Many people feel incredibly pressured to proceed with an engagement, even if it’s clear that the marriage is doomed. The sunk cost fallacy, the phenomenon whereby a person is reluctant to abandon a strategy or course of action because they have invested heavily in it, even when it is clear that abandonment would be more beneficial, is very much at play here. If you have loved someone enough to have committed to marry them, it would be a huge emotional step to break it off when you’ve already accepted the idea of your future marriage into your heart. It is incredibly painful all at once to break an engagement, but that pain would be much less than the pain you’d feel in a loveless marriage that ultimately ends in divorce. You can either choose to be really embarrassed all at once, or really unhappy over the course of months or years.