Marriage in Stardew Valley: Courtship, Proposal, and Divorce Explained

Tending crops and livestock day after day pays the bills, but Pelican Town offers something more permanent than another season of parsnips. Stardew Valley lets your farmer settle down with one of twelve villagers, gain a built-in farmhand, and even start a small family. The catch is that nobody walks up the dirt path and asks you out. You have to earn it.

Who You Can Marry

The base game ships with twelve marriage candidates: six bachelors and six bachelorettes. Each has their own quirks, schedule, and gift preferences, so picking a partner is less about who looks best on the title screen and more about who you actually enjoy spending in-game days around.

Bachelors: Alex, Elliott, Harvey, Sam, Sebastian, Shane.

Bachelorettes: Abigail, Emily, Haley, Leah, Maru, Penny.

A few villagers come across as cold, smug, or downright grumpy in early conversations. Stick with them. Most of these characters open up significantly past four or five hearts, and the rough edges often turn out to be the most interesting part of their backstory.

The Two Hard Requirements

Before the game lets you put a ring on anyone, two conditions need to line up:

• You and the villager are officially dating.
• Their friendship meter is at the full 10 hearts.

Everything in this guide is just the path to those two checkboxes.

Building the Relationship

Every marriage candidate caps at 8 hearts until you start dating. After that, two more hearts unlock, and then another two open up once you are married. The route to higher hearts is consistent: talk to them daily and give thoughtful gifts.

Gifts are the heavy lifter. Each villager has loved, liked, neutral, disliked, and hated items. There are also universally loved gifts like Prismatic Shards, Rabbit's Foot, and most artisan goods, which work on almost everyone (a handful of villagers still reject specific items from the universal list, so checking the wiki before handing over a Pearl is sensible).

A few tips that save real time:

• You can give up to two gifts per week plus one on their birthday.
• Birthday gifts count for eight times the normal friendship value. Loved gifts on birthdays are basically a whole heart in a single interaction.
• Just talking to them every day adds a small boost and prevents friendship decay.

Once you hit 8 hearts, head to Pierre's General Store and buy a Bouquet for 500g. Hand it over to your candidate, and you are officially a couple.

Quick warning: handing bouquets to several villagers at once is technically allowed, but if two of them spot each other while dating you, expect friendship penalties and a very awkward cutscene.

Proposing With the Mermaid Pendant

Keep dating, keep gifting, and eventually you will hit 10 hearts. Now the real proposal item becomes available: the Mermaid's Pendant.

To buy it:

1. Wait for a rainy day.
2. Head to the beach south of town.
3. Cross the broken bridge on the right (repair it for 300 wood if you have not already).
4. Look for the Old Mariner, a shadowy figure who only shows up in the rain.
5. Pay 5,000g for the pendant.

One extra requirement people forget: your farmhouse needs at least the first kitchen upgrade from Robin before the marriage can go through. No upgrade, no wedding, no matter how many hearts you have.

Give the pendant to your partner. If they accept, the wedding takes place three in-game days later. If that day collides with a festival, the ceremony bumps to the day after. Everyone in Pelican Town shows up, which is a nice touch considering half of them complain you never visit.

Life After the Wedding

Your new spouse moves into the farmhouse and gets their own customized room attached to it. From there, they may pitch in around the farm: watering crops, feeding animals, repairing fences, or filling the pet bowl. How helpful they actually are depends on their personality. Shane will work; Haley may prefer to stand in the kitchen and judge your decor.

Expect occasional gifts from your spouse, ranging from cooked meals to genuinely useful resources like iridium ore or rare seeds. Time in the valley does not age anyone, so neither of you grows old.

You can also try for children. After the first kid, you can adopt or have a second one. Worth noting that kids stay as toddlers permanently, which sidesteps the awkward question of what a Stardew teenager would even look like.

How to Get a Divorce

If married life turns out to be less idyllic than the cutscenes suggested, divorce has been an option since version 1.1.

The process:

1. Visit Mayor Lewis's Manor.
2. Interact with the book on the desk to file paperwork.
3. Pay 50,000g.

You have a single in-game day to change your mind and cancel the filing. If you do nothing, the next morning your spouse moves out, their room is gone, and their friendship drops to zero hearts with an "Ex" tag attached to their portrait.

The ex will refuse all gifts, which makes rebuilding the relationship far harder than the first time around. There is a way to wipe their memory of the divorce by visiting the Witch's Hut and paying for a special potion, but that is a separate quest line and not something to count on as a casual undo button.

Marriage in Stardew Valley is a long project, not a quick objective, but it changes how the farm feels day to day. Pick someone whose schedule and gift list you actually want to memorize, and the months of bouquets, birthday gifts, and rainy beach trips become part of the routine rather than a grind.