Marriage, explained: the two gifts that turn a friendship into a wedding

Marriage runs on two gifts, not one: a bouquet from Pierre's once you hit 8 hearts with someone starts dating them, and a Mermaid's Pendant once you hit 10 hearts is the actual proposal. Skip the bouquet and the pendant sale won't even trigger — the game checks for it.

Hearts: how they move, and where they stop

Every villager you haven't proposed to caps at 8 hearts until you give them a bouquet — the meter physically freezes there, even if you keep gifting. You raise hearts by talking to them once a day, giving gifts they love or like, handing in item-delivery quests, and picking dialogue choices in heart events; hitting them with a slingshot or rummaging through a garbage can while they're nearby knocks points off. Gifts are capped at two per week per person (a bonus 10 points lands the following Sunday if you use both), plus you can always add a birthday gift on top of that limit — birthdays multiply whatever the gift is worth by eight. Skip a day without talking to someone and their friendship quietly decays, though it stops decaying once a meter is full.

Once you're engaged the freeze lifts for good, and marriage candidates you haven't proposed to go back to behaving normally — so giving out bouquets to several people at once costs you nothing as long as you haven't proposed yet.

The bouquet: dating, not yet engaged

The morning after you cross 8 hearts with an eligible bachelor or bachelorette, Pierre mails you about it, and the bouquet appears in his shop. Giving it changes their status to "boyfriend" or "girlfriend" on the Social tab and unfreezes their heart meter so it can climb toward 10. You can hand a bouquet to more than one candidate with no friendship penalty for it — the only cost shows up later, after you're actually married, when gifting an ex-flirtation can make your spouse jealous. Changed your mind about someone? A Wilted Bouquet (crafted from a bouquet and a piece of coal) breaks things off and drops their hearts to 5 on the spot.

The Mermaid's Pendant: what has to be true first

Hitting 10 hearts with someone you've already given a bouquet triggers a letter from Mayor Lewis about the pendant — but the person who actually sells it, the Old Mariner, won't part with it until several things line up at once:

• You've upgraded the farmhouse at least once, so there's a room for a spouse to live in.
• You've reached the beach's Tide Pool area, which means repairing the bridge (300 wood) or buying Robin's second community upgrade.
• You're at 10 hearts with an eligible candidate and aren't already married.

The Old Mariner only shows up on rainy days at the tide pools — in winter he needs a Rain Totem to appear at all — and he sells the pendant for 5,000g. Give it to your partner and a Mermaid's Pendant icon shows up on the calendar for the wedding day.

The ceremony, and what changes after

The wedding happens three days after you propose (pushed back a day if a town event or Green Rain falls on it), and you and your spouse turn up on the farmhouse porch at 6am when it's done. From here your spouse's heart cap rises to 14, though decay never fully stops for a spouse the way it can for a regular villager.

A happy, well-tended spouse pitches in around the farm — watering crops, feeding animals, mending fences, cooking meals — and moves into a purpose-built room next to your bedroom, plus a small outdoor spot where they read, tinker, or otherwise do their own thing during the day. Neglect them (an untidy house, monsters loose indoors, no bed to sleep in) and they'll say so, and refuse to help until it's fixed.

Once the second farmhouse upgrade adds a nursery, your spouse can start asking — after you go to bed some nights — whether you want to have or adopt a child. Opposite-gender couples have kids biologically; same-gender couples adopt. Either way you're capped at two, one of each gender, and they stop aging once they reach the toddler stage.

Divorce, if someone changes their mind

A book inside the Mayor's Manor lets you file for divorce for 50,000g, with a same-day window to cancel before Lewis's house closes. Go through with it and your ex moves out along with their room, your friendship with them resets to 0 hearts, and they'll treat you coldly afterward — no more gifts accepted, no more normal festival dialogue. Any kids from the marriage stay with you. If you regret it later, the Witch's Hut has a shrine that wipes an ex's memory of the whole relationship for 30,000g, opening the door to dating and remarrying them from scratch.

Marrying another player

Yes — in multiplayer, you can propose to another player instead of an NPC. It works through a craftable Wedding Ring rather than a pendant: the recipe costs 500g from the Traveling Cart, and the ring itself takes 5 Iridium Bars and a Prismatic Shard to build. Marrying another player gets you the same Stardrop reward NPC marriage does, and a shared home can have children the same way an NPC marriage can, once it has the nursery upgrade. The one hard rule is that two players can't both marry the same NPC — beyond that, courting another player runs on the same clock as everything above.

If none of this sounds appealing yet, there's no rush — the friendship system underneath marriage is the same one you're already using for gifts and quests, so working on hearts through fishing rewards or anything else you're doing on the farm counts toward it either way.