Is he going to marry you? Or not?
He’s the right man, it’s the right time and you’re the right girl. But if he still hasn’t asked you to marry him, is it your move?
Got marriage?
When Clarice turned 30, she realised something that most of us would only laugh off: she still wasn’t married.
She’d lived as a party animal all her life with her girlfriends, a sisterhood formed when they were still in college. Late nights, shopping sprees and group holidays was how they used to spend their weekends together. But over the years, their girls’ nights out lost one member after another. First there were five, then there were four, then there were three… until Clarice found herself spending her thirtieth birthday with her boyfriend and his buddies instead of hers. All her friends had husbands, and some had toddlers on their laps. They all had other priorities.
“When I saw our table piled high with jugs of beer instead of frozen margaritas, I knew something was not quite right with the picture,” says Clarice, a marketing executive. “All my friends were married, and all to boyfriends whom they’d only known for two or three years. And here was Keith, my boyfriend of nearly ten years, who had never even proposed.”
While many women would have been content to wait a little longer for the Magic Moment, Clarice wasn’t. By her next birthday, she had married Keith, had moved in with him, and was signing the documents for their first house.
Loading ...But how did she do it?
“Oh, I threatened him,” smiles Clarice. “I told him that he either loves me enough to commit, or he doesn’t — there were no two ways about it.”
Keith was a bit taken aback, of course. He still wasn’t a millionaire (he used to joke about getting rich before getting married), he couldn’t cook, and he was a sloth. Living with his parents, he hadn’t even learned to do his own laundry yet.
“But I loved her enough to want to change all that,” says 35-year-old Keith, a junior architect. “When I woke up the morning after Clarice’s birthday bash, I had a beautiful hangover. That was when she attacked,” he grins.
Clarice recalls that Keith was all stutter and groan that day, as she harangued him about settling down and put him on guilt trips that were amplified by his headache.
“I just felt that he needed a little nudge in the right direction, you know?” says Clarice. “I knew he loved me enough to marry me. He just hadn’t thought of asking.”
Digging for gold
The National Marriage Project, a research centre at Rutgers University in New Jersey, U.S., calls it the Readiness Gap: women and men may start out equally concerned about their careers and financial well-being, but women will shift their focus towards marriage and families sooner. That’s why men have traditionally been older than the women they date and marry. Also, the closer their age gap, the longer it takes for the man to commit.
But whereas Clarice was able to turn her boyfriend into her husband overnight, the going was much tougher for Ada. She tried the direct approach, too. But it backfired.
“He said he loved me so much that he would rather let me go than to marry a loser like him,” she says. “It was bullshit, of course — I knew he loved me. But what he said also told me that he wasn’t ready yet.
So Ada decided to warm him up to the idea. She dropped hints at every opportunity. When people asked them when they were going to tie the knot, she’d pipe up and say, “As soon as David asks me,” (much to his disconcertion). She would talk about her dream wedding with him and openly discuss who they should and should not invite. She also started looking into jewellery shop windows — something she had never done before — forcing him to participate in choosing their wedding rings.
“Pretty soon, David was talking about it, too,” smiles Ada. “He might not have been as excited as me about it, but at least he wasn’t as scared of it anymore.
David laughs: “She’s a sneaky one, she is. But it’s true. After talking about it so much, and watching so many movies (apparently, Ada rented all the soppy marriage stories she could get her hands on, including all-time favourite Four Weddings and a Funeral), I was more receptive to the idea of taking the vows.”
But yet he didn’t ask her — he didn’t know how to!
“I wanted it to be special. Not the clichéd, down-on-bended-knee proposal you see in cheesy commercials. It had to be unexpected. I wanted her to remember the moment forever.”
David trawled the Internet, looking for creative ways to propose, but none appealed to him. Weeks went by. Meanwhile, Ada was getting impatient.
“A year later and he still hadn’t proposed,” Ada remembers. “I was very frustrated. I loved him, but I was starting to think that I’d have to leave him if he didn’t hurry up.”
Luckily for David, Ada was struck by inspiration when she heard that Britney Spears did the proposing with Kevin Federline and got away with it.
“I did my own research and found out that 97-percent of men think its okay for women to propose,” says Ada. “Also, it was 2004, and women are supposed to be allowed to change the rules and do the proposing in leap years.”
All of this was heartening to Ada, and although her mother disagreed, she bought their engagement rings herself. And in July of that year, she popped the Big Question to David.
“I got down on my knee, and I proposed to him,” smirks Ada. “Although we were alone, I’d never felt so embarrassed in my life. The only thing that kept me going was the knowledge that he was probably twice as ashamed as I was.”
When enough is enough
Sadly, some men cannot be pushed. Lina, a financial executive, had been dating Alan for nearly eight years. The question of marriage, she says, came up once or twice but never led anywhere — they were trapped in a beautiful, loyal relationship that just could not seem to take its final steps on its own.
“I was getting older,” says Lina. “I was going on thirty-one; he was the same age as me. But we all know that women feel the years more keenly than men, and I was scared.”
Her fears were understandable. Lina’s older sister had dated the same man for fifteen years before he dumped her for younger woman (she insists on calling her a girl). When she looked in the mirror, she saw a thirty-nine year-old has-been with bad skin and a flagging social life. Lina didn’t want it to end that way with Brian. So she sat down to have The Talk with him, to tell her how she felt. He took it badly.
“He said that he did want to marry me, but only when he was ready,” Lina recalls. “He wanted to buy a house and finish the installments on his car first — but that would take three years!”
Even so, Lina says that she would have agreed had Brian not made a crucial mistake: he got defensive, and accused her of trying to ‘trap’ him into marriage. That made her realise that it had nothing to do with the car or house or bank account. It was him.
“He was just making excuses,” Lina says. “It hurt, because you expect your partner — especially one that has been with you for so long — to love you enough to do anything with you. But Brian didn’t.”
And so Lina ended the relationship. Brian was crushed, but left in a huff, his ego too bruised for apologies. Although he came back with a ring some weeks later, begging to be given the chance to propose and to marry her, Lina stuck with her decision.
“Isn’t it scary how someone could change his mind so easily over something as serious as marriage?” says Lina. “I almost accepted. But then I imagined him making the same split-second decision to have an affair or to leave me, and that settled it.”
Lina is now thirty-two and back on the dating scene. But she’s taking things very differently now. She knows what she’s looking for, and she’s not wasting time with men who are not looking for the same thing.
“My sister waited too long,” says Lina. “Us women cannot do that, you know. We have a shelf life — if you pass it by, you end up in the personals column of The Sunday Mail.”
Calling the shots
Women certainly don’t have to and shouldn’t wait for the man to propose if they want to marry. As Ada said, 97-percent of men these days think its okay for a woman to do the proposing. It may be bold, but being bold is a real turn-on for guys. It does beg the question, though: why aren’t more women doing it?
Loading ...Rejection is highest on the list for Debra, a 27-year-old web designer. “If I spot even a hint of doubt in his reply, whether Yes or not, I would be mortified,” she says. “It would be devastating to the relationship. Perhaps that’s why most women still prefer the status quo… even with the terrible risk of being dumped after your Use By Date.”
Ada agrees with Debra in spite of having taken that risk: “To be turned down that way is something that only a guy should ever have to go through, not a woman,” she says. “I know I would never have recovered if David said No. I only asked was because I knew he’d say Yes”
Will you boyfriend say yes to you? Well, I suppose there’s only one way to find out.
The marrying kind of man
According to research by the National Marriage Project, the typical man of marriage:
- Grew up with both biological parents, and whose father’s played an active role in his life (63%).
- Made the decision to wed freely (not under pressure) and for his own reasons (81%). Only 15-percent of married men polled agree with the statement “You got married sooner than you wanted because your wife was pushing for it.” However, only 35-percent agree that “you got married because you were ready to have children.”
- Specifically looked for someone who will be a good mother (75%).
- Is more religiously active than the unmarried men. Nearly half say that they go to religious services several times a month, versus less than a quarter of the unmarrieds.
- Is happier being married than being single (94%). Married men agree that marriage improved their lives in two areas: sex and money. 73- percent say that their sex life got better after getting married, and 68-percent say that marriage has helped them become more financially stable.
- Does not see children as the central purpose of marriage (70%) — about the only common opinion he shares with unmarried men. However, 70-percent of married men hold more child-centric lives, and they are also more likely to want more than one child.
- Ironically, he also disapproves of unwed childbearing. Only 47-percent of married men agree that “It’s okay for a woman to have a child on her own if she can afford it,” compared to 63-percent of unmarried men. Married men are also more likely to say that “People should marry and not just live together if they have children” (64% v. 53%).
