Cristiano Ronaldo and Georgina Rodríguez’s 10-Year journey to ‘I Do’ challenges the deadline on modern love

Dubai: Cristiano Ronaldo and Georgina Rodríguez took around ten years of knowing each other before getting married. Rather than clutching our pearls or alerting the family elders over the delay, perhaps we should ask why we're so invested in how quickly couples make it to the altar.

Maybe they didn't “wait” ten years at all. Maybe they gave themselves ten years to fall in love, become parents and figure out whether this thing called forever actually worked for them. There's something refreshing about refusing to conduct your love life according to society's imaginary relationship calendar.

Hollywood and Bollywood haven't exactly helped. For decades, our movies have peddled marriage as the great romantic finish line, arriving conveniently before the credits roll with the promise of happily ever after.

That's not to say marriage doesn't work. Perhaps it simply works differently now, and doesn't have to mark the beginning of a committed life together. Sometimes it can arrive somewhere in the middle.

By the time Ronaldo and Rodríguez married, they were hardly two starry-eyed lovers wondering whether they could build a life together. They were raising five children in a blended family, had moved countries, navigated dizzying career highs and lived with the kind of scrutiny where a dinner date can become global news by breakfast.

Their life may come with private jets and sprawling homes, but wealth doesn't give anyone a free pass from the difficult stuff. In 2022, they endured the devastating loss of their baby son Ángel.

So the wedding wasn't necessarily the beginning of their commitment. It came after years of doing the difficult, glorious and presumably deeply unglamorous bits that don't make it onto Instagram.

I rather love that order.

For generations, romance came with a remarkably strict instruction manual: meet someone (or have your parents enthusiastically find someone for you), fall in love, get engaged, marry, buy the house and then make babies. But R and C appear to have skipped a few pages, rearranged the chapters and carried on quite happily.

Who decided love needed a deadline?

Women, in particular, have been subjected to the relationship stopwatch for years. Date someone for long enough and people start examining your left hand with the intensity of forensic investigators. Has he proposed? When will he propose? Is she waiting for the ring?

The problem with that narrative is that it reduces Rodríguez to a woman waiting to be chosen, when she had already spent years building a family with Ronaldo. She is the biological mother of two of the five children they raise and has been a maternal figure to his three older children.

Their family wasn't created by a wedding ceremony. It was already there.

Which is why the word “finally” bothers me. It makes it sound as though Rodríguez spent a decade in some celestial waiting room, clutching a bridal magazine while Ronaldo decided whether she had passed the audition.

Maybe neither of them was in a hurry. What's wrong with that?

Taking your time isn't wasting it

We have a peculiar attitude towards speed in relationships. Get engaged after six months and everyone sighs, “When you know, you know.” Take ten years and suddenly we're looking for evidence of trouble.

But why does certainty have to arrive quickly?

After a decade together, you've seen the full version of the person you're marrying, long after the flattering lighting of early romance has disappeared. You've seen each other exhausted and irritable, watched careers and priorities change, dealt with children, relatives, homes, travel and all the other stuff that makes up an actual life.

Anyone can appear compatible over a fabulous dinner. Try raising children together. That's when the legwork really begins.

They weren't dating for ten years. They were living.

And they're not as unusual as we think

There's a broader cultural shift behind their story, which is what makes this more interesting than another celebrity wedding.

A major Pew Research Center study found that among American adults aged 18 to 44, 59 per cent had lived with an unmarried partner, compared with 50 per cent who had ever been married. Just over half of cohabiting adults in that age group were also raising children.

No, this doesn't mean everyone is suddenly having five children and waiting a decade before calling the wedding planner. It does suggest that marriage and the beginning of family life are no longer automatically the same event.

The old sequence has been scrambled.

First comes love. Then comes... whatever works

Ronaldo and Rodríguez have famous company. Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt were already raising six children when they married in 2014, although we all know how spectacularly that particular happily-ever-after unraveled. Matthew McConaughey and Camila Alves had two children before they married.

The point isn't that marrying later guarantees success; clearly, it doesn't; but that there is no longer one universally accepted route to becoming a family.

For previous generations, marriage often gave you permission to begin the rest of your life. Today, couples may live together, buy homes and have children before deciding whether marriage belongs in their story.

That doesn't make marriage meaningless. Perhaps we've simply stopped expecting it to do all the heavy lifting.

There is something romantic about knowing

There's a particular beauty in marrying someone when you're young, madly in love and convinced you can take on the world together. But there's another kind of romance in looking at someone after ten years of actually taking on that world and deciding you still want them beside you.

One comes with hope. The other comes with history.

I don't find the second any less romantic. If anything, it feels rather grown-up.

Maybe the real luxury was time

For all the private jets, diamonds and fabulous homes surrounding Ronaldo and Rodríguez, perhaps one of the greatest luxuries they gave themselves was time.

Not time to “wait”, but time to live.

We spend so much of our lives being told we're late for something or that we are late to marry, late to have children, late to buy the house, late to earn enough money, late to have figured out what on earth we're doing.

Their story is a useful reminder that there doesn't have to be one correct order.

Sometimes you marry someone and then discover what building a life together looks like. Sometimes you build that life first and marry the person who has already been standing beside you through it.

Cristiano Ronaldo and Georgina Rodríguez took ten years.

Good for them. In an age obsessed with getting everywhere faster, perhaps taking your time is the real flex.