Amanda Marcotte is talking about fake marriage proposals. At Double X, she writes:
The traditional marriage proposal was male domination dressed as chivalry distilled: He controls when and how, and her only power is to say no. And even that power is undermined by the immense social pressure to say yes—or else be taken for an ingrate. But nowadays, women have too much at stake to leave marriage proposals to chance, and so marriage is actually a mutually agreed-upon decision. Yet the patriarchal proposal is still seen as “romantic,” and women still want it. So the compromise reached by our culture has been to create a charade proposal, complete with feigned surprise from the bride-to-be.
Having described the stakes, she goes on to describe what a lot of people must be imagining as the contradiction:
From a certain perspective, pretending to be surprised when he whips out the ring after you guys sat down and mapped out the proposal seems like the silliest thing in the world.
Well, I don’t know. I’m not sure Amanda is giving people as much credit as she might. She does point out that this could be a coping technique for women to get to have a voice in marriage negotiations, as well as getting some of the traditional “romance.”
But I wonder. I wonder because the original Wall Street Journal article describes a situation for fake wedding proposals that’s very familiar to me: “Ms. Miller says some women script the proposal first, telling their boyfriend something like: “I’d always wanted to be proposed to on Christmas morning in front of family.”
My husband and I first got engaged during our senior year of college. I asked him. We bought little jade rings for each other, and decided not to tell people. We were planning to wait a long time to get married, so it was just a gesture that meant we wanted to someday. Then, after college, I started feeling like I’d settled down too soon, and I wanted more flexibility–so we put away the jade rings and went back to “not engaged.”
A couple years later, we decided we wanted to get married after I finished graduate school (he’d finished the year before) and that we wanted to buck my family’s traditions by actually having a wedding. My family is a bunch of inveterate elopers, and I think that’s fine–there’s no problem with standing in front of the justice of the peace and saying your bit. A lot of my relatives lived with their partners for years, unmarried, before tying the knot for insurance reasons, and that’s fine, too.
But I wanted a wedding. I’d say “we” did, but Mike was pretty chill either way. I wanted a wedding because I’ve always had a thing about wanting to have my loved ones in one place, however briefly. I didn’t get married for the dress (I wore a bridesmaid gown in purple) or the flowers (we went to a farmer’s market and made our own bouquets)–I got married for the gathering. Some people came to town between one and two weeks before the wedding, and stayed for a couple of days afterward. My friends are scattered all over the globe, with the woman who was my maid of honor living in Australia for the past 8 years. My family is also scattered, and doesn’t do things like reunions. So it was kind of amazing to have everyone in one place.
Anyway. Mike and I decided we wanted to get married, and when we wanted to get married, and what we wanted to do for our marriage. We told some of our friends we were planning to get married, for various reasons. The only people we didn’t tell were my parents, Mike’s mom, and Mike’s sister. Because we decided to stage a proposal for them.
On Christmas Day, in front of my parents and Mike’s mom and sister, Mike proposed to me, and I pretended to be surprised. About ten minutes later, I’m pretty sure all the details about how we’d already made this decision were on the table, at which point my father said, “I figured; it’s stupid to propose without knowing the answer in advance,” which I love him for.
We had a fake proposal, but it wasn’t for “romance” and “spontaneity”–it was a stage play put on for our families. When I first saw the “fake proposal” thing, I wondered how many other people were doing that… and when I saw that one of the descriptions of how the proposal went was basically a one sentence description of how ours went, that’s when I figured probably a lot of people were doing that kind of thing.
As a couple of feminists, we didn’t want to get engaged based on surprise, which can backfire. We wanted to have time to ourselves to work out what we wanted. Our decision to get married was slow and organic. Not only did we both have equal voices in how the decision was reached, but there was no external pressure on either of us as there often is in surprise proposals that are done in front of an audience–it’s humiliating for both of you if the answer is no when the man is asking in front of your family, or in front of a restaurant full of people, or on national tv. That kind of pressure is awkward, and seems like it could be problematic in some cases.
But with a yes in hand, and equal contributions from both partners, Mike and I felt free to spring a surprise marriage proposal on our relatives.
That’s not to say we were totally feminist about the matter. Why didn’t we interrogate the tradition of having the man propose to the woman by reversing that in our fake proposal? I could have asked him as easily as he asked me. But we didn’t do that, and we didn’t talk about doing that. There was definitely a bowing to social norms in what we did, and many of them are shaped by sexism, or are directly sexist. But the whole thing didn’t take quite the shape that Amanda Marcotte suggests.
I have to say that I’m not sure I “get” your story. It seems like you exactly were re-enacting the standard “romantic” and “spontaneous” proposal for your families, even if you then later revealed to them that actually you’d planned it beforehand. I guess I don’t understand from the way you’ve told this story *why* you did it? You say that you didn’t just do it to experience a traditional proposal, and you make it clear that your parents didn’t expect a traditional proposal so…I dunno, I’m lost. If it was just because you thought it would be fun to surprise your parents, doing it by enacting a standard proposal seems to fit into both the patriarchal model and the model Amanda Marcotte is depicting quite well. Is there something I’m missing?
Well, because it’s a ritual. It’s like every other ceremony: you have witnesses and a sort of script, and you go through these planned actions to formalize your partnership. You’re promulgating your intent to marry, and announcing the upcoming wedding to everyone in the wedding party.
I think criticisms of the shape of our proposal ritual–the man asks, the bended knee, the ring, the feigned shock–are all right on. I don’t know why there’s any problem with planning a little ceremony around it, any more than there’s a problem with planning a wedding ceremony. A lot of scripting and artifice goes into those, too, even the feminist hipster kind.
Amanda seems to be suggesting with the second quote I put up there that the scripted proposals are for the enjoyment of the woman so she can feel “romanced.” I’m suggesting they’re performative, and that romance may not be central.
Piny–as usual, I agree with you.
Well, I’m not sure most women are as selfless as you. Nor should they be! We’re so used to seeing female pleasure shamed, I suspect you thought I was shaming women. No way! My point was I admire the creativity that goes in to having your feminist cake and eating your romantic diamond, too.
I wouldn’t use your selfless model as the norm. You didn’t do traditional rings, so I’m thinking it was different than the more traditional mimicking ones.
My fiance and I bought simple sterling silver rings and then proposed to each other on the beach after a weekend camping trip. We spent the rest of the day celebrating our engagement at parks and restaurants in Seattle. It was way more romantic than having him do all the asking, and I loved knowing that our decision was completely mutual.
We decided to get married, told our parents, got the ring from my mom (yes, I wear a diamond, it’s inherited), got the ring re-sized, and then went away for the weekend on a special trip to get engaged. I didn’t know where we were going – my husband planned it all out as a surprise, but I sure as heck knew what we were going away for. I like stars so he took me to the largest star in the US here and proposed in the little park under it, which was super nice, but far from necessary. Most of my friends have had a similar experienced, knowing they were getting engaged and making a special trip for that purpose.
I vaguely recall some old bit of correspondence – between Adams and Jefferson, maybe? – discussing marriages among the next generation, and how the proposal is pretty much always results from the woman’s initiative, even if the man actually mouths the words. If anyone’s acquainted with such a quote, please let me know.
My girlfriend proposed to me. (I’m male.) I immediately and lightly dismissed the idea out of hand. I have no doubt that she was sincere, and sincerely hurt by my reaction. But the truth is that I was terrified of commitment, and a long, thoughtful and drawn-out declining of her proposal would have merely prolonged the agony.
I did at long last propose to (and marry) my girlfriend, but not before she had made her continued interest ABUNDANTLY clear. Yes, I had control, but I don’t find anything especially gendered in that dynamic. If anything, I played the role traditionally assigned to the woman.
I proposed long before I began reading feminist stuff, so it was fairly traditional. But I really had no idea about whether or not my hoped-for fiance would say yes–we hadn’t previously agreed to get married–so it was utterly terrifying to ask. I don’t know if we would have discussed it if we had waited, but I was madly in love* and wanted to get married so I asked. Also, I’m naturally in the “I like surprising people with presents” category.
That said, if I had talked about it in advance, then I’m not sure I would have seen the benefit of having a separate proposal.
*And still am, FWIW.
This describes us. We negotiated the real decision to get engaged slowly over time and together. But the proposal itself we left to him to execute in a fairly traditional manner: bended knee, diamond, pretty place outdoors in nature. For me, it was a lot like letting someone throw you a “surprise” party for your birthday; a little silly, but nice.
It was a gesture, a chance for him to show that he values me and us, using a traditional idiom. The important thing is, we never felt like we HAD to use this traditional idiom. We could have skipped the whole thing, done something else, and never thought twice about it. E.g., I actually wanted the diamond. (What can I say, I like sparkly things! Engagement seemed like my best excuse to date.) But if we’d skipped the traditional proposal, I would have just found some other excuse to buy myself a diamond.
The whole wedding process included a lot of this. Using traditional idioms but bending them to suit us, and simply abandoning them when they couldn’t be salvaged.
The way I see it, marriage is a civil institution. It is about two people, but it is also about family, community and society. Following traditions is a way to have connection at the level of society. You are doing this thing that is the same as many others have done for many years. You are part of this group thing.
As is always the case with social roles, a certain amount of belonging is good, while slavish adherence to what society wants from you is bad. We are all trying to negotiate the balance that is right for us.
I recall now that I did have some reservations about the asymmetry of it. Pretty much immediately after he proposed, I bought him a ring to wear as well. He was pretty hesitant at first, I remember telling him “if I am wearing a ring, it is only fair that you wear one too.” Now, my ring was $1100 of diamond and gold, his was $30 of sterling silver. But that really says more about our respective tastes than anything else.
My husband and I started discussing the possibility of getting married over 2 years before we actually got engaged. We jokingly said we were “engaged to be engaged” and used that time to discuss our attitudes towards marriage and family and to start living together. I will say I told him that I kind of liked the element of surprise and it felt weird to me to micromanage what was supposed to be said, we’d talked about it enough that I knew what was in his heart (and he knew my heart). So I told him he to surprise me.
So anyway he proposed to me on my birthday while I was hanging upside down on a tree branch. (I nearly fell out of said tree and my first response was “umm can you help me get down?! ” and then I told him yes) I wouldn’t have it any other way. I am so glad we took the time to discuss getting married and try to understand the ramifications.
I completely agree that a wedding is a social idiom and you bend traditions to fit your own needs. For example I hate the notion of the father walking his daughter down the aisle because it felt like it passing off property. When I realized how much it meant to my father to get to do that, I compromised by having him and my mom walk me down (symbolizing how they’ve both raised me) and halfway they stop and I walked myself down the rest of the aisle to meet the groom. Both sides of the family stood under the chuppah to symbolize two families coming together to create a new family.
Ha! We did something similar: Bride and groom were each escorted down the isle by both their respective parents.
I give this arrangement an A for symbolism and family togetherness, but a C- for photos. Having someone on each arm, I looked like a well-dressed fugitive that had finally been taken into custody. (I had more hair back then.)