the iceberg, Rose tells Jack that when the ship docks, she's getting off with him. Somewhat justified, as transatlantic cruises such as the Titanic and her sister ship Olympic were known for people meeting and falling in love during the six or so day voyage; the only unrealistic bit is this happening between people of different social classes. Also, she's desperately unhappy, and looking for any way to get away from Hockley - she was about to kill herself earlier, it's no surprise she'd grab onto Jack like that. And of course, we don't know how it would have turned out long-term anyway.
  • Unbroken has Louis Zamperini marry Cynthia Applewhite in a short timespan after meeting her. He also expects that being with her will get rid of his trauma of being a POW of the Japanese. His losing money all the time as well as his anger and PTSD makes things so bad that she wants to get a divorce even though they just had a child. But then Cynthia goes to a Billy Graham crusade, and convinces Louis to go, and he ends up realizing that God never abandoned, and not only does this restore his faith, but it also gets rid of his alcoholism and PTSD. This really did happen in real life, and can be read about in the book. The first movie doesn't cover it, but the second movie does. In short, it's at first played straight, then it gets subverted, and then played straight again, as after that they had another child, and remained married until 2001, when Cynthia died. A Double Subversion.
  • The 2017 Lifetime movie A Wedding To Die For is largely an uncredited remake of The Perfect Bride, but adds an additional twist: Becca, the skeptical sister, is now the adopted sister of Charlie, the groom-to-be, and Helena, the murderous fiancee, is Becca's long-lost sister who was also given up for adoption, and Helena specifically got into a relationship with Charlie so she could reunite with Becca.
  • What Price Hollywood?: Mary and Lonnie get married way too fast, and eventually, their marriage falls apart just as quickly.
  • 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.
  • 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).

    Literature 
  • The couples in most P. G. 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. Of course, fairly few Wodehouse engagements actually make it to the altar; the average Bertie Wooster plot, for instance, revolves around his attempts to escape from an unpleasant engagement.
  • 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.
    "This has got to be a record," chuckled Ferrara. "Meet a girl and propose in one day, maybe. But using a dictionary?"
  • Batiya and Chunru only know each other for a couple weeks in Across a Jade Sea before deciding that they'd rather get married right away then be separated indefinitely from each other when they reach land.
  • 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 fiancé" shtick.
  • 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.
  • Miss Price of Bedknob and Broomstick meets Emelius and within a weeks, most of which time they are not in contact with each other, he proposes to her and she accepts.
  • In the third Beka Cooper book, Beka and Farmer decide to marry after knowing each other for two or three weeks. They meet on the night of her fiancé's funeral, albeit a fiancé she no longer loved. Granted, it was a busy month, but still kind of jarring compared to the long-term relationship in Pierce's other books.
  • In A Brother's Price this is what happens if you're lucky. If you're not, expect to marry someone you don't know at all, and if you are a girl, the husband may even be chosen by your stupid big sister, for whom it is Fourth-Date Marriage, so you can end up in an abusive relationship even if your sister is not usually a Horrible Judge of Character.
  • In A Cry in the Night, Jenny and Erich have known each other a week when he tells her he wants to marry her. They've only known each other a month by the time they actually tie the knot. A few people express doubts about the marriage because of this, though Jenny insists she knows what she's doing and that she and Erich are only taking things so quickly because they're so sure of their love for each other. It doesn't work out. AT ALL.
  • By the end of Death and Diplomacy, Bernice Summerfield and Jason Kane have known each other for maybe a week, including the day or so when she thought he was a creepy alien as well as the later period when she just thought he was a creep. The book ends with them announcing their engagement and the wedding is in the next one.
  • In Shanghai Girls'sequel Dreams of Joy, Tao invokes this by proposing to Joy very soon after they meet, and while Joy wants to say yes, she declines to spend a little more time with the biological father that she just reconnected with. When she returns to the village a few months later, Tao asks her again and this time she agrees. The trope is then promptly deconstructed; Joy very quickly learns that committing to life in a commune with someone you barely know is a terrible idea, even before the impending Great Leap Forward makes everything a hundred times worse.
  • In the Elemental Masters series, characters have gotten married or engaged in relatively short periods of time. However, all of them are Elemental Masters or Mages, which means they can usually tell in a short amount of time if they are right for each other or not. One character in Steadfast mentions that he's heard of magicians that meet for the first time and then elope in Gretna Green the following week, not having the patience to wait to get a license and post banns.
  • 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.
  • The Empirium Trilogy: Towards the end of Kingsbane, Rielle marries Audric despite only officially being a couple with him for a few months and a bit more than that privately. This is partly because he wants to show his people that the crown of Celdaria still has faith in their Sun Queen and partly because he genuinely loves Rielle and wants to spend the rest of their lives together.
  • In the Enchanted Forest Chronicles, Cimmorene and Mendanbar get married after just a few days of knowing each other, despite both being reluctant to marry before hand, and Daystar and Shiara are implied to be in love after knowing each other less than a week, though they don't want to get engaged. Averted with Morwen and Telemain, who knew each other for a long time before they got married and were implied to have had a romance before the series started.
  • The entire Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy takes place over a four and a half month span. As seen on the Book Timeline, Anna meets Christian Grey on May 9, accepts his proposal one month later on June 17 (with a five days break up in between), and they get married at the end of July.
  • Gone with the Wind: Charles Hamilton falls in love with Scarlett within one day and they're married two weeks after that. She and her second husband Frank Kennedy have an equally short courtship.
  • In the Heralds of Valdemar book Exile's Valor, Queen Selenay gets married to Prince Karathanelan (Thanel) of Rethwellan after only a few months. Her fellow Heralds all think it's the worst idea they've ever heard, but they don't protest it, since they know that 1. she's lonely and grieving, 2. opposition would just make her more fixated on the idea, and 3. an alliance marriage with Rethwellan is a good idea anyway. It doesn't end well
  • In I Heard That Song Before, Kay and Peter get married a little over a month after they started dating. This, in addition to their seventeen year age-gap, leads some people to speculate that Kay is a gold digger or, worse, that Peter married her to avoid her revealing information that may or may not prove he's a murderer, though Kay is convinced it's true love. It turns out he does truly love her and they're happy together in the ending.
  • In the I, Richard Plantagenet Series this happens with Richard and Anne Neville. He had been raised in her father's household and encouraged to think of the young Anne as a potential bride, but they were separated before she became old enough for him to have any real romantic feelings for her. When he hears she has been been married to the Royal Brat Edward of Westminster, Richard feels sorrow at what might have been had circumstances been different. When Anne is widowed and held as a prisoner by Richard's brother George, Richard decides he wants to marry her even though he hasn't seen her since she was a girl. He rescues her from a kitchen where George has forced her into servitude, takes her to sanctuary and immediately proposes. She says yes.
  • In The Mister, Alessia and Maxim have known each a little under a month and have only been properly dating for about a week when Maxim decides she's the woman he wants to marry. When Maxim proposes to Alessia at the end, she instantly accepts. Alessia's father then enforces the matter by demanding they marry in four days before leaving Albania.
  • 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.
  • Vicar Leonard Clement, the narrator in the Agatha Christie novel The Murder at the Vicarage proposed marriage to his wife Griselda after only knowing her for 24 hours.
  • Defied in The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Hastings asked for Cynthia's hand in marriage after knowing her for just a few days. She sensibly rejects his proposal, though mostly because she's in love with someone else.
  • Myth-O-Mania:
    • In Phone Home, Persephone!, Hades and Persephone only date twice, at most, before he proposes to her — When Persephone plans to take Hades on a picnic, she pays Cupid to shoot him with a love arrow. At this point in the series, the effects of Cupid's arrows wear off after three days, giving time before the wedding for Hades to develop a genuine affection for Persephone.
    • In Keep a Lid on It, Pandora!, Pandora and Epi date for "what, twenty minutes" (in Prometheus' own words), before they decide to get married. Since Pandora was the first mortal woman, Hera, the goddess of marriage, helps ensure that "Pandy" and Epi remain Happily Married despite their impulsiveness.
  • A First Date Marriage in The Number of the Beast: Zeb and Deety meet for the first time, have maybe two dances with each other, and are ducking out the side door for a quickie Nevada wedding.
  • Jake Mast asks Lydiann Ebersol to marry him a month after meeting her in The Prodigal, the 4th book in the Abram's Daughters series by Beverly Lewis.
  • In Francine Rivers' Redeeming Love, Michael begins proposing marriage to Angel the first time they meet each other, though it isn’t until after the third or fourth time that he is actually successful in gaining her consent (more or less). It should also be noted that this is very much a case of Honor Before Reason, since Angel couldn’t stand the sight of him and he was, far from being in love with her (though he did admit she was stunningly beautiful), obeying a divine mandate.
  • In Prince of the Blood from The Riftwar Cycle, when Jimmy the Hand encounters Gamina it's love at first...well, telepathic contact; he proposes marriage half an hour later.
  • In Relativity, Sara and Greg get married after knowing each other only approximately four months. This is actually lampshaded by Sara's best friend Madge earlier in the saga:
    Madge: You always do this, Sara. You always get so caught up with a guy. Three dates and you’re ready to get married.
    • Actually, they have only two official "dates" before they get married, but they see each other quite often in that time.
  • 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.
  • Garth Nix's Sabriel has the main characters getting together after roughly a week of knowing each other. Then again, it was a very intense week...
  • In The Savant, Arlo Harkin's parents met while walking in a park. They were married in Las Vegas the next day. Shortly thereafter, his father was shipped off to fight in World War II and was killed months before Arlo's birth, leaving his mother a widow at seventeen.
  • In Sorcery and Cecelia, the marquis of Schofield proposes marriage to Kate after only week or so of acquaintance—not more than mildly unusual to those around them, given that the setting is the London Season in 1817—but it is as a cover-up for his plan to defeat the villain plotting against him. He later attempts to break off the engagement, but she refuses; by the end of the novel they’re in love and planning to be married within a few weeks, though this trope still kind of applies since it’s only been about three months since they met. The same goes for James and Cecy who, though they never had a sham betrothal, did meet and eventually get married in an almost identical time frame.
  • 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 the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine relaunch series, Jake Sisko marries a Bajoran artist that he's known for about three weeks.
  • In Heian Japan, the setting of The Tale of Genji, three nights of sex and eating some cakes together constituted a legal marriage.
  • Tales of Kolmar: Lanen and Akhor only have to meet twice, over two days, before they realize that they're very in love, and the next meeting has them doing a version of the Flight of the Devoted, which is as binding as marriage. They note, themselves, that this is highly irregular, both because it happened so fast and because one is human, one is a dragon.
  • In Tales of the Frog Princess, it took a total of three days for Li'l and Garrid to fall for each other.
  • The Twilight Saga: Zigzagged. Bella begs Edward to turn her into a vampire after exactly 60 days knowing him so they can be in a relationship forever. By that time, they have been officially in a relationship for nine days, and the rest they spent mostly without speaking to each other. Obviously, this is worse than her begging him to just marry her (deciding to give up your humanity in exchange for being with a vampire you've known for two months?), but Edward decides to turn her if and only if she marries him first, which means she must wait after high school graduation. Their wedding in Breaking Dawn happens two years after they first met.
  • Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga:
    • In 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 the 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.)
    • In Diplomatic Immunity, Lieutenant Corbeau and Garnet Five start making marriage plans after only knowing each other for a few days at most. Miles considers suggesting that this isn't enough time to base such a significant decision on, then reflects on his history with Ekaterin and decides he lacks moral standing on this point.
  • The cat equivalent of this is common in Warrior Cats. Two cats will interact once or twice and quickly become mates. One example would be Bluefur and Oakheart.
  • Zigzagged in Wax and Wayne. Steris and Wax first meet while privately arranging a marriage between their houses. Since it would be scandalous if they got engaged without being seen in public together, Steris outlines an extensive schedule of attending parties and balls that appears to avert this, but gives them little private time before or after marriage, making it impossible for them to get to know each other. It turns out that Steris doesn't dislike Wax, she's just afraid that he'll dislike her, as she's got No Social Skills and has had broken engagements before. Their eventual marriage averts this, taking place a few years after they meet.
  • Wearing the Cape: After a major disaster, Astra and Atlas privately get engaged before they even have their first real date, as they don't really know how much time they have. When her parents hear about this, they make it clear they think she's a kid rushing into things far too fast. Considering that even with this rush Atlas still managed to get killed before they got married, Astra had a point about hurrying.
  • In While My Pretty One Sleeps, Myles and Renata first met when Renata was a child and Myles was a young soldier whose wounds meant he didn't recall much. Over a decade later, they met again when Renata was now an adult and had an instant connection. They fell in love so swiftly they married just three weeks later. They were happy together for over a decade until Renata was murdered.
  • Who Censored Roger Rabbit? has a first date marriage. Roger jokingly proposed to Jessica on their first date, but she accepted. Their relationship only lasted a year before Jessica left Roger because Jessica was forced by a genie to marry Roger.
  • The lesbian stereotype is mentioned by Kate in You Know Me Well, who struggles with the opposite problem when it comes to commitment.

    Live-Action TV 
  • 7 Yüz: In "Biyolojik Saat", Metin asks Gökçe to marry him after only eleven days of dating, saying that in their short time together, he's known her better than women he dated for months. She is naturally taken aback by his sudden proposal, and reveals that she had similarly rushed into her failed previous marriage.
    Gökçe: I'm sorry, but do you propose to every woman whom you have a wonderful time with?
  • Don't forget Matt and Sarah's first date marriage on 7th Heaven, though they did have a big wedding several months later.
  • 90 Day Fiancé: Some of the couples, such as season 4's Melanie and Devar and season 6's Colt and Larissa, got engaged within days of meeting each other. This naturally raises some eyebrows from concerned family members.
  • All Creatures Great & Small (2020): James and Helen get engaged maybe six months, if that, after they officially get together. It works anyway, for two reasons; first, they had been growing closer as friends for nearly a year before they started seeing each other, and second, they are obviously perfect for each other, to the point where their engagement comes across as absolutely believable despite the short time frame.note  The real people they're based on also married within a year or so after meeting.
  • Sisters Xenia and Arabela both marry their chosen ones after only a few days (Xenia) or weeks (Arabela), for different reasons. Xenia wants to marry so she can be queen, Arabela wants to marry for love.
  • The first scene of Army Wives has Trevor propose to Roxy having dated her for four days. They marry shortly after that.
  • 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.
  • 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. Tropes Are Tools, since they stayed together for at least eight years.
  • 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 Brady Bunch spin-off The Brady Brides had Marcia engaged to Wally after knowing him for just a week. He even proposes on the same day they meet when Marcia expresses concern that her younger sister Jan is due to marry first.
  • The Brittas Empire: After an entire episode where he is considered to have died, Brittas returns to his wife's home to find her preparing for a wedding to a man that she had met at his presumed cremation only three days ago. He is understandably a bit shocked.
  • In the Broad City episode "Jews on a Plane," Abbi and Ilana take a Birthmarc flight to Israel, arranged for the purpose of getting Jews to marry each other. One guy proposes to the girl next to him partway through the flight.
  • Charles from Brooklyn Nine-Nine has a strong tendency for this kind of relationship. It even has a name: "Full Boyle mode". It's been a great disservice for him in the past, but it works out with his two main love interests because they're the same kind of people.
  • Happens in season 8 of Charmed (1998) in a rather rushed effort to get all three leads married off by the series finale. Henry proposes to Paige after knowing each other for only eight episodes (a couple months in the show's timeline) and they marry in the very next episode. Phoebe also ends up marrying Coop in the finale's flash forward after 7 episodes. While a length of time did pass between the finale and their wedding, the comics confirmed it was only a few months. Compare these two to Leo and Cole who took at least a season (two in Leo's case) to marry their respective Charmed One with a fair amount of episodes inbetween the proposal and the wedding.
  • Clarence begins when Clarence encounters a temporary maid whilst he is doing some furniture lifting. By the end of that very first meeting, Clarence is asking her to marry him, although said maid is understandably a bit shocked and proposes a trial run first.
  • 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.
    • Pierce married three of his seven ex wives after knowing them a month. In one episode, he gets engaged to a chinese student on their first date.
    • In her timeline in "Remedial Chaos Theory", Britta gets to fetch the Pizzas and returns announcing her engagement to the delivery guy.
  • In the Decoy episode "Cry Revenge," a middle-aged woman is getting harassing phone calls. One day her daughter picks up the phone, flirts with the man making the calls, and agrees to meet him in person. Once they meet, she proposes to him on the spot, and they're married that day.
  • The main plot of Dharma & 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.
  • Doctor Who:
    • In the serial "The Green Death", Jo Grant is Put on a Bus by getting engaged to Professor Clifford Jones, a man she met for the first time earlier that story, when he yelled at her for ruining an experiment. (Other companions also left for a man they'd just met, but Jo is the only one where they actually announce their engagement. At least until Bernice Summerfield in Death and Diplomacy.)
    • There's parallels to this with the early habit of having female companions Put on a Bus by having the Doctor leave them in some godforsaken time period because they've fallen in love with someone. Susan's relationship with David is implied to take place over the course of several months, but Vicki's relationship with Troilus explicitly takes place over the course of two days and is still intense enough that she abandons her life of adventure and her adoptive grandfather in order to live in a time period before modern medicine (when "The Web Planet" had established she was disturbed even by the idea of swallowing aspirin tablets due to how primitive it was) and knowing that there is an Alpha Bitch there who detests her to the point she's tried to have her killed.
    • The other notorious example is "The Invasion of Time", where Leela suddenly announces she's marrying Andred after barely even showing any sexual tension with him and only knowing him for a couple of days at most. This was Real Life Writes the Plot, as the showrunners deliberately failed to write a convincing exit for her because they were hoping until the last minute that the actor would change her mind about leaving.
  • On ER, Gallant and Neela marry without even really having had a proper date. They were good friends with Unresolved Sexual Tension for several months before he was shipped off to Iraq, then corresponded via mail for months.
  • Friends:
    • Ross and Emily decide to get married after knowing each other for just six weeks. The marriage lasted about as long as the courtship. Emily gets engaged again shortly after the divorce. Ross justifies their hasty engagement by saying that he dated his ex-wife Carol for four years before getting married and they still ended up divorced.
    • When Rachel finds out about the engagement, she impulsively proposes to her boyfriend Joshua even though they actually have gone on only four dates. At this time he still hasn't even officially divorced his ex-wife, and he gets freaked up and end up breaking up with Rachel.
  • Full House: Joey meets a woman who he hits things off with. Together they agree that dating is awkward and would prefer to skip to the next step, marriage. Joey initially thinks this is a great idea, but after everyone else points out what a terrible idea this is, eventually he realizes he's made a mistake. Fortunatly, the woman came to the same conclusion, and the pair agree to begin dating, rather than skip straight to marriage.
  • 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 to Blanche's uncle Lucas.
    • Dorothy and Lucas were actually faking their engagement largely to get revenge on Blanche for lying to them and setting them up on a blind date just so she could get out of her familial obligation to him and so she herself could go on a date. In the two months they kept the ruse going, they ended up falling in love for real.
  • In Good Girls Revolt, Patti considers her sister’s marriage this as she’s only eighteen and wants to get married before her husband leaves for Vietnam.
  • A literal example occurs in Grey's Anatomy: a heart patient is brought in at Thanksgiving and told she has to hold on until the New Year, 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.
  • There were two examples on Halt and Catch Fire: In season two, Joe MacMillan meets Sara Wheeler after leaving Cardiff Electrics, within months they are married and decide to elope shortly after, unsurprisingly the marriage ends right before Joe leaves for California.
    • Subverted for Cameron the next season when she married Tom Rendon, despite breaking up with him back in Texas, however the marriage lasts seven years, even after Cameron cheated with Joe at Comdex 1990.
  • Lampshaded on Henry Danger when Ray announces that he's getting married to a woman he met three hours ago. It's quickly revealed that the woman is a villain who gave Ray a Love Muffin.
  • 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.
  • 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.
    • This almost happened to Barney, of all people, who proposes to Quinn in season 7 finale after five episodes of dating. Eventually, they have arguments over signing the pre-nups and realize they can't trust each others.
  • On Imposters, this seems to be Maddie's M.O. as a professional Gold Digger. She would begin dating people and marry them in a short time, then clean out their bank accounts and leave, and then threaten to blackmail them with some heinous family secret if they look for her.
  • Downplayed with Detective Megan Wheeler in Law & Order: Criminal Intent. She goes on a six-month special assignment in Europe, during which she meets and gets engaged to a man named Colin. It ends abruptly when he is thrown in federal prison for money laundering and embezzlement.
  • Life in Pieces: Tyler proposes to his girlfriend Clementine after just a few months of dating, she says yes, and they're married before the end of the episode. When Tyler's mother Heather is freaking out, his father Tim is unconcerned, saying that Tyler saw an opportunity to "lock that down," and that Tim did the same thing with Heather.
  • The whole point of the Netflix Reality TV show Love Is Blind, where couples propose marriage within 10 days and get married within four weeks (although they do have the option of ending the relationship at any time). Only two out of the six couples from season 1 remained married when the reunion episode aired.
  • Mahou Sentai Magiranger:
    • Hikaru and Urara marry on the same day they first confess their feelings for each other, although in this case they'd already been living together on a daily basis for a while (he'd moved into her family's house as a Token Houseguest) and had half a season of Ship Tease in advance. That said, the actual reason they escalated it so quickly was that Hikaru had good reason to believe he'd be dead by the next day (and potentially everyone else too), so it's a purely ceremonial one done at home since there was a real chance they wouldn't have much time to devote to the courtship. They end up surviving the final battle, and by the time of the epilogue a year later they're going strong enough that they've moved out together.
    • Houka attempts to pull one earlier in the series with a man named Tetsuya, whom she'd met at work and planned to marry the next day. In this case, her older brother Makito actually does react as badly as you'd expect (the other siblings are resigned to just letting her do whatever she wants, considering this kind of thing is hardly surprising behavior for her). It turns out to also be a case of Last Wish Marriage since Tetsuya was cursed to disappear in three days due to the Monster of the Week, so when that issue is taken care of the two immediately call off the wedding. The relationship ends up falling apart at some point offscreen, and the rest of Houka's Character Development involves her learning to take things like relationships a little more seriously.
  • Exaggerated by the Reality TV show Married At First Sight, which is... Exactly What It Says on the Tin. At the end of the season, typically 5 to 10 weeks later, the contestants are allowed to divorce if they so desire, or stay together if Marriage Before Romance has taken hold.
  • Miami Vice: Crockett meets Caitlin about ten minutes into "Like a Hurricane." The last scene is their wedding. The episode takes place over the course of about a week.
  • Misfits: Nathan meets and instantly falls for Marnie in his last episode before the two head for Vegas to get married.
  • 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 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 Cloud Cuckoolander. She is, however, attracted to Earl, but she knows 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.
    • Funny thing is, the final episode (before the cancellation) reveals that the boy actually is Earl's (they hooked up for a one-night stand at a costume party and didn't see each other's faces), so in a weird kind of way he ends up making an "honest" woman out of her (if that word can even be applied to Joy).
    • Earl's other two marriages were an example of this trope as well. His second marriage was to his friend Ralph's elderly mother, after it was revealed that Earl drunkenly slept with her some years back and Ralph was threatening Earl's life over it. The marriage was annulled within two weeks, because Earl wouldn't consummate the marriage and she slept with the old man in Earl's Garage Band. His third marriage was to his friend Frank's ex-girlfriend Billie, after a coma dream convinced Earl that she was The One. He found out the hard way that sometimes Wanting Is Better Than Having, and ultimately she divorces him after she found inner peace on Camdenite farmland she was using to hide out from the police.
  • In one episode of Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide, the school bus driver laments that his girlfriend broke up with him after he decided they should go pick out wedding cakes for their first date. Eventually, he gets over her and asks out one of the teachers for a date - she suggests they go pick out wedding cakes.
  • Taken to ludicrous extremes in a 1985 storyline on Neighbours: Jim and Anna meet in episode 12, go out to dinner in episode 14, admit that they both love each other by episode 15, get engaged by the end of episode 16, then break up in episode 18 due to the opposition of Jim's daughters. Keep in mind this is a daily, half-hour Soap Opera we're talking about.
  • Gerry and Carla Carroll on The Newsreader are an interesting example. Gerry met Carla when he was working as an entertainer on a cruise ship, and fell for each other immediately, and Gerry states they were "basically married" by the time the ship docked in Sydney, with him choosing to stay in Australia rather than go back to his home country of Ireland. However, Gerry is also bisexual, a fact Carla knew from the very beginning, and they've come to an arrangement that lets him also sleep around with men. Seems to work for them, as they clearly care deeply for each other, are still married over a decade later, and have a daughter together.
  • 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.
  • On The Office (US), this is one of Michael's flaws, as he believes in "love at first sight" and tries to rush many of his relationships. He proposes to his girlfriend Carol on only their ninth date, leading to relationship issues. He eventually averts this on Jim's advice by slowly courting Holly.
  • 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. April and Andy do indeed get married, and it actually works out! Their relationship is remarkably stable, given how immature they both are in all other aspects.
    • An exaggerated version of the trope happens with Shauna Mulwae-Tweep and Bobby Newport in the Grand Finale episode. They get hitched just a few hours after meeting each other, with the moment being played as a Throw the Dog a Bone moment for the former as her inability to get a boyfriend was practically a Running Gag throughout the series.
  • In the first episode of Robin of Sherwood, Robin and Marian meet while Robin is trying to escape from the Sheriff of Nottingham (Marian iQQs his ward). He bursts into her bedroom, looking for a place to hide, and they immediately fall in love. Marian helps him eis scape, and when he later he savethe s her, she decides to stay in Sherwood Forest with him and his band. They get married at the end of the second episode.
  • The Sandbaggers, episode "Always Glad to Help". Neil sends Laura to flirt the with Prince Hamad to find out what he'2 up to. He proposes within a week; Laura, flustered, stalls for time by saying she does not fancy living in the desert. Hamad says he does not intend to do so anytime soon, and this is the key clue to his plans.
  • 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.
  • On Seinfeld, Jerry proposes to Jeannie (who is very similar to him) after dating for a short time in the seventh season finale, brought on by George's upcoming nuptials and seeing other couples in love. This of course doesn't last past the next season premiere.
  • Sex and the City:
    • In "The Chicken Dance", Miranda invites a friend to stay over at her apartment for a week with the hope of wooing him. He and Miranda's interior decorator fall in love almost instantly after meeting and they get engaged a week later. The wedding, which is held four weeks after they met, becomes the topic of conversation for the rest of the episode.
    • Charlotte and Trey are engaged and married in a ridiculously short period of time. A Surprisingly Realistic Outcome occurs—Trey's impotency aside, the marriage is troubled almost from day one and despite valiant efforts on both parties part to make it work, it ultimately fails.
  • Shtisel: Marriage after only a few dates is the norm in Haredi communities. Many couples don't even have four before getting engaged. Giti knew she wanted to marry Lippe after one date, though it took a while for her parents to approve, and her daughter Ruchami skips the dates and engagement and getting married (at 15!) to Hanina, who she'd only met a week or two ago, and had only spoken to in person for the first time that morning! Note that her parents don't know he exists until they're already married, and she doesn't even know if he has living parents.
  • Smallville: In "Heat", after summer vacation in Smallville, Clark is surprised to find out Lex became engaged to a woman in such a short period of time. Naturally, we later find out she's the Freak of the Weak and has seduced Lex with her Living Aphrodisiac powers and is planning to kill him and take his money.
  • St. Elsewhere:
    • After knowing each other for only six months and dating for only a few weeks, Dr. Ehrlich and Roberta Sloan get married in "In Sickness and in Health". It doesn't last.
    • In "Where There's Hope, There's Crosby", Jack Morrison marries his second wife Joanne McFadden. In the next episode "When You Wish Upon a Scar", Joanne tells Dr. Westphall that they were friends throughout their childhood in Seattle and were fixed up by Jack's brother David. After only two dates, Jack asked her to marry him but she turned him down. However, Joanne changed her mind and came to Boston to be with him.
    • In "Split Decision", Luther Hawkins and Penny Franks get married after only knowing each other for about a month.
  • Star Trek:
    • In the classic Star Trek 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 Star Trek: The Next Generation, we're made to think that it's customary for Klingons to marry after having sex for the first time, as Worf tries to shout the traditional wedding oath after sleeping with K'Ehleyr, who, being half-human, isn't about to make a lifelong commitment after a single night together. We don't really see it in later pairings involving Klingons.
  • Dean Winchester of Supernatural knows something is very wrong when his younger brother Sam excitedly marries Supernatural fan Becky almost immediately after a chance meeting in Vegas. The brothers had met Becky before, but while she had shown much interest in Sam, Sam had not previously reciprocated. Turns out she was dosing him with love potion.
  • On Taxi, John Burns sees a woman he likes and, with some joking advice from Bobby, the first thing he says to her is "let's get married". She says okay, and over the weekend they do get married. While they both initially think it was a mistake and want the marriage annulled, they end up staying married.
  • 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. Since Bill was born in the 19th century this may have been his expectation from the start.
  • The Twilight Zone (1959): In "In His Image", Alan Talbot and Jessica Connelly got engaged after knowing each other for only four days. Jessica never learns that Alan was an android or that his identity was assumed by his creator Walter Ryder, Jr.
  • The White Lotus: Deconstructed. Rachel and Shane have a whirlwind romance for a few months, get engaged, and spend a few more months planning a wedding before their honeymoon. It is only with the extra time spent and the hindsight of the rush with which they got married that Rachel realizes she made a mistake; she thinks Shane is a Spoiled Brat Manchild and is uncomfortable with both the overbearing presence of his mother in their relationship and their expectation she will quit her career to become a Trophy Wife. By the end, a resigned Rachel decides to accept it and become a Stepford Smiler housewife like Shane wanted for the sake of her financial safety after a series of blows to her self-worth and job.
  • The Wild House:
    • Serena falls in love with Orlando, whom she met when he spent a couple of weeks at her house on a foreign exchange. After he goes back to the US, she instantly transfers to a school there to be with him; they get engaged almost immediately, and married a few months later. Her cousin Georgina successfully pushes for a guy she's known for a very short time to propose so that she can steal the spotlight at Serena's wedding.
    • In one episode, the family prepares for Aunt Yvette's wedding to a man she has only just met and barely knows. Subverted when the wedding ends up not going ahead.
  • Young Sheldon: Pastor Jeff and his new girlfriend Robin tie the knot in "A Live Chicken, a Fried Chicken and Holy Matrimony". While it isn't specified how long they were together beforehand, it can't have been longer than a few months due to there being only a handful of episodes between their first meeting and their marriage. The marriage happened due to the two wanting to have sex, but Jeff couldn't do the deed outside of holy matrimony.

    Music 
  • In David Byrne & Fatboy Slim's album Here Lies Love, the song "Eleven Days" covers the whirlwind romance of Ferdinand Marcos and Imelda Romualdez. They meet, and eleven days later she agrees to marry him. They don't even meet again in the interval—Ferdinand courts Imelda by sending messages and gifts.
  • Referenced in Evelyn Evelyn's self-titled song "Evelyn Evelyn", which is about a set of Conjoined Twins:
    Eva: Do you think I should marry him?
    Lyn: But we just met him yesterday.
  • Electric Light Orchestra's "The Diary of Horace Wimp" from their Discovery album regards the titular character, who changes his life around and meets and marries a girl... all in the span of a week.

    Print Media 
  • Parodied in a one-panel cartoon in Private Eye: A bride standing at the altar saying "I don't usually go this far on a first date."

    Theatre 
  • In Alison's House, Ann the secretary falls in love with Knowles the reporter, and they elect to go away together, over the course of a single afternoon and evening.
  • ''All Shook Up: Miss Sandra and Dennis, as a result of Pair the Spares, end up skipping over the dating part and get married after discovering each have a love for Shakespeare, a unique trait in their small town.
  • Unlike the film, the stage version of Beauty and the Beast plays this trope straight. While the film creates the sense of several weeks or months passing, onstage the song "Something There" about their budding feelings for each other takes place directly after the Beast saves Belle from the wolves and she tends his wound, which is still Belle's first night in the castle. Their iconic Dance of Romance, and later their declarations of love and the breaking of the spell, all seem to take place on the following night.
  • In Carousel, Billy and Julie meet in May and are already married in June.
  • In Hamilton, it's unclear exactly how much time passes between Eliza and Alexander meeting and them deciding to get married, but the song seems to imply it happens only over the course of a few weeks. This is a combination of Truth in Television and artistic license: the real Eliza and Alexander did want to get married after only knowing one another for a month, which was a pretty normal timeframe during that period (sex outside of marriage was frowned upon and most couples didn't want to wait long). However, they weren't able to get married at that time because Eliza's parents wouldn't have been able to be there, and since Angelica had already eloped, they really wanted to be present for Eliza's wedding. (Notably, Eliza was the only one of her father's children who had his blessing for marriage.) As a result, given Hamilton's army commitments, it was a full six months before they actually married.
  • The Mario Opera has Mario and Peach set to be married after knowing each other only a month.
  • Miss Saigon: Kim and Chris are madly in love and planning to move in together after one night together. After moving in, he declares his intent to take her back to the US with him and officially marry her there. It's explicitly stated several times that their whirlwind courtship has lasted all of two weeks.
  • Nellie and Emile in South Pacific have only known each other for two weeks, and Emile has already proposed, though Nellie hasn't said yes or no.
  • 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 Mid Summer 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.
    • Twelfth Night, even by Shakespeare's standards, deserves special mention. Sebastian marries Olivia, a woman he has literally just met, without even telling her his name.
    Sebastian: "If it be thus to dream, still let me sleep!"
    • As You Like It has a partial example in Orlando and Rosalind, who spend most of their time pre-marriage while Rosalind is disguised as a man, so up until The Reveal, Orlando is prepared to marry a women he's met once in his life.
      • Similarly, Oliver and Celia jump very quickly from first meeting to marriage, which is lampshaded by Orlando.

    Video Games 
  • In Bad Day on the Midway, Dixie narrates that it took only two weeks for her and Ike to get married.
  • Dragon Age:
    • Potentially averted in Dragon Age: Origins, 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.
      • Practically inverted in Dragon Age II's case, considering how little changes for most characters in the course of what's supposed to be that many years.
  • 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".
  • In The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, all that's required for marriage is having completed a quest for a given (and marriageable) 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, it's 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.
  • Fire Emblem has many examples:
    • Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War doesn't do this in gameplay; it takes a buildup 500 love points for two characters to marry and the chapters explicitly span months or years. Plotwise, however, Deirdre and Sigurd take Love at First Sight to a new level. After she hears about him from Aideen and he saves her from a ruffian, they part ways for a few turns (i.e. a few days at best, depending on your interpretation of ingame time) and wind up saying things like "I tried so hard to forget you!" to each other as though they were lovers separated for months, rather than strangers who ran into each other for ten minutes.
    • Can be played straight in Fire Emblem: Awakening if Chrom marries the Female Avatar (a girl whom he meets by the start of the story - it's not clear how many days/weeks pass from the beginning to the chapter where Chrom marries her or any other of his brides) or Olivia (who appears at the same chapter where he has to get married).
      • If a male Avatar marries Chrom's sister Lissa quite early in the story, it can be the same deal.
      • It's possible for nearly all first-generation characters to marry someone they've just met, if the player grinds their supports quickly enough. And invoking the trope name more literally, the fourth support level, S, is the one where the characters get married. Who knew constantly fighting for your life together on a battlefield could be so romantic?
      • Hell, the way the support system works, there are a lot of pairing conversations that seem to involve a zero date marriage: each pairing has a C, B, and A support conversation which are all platonic (though possessing varying degrees of Ship Tease on a case-by-case basis), and then an S support which is explicitly romantic. Only the final conversation can be explicitly romantic because only these conversations are blocked after a character gets married, to prevent polyamory. This means that for each pairing, the characters only get the space of a single conversation to go from admitting their romantic feelings to proposing marriage, sometimes all in one smooth action!
    • The trend continues in Fire Emblem Fates, particularly in the Revelation route if the player decides to pair off characters from Hoshido with characters from Nohr. Azura even comments on this trope in her S-level support with Niles.
      Azura: Niles, I do have feelings for you, but we've barely managed to discuss the weather!
    • Fire Emblem: Three Houses averts this. On any given route Byleth can only obtain their S-Support at the very end of the game, right before the credits roll. Every other character can only get up to an A-support in the game proper. There may be some hints of future romance on the horizon, but any romance or marriage is only mentioned in the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue.
      • That being said Sothis may be the only one to play this straight since she only has an S-Support and is largely absent for half the game.
  • 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.
    • In Story of Seasons: Trio of Towns, the DLC candidates Stephanie and Woofio are unusual in they completely skip dating and are married during their final (and coincidentally fourth) love event. While the player can choose to stay friends with them in the last event instead of marrying them, this will lock them out of being married again for the file. This can be taken even further taking advantage of their special items and other friendship boosts, allowing a player to marry them in less than a full in-game season.
  • In Hometown Story, the item necessary to marry isn't obtained until you have gone on three dating events with each of the bachelors, followed by a confession event from each that starts off as a fourth date. The proposal event that triggers once you meet the requirements for marriage starts out as a fifth date.
  • 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.
  • In The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, a Hylian man and a Gerudo woman meet at Lover's Pond, a heart-shaped pond that people visit for the express purpose finding their soulmates. Once Link helps the guy introduce himself to the woman by giving a flower that happens to be both's favorite, they immediately decide to get together.
  • Love of Magic: Owyn and Emily marry after knowing each other about two and a half months, although the formal wedding takes longer to organize.
  • 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.
  • This is likely to happen in New Style Boutique 2: Fashion Forward due to the way progression works. Story events more or less advance by the number of people served in your shop, while the clock and calendar advance in real time. As a result, if you play for more than a few minutes a day, Adelaide will go from meeting her boyfriend to marrying him within a couple of weeks, both in real life and in-game.
  • In Rune Factory 4, you can have a third date marriage — while it can take more than that, the base requirements to get hitched are to have a double bed, an engagement ring, and three dates with your lover. In fact, if you're playing as a female, you don't even need the ring; your boyfriend will propose to you after a minimum of three dates. You can turn him down, though, and propose later. Presumably after going on a few more dates. However, this trope can also be potentially subverted by the way time passes in the game, as depending on how much you speed through days, it's possible to have gone on only three dates but have been romantically involved with your eventual spouse for years.
  • Possible in The Sims. Heck, it's possible to have a first-date marriage, if you're determined enough to raise enough relationship in that first day. Justified in all games after the first as those include lifespans and ageing mechanics, with time advancing at very high speed - each "day" is representative of several months (roughly a year per day in The Sims 2, judging from the day age meter without mods), resulting in solid dating history before marriage happens.

    Webcomics 
  • Suggested but ultimately avoided in Cursed Princess Club. The two elder Pastel Princesses, Maria and Lorena, are eager to speed up their Arranged Marriages to their Plaid Prince fiancés, Blaine and Lance. So is Plaid King Leland, who in Episode 28 suggests planning their wedding for the following week (the princesses and princes had only first known about and met each other the previous week). Pastel King Jack, despite being one of the two fathers to arrange the marriages, is starting to get hesitant about rushing things because he's getting uncomfortable seeing his little girls getting all lovey-dovey, to the point of telling the very put-off Maria and Lorena that he wants the wedding postponed indefinitely. But the following day, youngest daughter Gwendolyn declares that she and Plaid Prince Frederick want to call off their engagement because "there's no attraction between us." While Gwen (and no one else in her family) had overheard Frederick calling her ugly soon after they first met, the rest of her family had recently seen the two of them sharing an unexpected romantic moment on a couch, so they're not convinced by her claim of a lack of attraction. But they do figure that, as the youngest sister, she's probably really confused by all the new emotions she's been feeling lately. So Maria and Lorena agree with their father to slow things down with their own engagements for Gwen's sake (while also encouraging Gwen to not back out entirely). Which turns out to be a good idea in the long run, as the two elder sisters gradually discover various unforeseen points of tension with their betrotheds that would have been more difficult to overcome if they had rushed things along as they originally wanted.
  • Dominic Deegan
    • Downplayed with Dominic and Luna. They're dating after less than two weeks and in love within a month, but the relaionship moves at a much slower pace from then. They take over half a year before having sex for the first time, a year before getting engaged and only get married about another year after that.
    • It's played straighter with Hans Reinhold and Kiya in the "March Across Maltak" arc. The two are together about a week and quickly develop an attraction to each other in that timeframe such that when Hans ends up becoming the future protector of the new Crone of Maltak, Kiya is willing to take up the job and find wherever he went to when the Crone's mountain disappeared and took Hans with it. She evidently became the new Crone as the two are seen together at the mountain in the next-to-last arc.
  • Downplayed with Mr. Mighty and Iron Jane in Everyday Heroes: Flashbacks showed that, although they'd known each other for yearsnote , they hadn't even so much as kissed before MM popped the question (after pouring his heart out to her while explaining why he'd trust her with an important secret). She was so moved by his earnest words and actions, she said yes. They got married the next day, but not before they changed the status of "how intimate they've gotten."
  • Knights of Buena Vista averts this with Bill and Mary, who had known each other over three years before Bill proposed. Yet when he did, Mary thought that was was instead having his Player Character propose to hers. Then they decided to actually include that as an In-Universe Throw It In!.
  • Kazumi and Daigo from The Order of the Stick knew each other for a grand total of three and half months before they got married. And Kazumi was already eight weeks pregnant at the wedding.
  • Travelling mercenary Ms. Poppy O'Possum says she has to go on at least three dates before she gets married. To a princess. Petunia begins exasperating.
  • Fred and Faye in Something*Positive were married after knowing each other only two months. Many years later, Faye talks about this:
    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.
    • It was also essentially her last words, for she died in her sleep that night.
  • Not marriage, but in Sunstone, Ally and Lisa manage to move in with each other before they start dating. Three weeks after they meet and started an intimate relationship, and three months after they met online, but still some time before either of them pluck up the courage to finally ask the other out for Date #1. The narrative acknowledges how rash this was and chapter four deals with the consequences.
  • Hasting's long string of divorces in Ugly Hill is partly due to him marrying new women at the drop of a hat.

    Web Original 
  • From a chain letter in this article on Snopes: "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."

    Web Videos 
  • 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.
  • Discussed in IISuperwomanII. Lilly's parents had an Arranged Marriage, and while they respect that she doesn't want one, they don't quite get the "point" of dating, and have trouble grasping the idea of a casual relationship. This has led to some frustrating conversations in which Lilly's mother asks her when she intends to introduce a guy to them, or if she thinks they'll get married, when they've only been on one or two dates.

    Western Animation 
  • Batman: The Animated Series episode "Chemistry" has Veronica Vreeland marrying a man she'd only known for a few weeks beforehand. Then at the wedding, Bruce Wayne meets a woman named Susan and the two hit it off. He ends up proposing to her on the second date and then they get married. It turns out that both Ronnie and Bruce's spouses were plant people created by Poison Ivy (and thus were irresistible due to secreting high amounts of pheromones) to marry all of Gotham's wealthy bachelors and bachelorettes so that she could kill them and acquire their wealth through their fake spouses.
  • BoJack Horseman:
    • Todd has a publicity relationship with celebrity Courtney Portnoy, and she quickly announces a marriage to him after only a couple of dates. However, Todd backs out of it because he's not into her like that, despite Princess Carolyn and Rutabaga's thrill at making a big important wedding.
    • In season 5, Mr. Peanutbutter, recently divorced from Diane, begins dating a waitress named Pickles. He ends up cheating on her with Diane within a few months, but instead of confessing, he proposes to Pickles due to being terrified of losing her, too.
  • Family Guy: Adam West asks Lois's sister Carol to marry him after one date. Lois herself thinks it's a bad idea, but rather than telling them to take it slow she tries to break them up. It all works out in the end, and they remained married until Adam's death in 2017.
    • This is deconstructed in a later episode where Brian marries a woman with terminal cancer or, what they thought it was. Due to all of the positive attention he got from the town, on top of other things, he has to continue the relationship, dealing with her overly happy attitude, her many cats, her quickly overindulgent attitude, and his obnoxious new mother-in-law, because to end the marriage would not go nicely.
  • Futurama:
    • In "A Bicyclops Built for Two," Leela meets another cyclops named Alcazar and hooks up with him to propogate their species, despite him turning out to be a total dirtbag. He proposes to her the day after they sleep together, which turns out to be part of a scam, as he's a shapeshifter polygamist who tricks women into marrying him to basically be his servants. Of course, Leela doesn't go through with it, and neither do Alcazar's other almost-wives.
    • In the first movie, Leela meets a technician at the Head Museum named Lars Fillmore and falls in love with him at first sight. They start dating within the week, and within what appears to be mere weeks, Lars proposes on Xmas Eve and she accepts. Their wedding is also only three days later. This turns out to be subverted in two ways. First, Lars leaves Leela at the altar after seeing Hermes' duplicate body severed from his head. Second, Lars turns out to be a time paradox duplicate of Fry from another timeline, meaning he'd known Leela for several years longer than she'd realized, and it's implied the reason she bonded so quickly with Lars was because he had everything she already loved in Fry without his immature qualities.
  • In Hey Arnold!, Olga announces that she's getting married to a guy she's known for three weeks and two days. Her parents don't understand why they need to get married so quickly.
    Big Bob: So then, what's the stinkin' rush? Get married in a year, if you still want to.
    Miriam: [drooly] You won't want to.
  • In the King of the Hill episode "Luanne Virgin 2.0", the stressed out and hormonally charged Rhett impulsively proposes to Luanne after two dates after seeing up her skirt during a very sexually charged swing dance. This was so the two of them could have sex without it seeming immoral. Thankfully they don't go through with it.
  • Almost happened to Bolin in Season 2 of The Legend of Korra with Korra's cousin Eska, with her declaring they would live together in "icy bliss" after spending all of a few days together, most of which consisted of her using him as a servant, then threatening to feed him to piranhas when he raises his issues. He skips town before going through with it, but she does not take this well. At all. Because Bolin is a guy, this is Played for Laughs.
  • Subverted in Moral Orel when Clay and Bloberta got married after one date (and it's really tough to call it a date since they just went to a reception together after attending the wedding separately). It's quite clear both of them regard it as a mistake, but go through with it anyway, since Clay wants someone around to help him and Bloberta just wants to be the one getting married. Most poignantly, when asked by her son why they married, all Bloberta could muster for an answer is 'why not?'.
  • Narrowly subverted by the X-Men: The Animated Series fifth season episode "Storm Front". As noted in this review, Storm agrees to marry Arkon, the man who essentially abducted her, after knowing him for 20 minutes. She does have her doubts, though, which are confirmed when Arkon is revealed to be a tyrant who is enslaving people from a neighboring planet, so they don't end up getting married.
  • Happens in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012) With Raphael and Mona Lisa. The two have a grand total of about 8 minutes of screen time together (a good chunk of which is Mona trying to kill Raph), which probably amounts to a couple of hours in-universe at most, and yet somehow still ends with Raph trying to make an Anguished Declaration of Love when he thinks they might die, and a kiss at the end of the episode.

    Real Life 

Cultural examples

  • Cultures which practice Arranged Marriage sometimes have the bride and groom meeting just a few times before their wedding. Since the ones responsible for arranging the wedding are the parents, the couple technically do not have a reason to meet until the wedding. Doubly so if the families are too poor (or on the opposite end, too aristocratic) and live far away from each other. Do note that arranged =/= forced. In most cases, both of the children need to consent to the idea of marrying each other before a wedding can occur. If one or both does not like the partner offered to them, the parents search for a different candidate and try again. Rinse and repeat until you have a match which the parents approve of, and in which the partners like (or can at least tolerate) each other.
  • Many religions disapprove of premarital sex, and so this is common among stricter adherents of multiple religions.
    • Traditional Islamic customs dictate that people who want to marry must do so as early as possible. Casual dating is not strictly forbidden, but it is frowned upon, mainly due to a fear that the couples might be inclined to perform fornication (which is forbidden in Islam). To get around this idea, some have a mut'ah, a temporary marriage, somewhat invoking this.
    • Happens a lot in the Ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jewish community—many become engaged after a grand total of ONE half-hour date at home, or beshow. Before that their parents do a lot of research and... that's basically it, besides the family pointing the guy out to the girl in synagogue. While it's an arranged marriage in the sense that one can only say yes to someone their parents approve for them, it's not a forced marriage because one can say no to the choice offered. It does seem to work.
      • In non-Hassidic Orthodox Jewish communities, it's more of a blind dating construct, but engagements are still pushed after fewer than ten dates, which can be compressed into a period of about a month. Longer than that is discouraged. Unlike Hassidim, however, who generally tend to have long engagements, non-Hassidim generally get married VERY soon after engagement (a month or two).
    • Among some conservative and/or fundamentalist Christian sects, dating and long engagements are discouraged because of the temptation to have sex before the wedding. Young people (on the advice of St. Paul, who advised people who couldn't handle celibacy to go and get married so as to avoid temptation) might rush to the altar so that they can have sex and still be seen as "pure." Sometimes this is encouraged by their families, especially in situations where instead of dating, the couple "courts"—that is, goes on a few parent-supervised "dates", with the understanding that the end goal is marriage, and the couple is expected to make their decision ASAP.
    • Mormon dating culture revolves around discouraging "hanging out," spending years together with no overt commitment before deciding they want to marry. Dating is seen as intended to focus on finding someone as a marriage partner, which means many relationships fizzle out within a few months because of Commitment Issues being addressed early. Thus, it is rare to hear of a Mormon couple dating for years before they get engaged. The pattern tends to be dating within a few weeks of knowing each other, getting engaged after a few months of dating, and having a wedding pretty soon after getting engaged. All told, the timeline from first date to marriage is often about 6 months or less.
  • In the gay community there is a joke 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. The idea is that since men are stereotypically the ones with Commitment Issues, if you remove them from the equation then it's full steam ahead. In the era before same-sex marriage was legalized in the United States, the joke was “What does a lesbian bring to a fourthnote  date? A U-Haul."note  (The joke being that they would move in together ludicrously quickly, and with no option to get married, moving in was the closest equivalent.) Today, the joke goes more like this:
    What do lesbians do on the second date? Get engaged. What do lesbians do on the third date? Get married. What do they do on the fourth date? Set up home together.
  • It isn’t rare for elderly people who find love to marry their sweethearts within a short time of meeting them. Maybe it’s because they realize they haven’t got forever left to live, and don’t want to miss out on precious time.
  • 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."
  • In the U.S. military it's common for personnel who aren't even old enough to drinknote  to get married to the first person they can tolerate in order to receive better living conditions (singles are quartered in a barracks, where they will often share communal living and bathroom facilities with upwards of 30 other people, while married personnel receive apartments or houses for them and their families) and better pay (married soldiers will get extra money if separated from their families for an extended period, alongside the added financial benefits that come with marriage such as filing joint taxes and reduced insurance costs).
    • Plus, if you know you're about to be deployed, it makes sense to Altar the Speed in case you don't make it back. The widow of a service-member killed in action gets $100,000 plus a pension of 1.375% of his high-3 pay times the number of years he served. His fiancee, on the other hand, gets nothing, even if he left her Someone to Remember Him By.
    • Has been used by couples who are both in the service with one soon to be deployed overseas to a peaceful location as a way to increase the odds of their new spouse likewise getting an assignment in that country. In at least one case of this, the marriage was the first date, and may have never been consummated.

Individual examples

  • A heartwarming example: Tony Benn met his wife Caroline over tea at Worcester College, Oxford, in 1949, and nine days later, he proposed to her on a park bench in the city. They were married for 51 years. As an anniversary gift, he bought the bench from Oxford City Council and installed it in the garden of their home in Holland Park.
  • Stan Lee proposed to his wife after they'd been dating for just two weeks and the two were married just an hour after after she legally divorced her first husband. Still, they were married for seventy years before her death in 2017.
  • 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.
  • 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 divorced the next year.
  • 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 had them sign annulment agreements before they got married.
  • The German Reality TV show Hochzeit Auf Den Ersten Blick (Wedding At First Sight) marries off two people who were chosen based on scientific analysis on what their morals, ethics, preferences and similarities are. They see each other the first time at that wedding and the show drops in months later to see if the relationship stuck or if they are already heading for the divorce court.
  • David Duchovny and Téa 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 were married for over 13 years, which is still an impressive record for anyone with a Real Life example of this trope.
  • 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. He unfortunately died in a plane crash in 1959, but on the bright side, the marriage itself seems to have been a generally happy one.
  • 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.
    • Kim's sister Khloe married Lamar Odom exactly one month after they met.
  • 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.
  • Tommy Lee of Mötley Crüe and Pamela Anderson only knew each other for 4 days before they got married.
  • A happily positive example is James Garner who married his wife, Lois Clarke, 14 days after they first met in 1956. They were together for nearly 58 years until his death in 2014.
  • In an appearance on The Mercer Report, Justin Trudeau revealed that he proposed to his wife, Sophie Gregoire, after meeting her for the first time, stating that he told her "forget boyfriend/girlfriend."
  • Columnist Emily Yoffe was engaged within 6 weeks of meeting her future husband and married 4 months after that. Her response to any letters displaying this trope is to declare that she's hardly one to judge, given how things evolved with her husband of nearly 20 years.
  • Martin Luther King Jr. proposed to Coretta Scott on their first date, after knowing each other for only two weeks.
  • Lyndon Johnson also proposed to Lady Bird on their first date. Shocked, she rejected him, saying it was too soon... only to accept a month and a half later.
  • Caroll Spinney of Sesame Street fame married his wife Deb a mere 13 days after their first date. They remained married until his death in 2019.
  • Cheryl Cole dated her second husband, Jean-Bernard Fernandez-Versini, for three months before marrying him in 2014. However, they eventually separated after 19 months, and tabloid reports tend to vary on the details of the separation.
  • A very heartwarming example with Cate Blanchett: Cate and her husband Andrew Upton (who is a screenwriter and playwright) got engaged after they'd only been dating for about three weeks. They've been married since 1997 and have four children together, proving that whirlwind romances do sometimes last.
  • Greg Mortensen explains in his biography Three Cups of Tea, that it was Love at First Sight when he met his wife Tara at a party in 1995. So much so, that they got married six days later. And they’re STILL together, despite the controversy that's popped up about his book.
  • Like Khloe Kardashian and Lamar Odom, Ariana Grande and Saturday Night Live's Pete Davidson got engaged just one month into dating, much to the surprise of everyone; they broke up after a few months.
  • Played straight in Danny Bonaduce's case, who revealed that he and ex-wife Gretchen married after their first date, the marriage lasted 16 years and two kids before they got divorced in 2007.
  • Same with The Notorious B.I.G. and Faith Evans, they got married just nine days into dating and stayed together until his murder in 1997.
  • Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly got engaged without having even gone on one date. They'd met and befriended one another while filming A Beautiful Mind, and kept in phone contact afterward. When 9/11 happened, he spent hours trying to get ahold of her; once she'd assured him she was okay, he said, "Let's get married." 20+ years later, they're still together.note 
  • Steve Irwin proposed to Terri Raines on their fourth encounter, only four months after they met by chance and fell in Love at First Sight at his parents' reptile park. The wedding was four months after that. They remained Happily Married and very passionately in love for 14 years, until Steve's death in 2006.
  • An almost example. Olivia Hussey fell in love with Christopher Jones and went to Ireland with him while he was making Ryan's Daughter. After about two weeks, they walked around the town one night in search of a priest to marry them. They couldn't find one, which may have been a blessing for Olivia; since their relationship turned abusive shortly after.
  • Reinhard Heydrich proposed to Lina von Osten on their second date (and third meeting). She raised several objections, but eventually agreed. They remained married until his assassination in June 1942.
  • Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, the first person to walk in space. In 1957 he married Svetlana Dozenko three days after they met. They stayed married until Alexei's death in 2019.
  • Actress/singer Pearl Bailey and musician Louie Bellson were married within four days of meeting and Happily Married for 38 years until her death, which he lamented as "losing my best friend".
  • Mariah Carey and Nick Cannon married within 6 weeks of meeting.
  • British Pop Artist, actress and radio presenter Pauline Boty married literary agent Clive Goodwin ten days after meeting him, breaking the hearts of many men in her circle (including her married lover). Unfortunately, their marriage was cut short when she was diagnosed with cancer while pregnant and refused treatment, dying only three years later. The fact that he never remarried in the twelve years between her death and his own suggests he never recovered from losing her.

 
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Nancy & Edward's Ever After

Nancy and Prince Edward find love with each other after their bethrotheds fall in love. And in true fairy tale fashion, they immediately get married.

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