Did you get/make a proposal before getting married?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Spin-off of this thread.

I really don’t remember who first said the word “married” or how. There was certainly no champagne and romance, no down-on-one-knee in a public square. We just sort of went from dating to “of course we’re getting married in July”.

Not that we didn’t talk about it; we talked about it endlessly. We determined we wanted a spiritual, non-legal wedding first and a “white floofy dress” thing later. (As it turned out, that’s not what happened, but that’s another story.) But the one thing left out of our conversations was an actual, you know, proposal.

My mother and father were the same way. No proposal at all.

How 'bout y’all? Did you get/make a proposal? If not, how did you go from dating to married? Do you feel like you missed out on something important?

2

We weren’t particularly bothered about getting married, until we started making plans to come to the UK, at which point it became clear that it would be an awful lot easier if I was married to a british citizen.

My husband took me to a posh hotel on a Friday night and proposed as we lay on the bed. He then excitedly took a bottle of bubbly out of his bag and cheerfully advise that ‘it was the dearest champagne they had at the supermarket!’. Bless.

There was no ring involved as I didn’t want one. We rang our parents who were very happy, sent a text out to our friends, and that was about it.

3

I got one. Sorta.

He’d planned to propose the weekend before but chickened out and decided to wait.

The next weekend we were sitting on the couch and he just blurted it.

I asked him if he was really sure he wanted to be asking me that, since it seemed to just fall out of his mouth. He said yes, so I did too. And that was that. :slight_smile:

4

Ours was very romantic. Top of a beautiful mountain, before the the world - I proposed. It was funny in a way, because she was quite grumpy by the time we got to the top of the mountain, and she was totally caught off guard as I got down on one knee and pulled a box out of my backpack. I was 2 feet away from a cliff face. She was positioned with the mountain against the background. She smiled, and cried, then said yes! Oddly, I didn’t look over my shoulder before proposing and there was a group of people with a Park Ranger on a guided walk to the summit of that mountain, and after my then fiance and I stood up and hugged, we heard a cheering crowd from about 300 yards away. We were on top of this in Sedona Arizona. :smiley:

5

We were at the ranch and had been horseback all day and then branding cattle. It had been sunny, hot and dusty so we were both quite a sight. Then entire time I’d been scared to death that somehow I was going to lose the ring stashed in my pocket, that or I’d fall or get kicked and it would break.

Finally, near then end of the day things kinda slowed down a bit and I suggested we walk down by some cliffs and look at some petroglyphs. She was in a sleeveless, plaid shirt, jeans and had a smudge of dirt on her sunburned nose. We took a seat on a big ol’ rock, then I hopped off, dropped to a knee and asked her if she’d share the rest of her life with me.

Most every time we are back there, we always stop by and see the rock. This last trip, we took our daughter along and showed her too. To anyone else, it would just appear to be a big ol’ rock, but it’s a pretty special spot to us.

6

I married twice.

The first time, I remember saying to her, “I want to marry you.” She later claimed she was the one who suggested it, and I don’t recall her actually saying yes or no, though I thought at the time she had.

The second time, I was more prepared. She came over to my house and I started talking about how I’d been thinking a lot about us and our relationship, then said, quite clearly, “Will you marry me?” She loved it so much she almost forgot to say yes.

7

Husband and I were sitting around one night watching TV - kinda late. On the weekends we sometimes stay up later and talk to each other ( :eek: - I know!) and he says to me right out of the blue, “You know that marriage thing we talked about? Set it up.” It was then that I realized I was marrying Mr. Romance…

:wink:

8

Yep, I was given a formal, down-on-one-knee proposal.

Hal was going on vacation for 10 days with his family so he wanted to propose to me before leaving. However, his aunt died two days before they were supposed to be leaving so there wound up being a ton of family things to do plus the wake and funeral (which he wound up missing because they were going to be on the plane already). Anyway, this threw a wrench in his plans of a big romantic proposal.

Being Hal, he decided to be cruel and romantic at the same time. When I got home from work the day of the wake, he said that he didn’t think it would be appropriate for me to go to the wake because I wasn’t family. Of course I became extremely upset because I had taken a 1/2 day off of work, we lived together, etc. I felt that I was definitely close enough to his family to be attending the wake. He waited until I got all riled up and started crying before he got down on one knee, pulled out the ring, and said “but maybe if you were going to be family, it would be ok”. :smiley: The Big Meanie!

9

I proposed to my wife before we got married.
If you call saying to her, “Hey, lady if you’re not doing anything, do you want to get married?” when we met at the altar proposing, that is.

10

My husband and I started talking about it when I hit whatever age it was that meant I couldn’t be a student dependent on my parent’s insurance. It was definitely my idea–he would have been happy living together forever, but he basically didn’t have any objections, either. He never really said yes, he just said “I want a stainless steel wedding band.” I found us some, and we got married at the courthouse a week later. I called my mom and friends the next day. He told his mom the next time we saw her, a month or so later.

See why we wanted stainless steel wedding bands? That’s what we are: functional, sturdy, elegant without being at all showy. It was the neatest suggestion ever.

11

We “talked about it” for several weeks before making a decision. It was all rather non-romantic and businesslike, but I came to love Razorette deeply in those weeks. About that time, I’d bought Cat Stevens’ “Tea for the Tillerman” album and the song “Hard-Headed Woman” described my wife perfectly. She didn’t care that I was an egotistical minor celebrity with more money than brains, and she was the first girl I’d ever dated who didn’t want to drive my Mustang, refused to let me buy her clothes and insisted that I meet with a financial advisor (they were all the rage in the early 70s) before becoming emotionally involved with me. I knew she wasn’t going to be easy to live with, but I also sensed that she was in it for the long haul. Pragmatically, it was the best decision I’ve ever made (though I’m sure she’s had a regret or two). I told her I had no idea what the future held, I’d either be a major player in American broadcasting or shoe salesman with unrealized dreams, but I’d always love her and she was welcome to come along for the ride. She decided “the ride” was better than living at home with her parents, and the next thing I knew we were announcing our engagement.

For the record, I’ve never become a major player in anything, but I’ve never sold shoes, either. And I still have my hard-headed woman.

12

OK, I’ll tell the whole story that I hinted at in the other thread.

We’d been together about 9 months, and I think we pretty much both had it in our minds that we weren’t about to let each other go. He’d started thinking about proposing, but then apparently I went through a phase where I was grumpy a lot, and he was afraid of getting a grouchy “No!” (Mind, he’d removed himself from the dating pool at age 32 after too many dating disappointments, and then I showed up. Go figure.) At the time we were living about 40 miles apart, and I was on his route to work, so he would often stop by on his way there and/or back.

Then his car broke down, and he didn’t get to work, or to come and see me, for about four days, while his car was being fixed. We talked on the phone, of course, but apparently he also spent a lot of time just sitting around his house by himself, getting flashbacks to when he’d been really alone. And that steeled his nerves or something.

So on his first night back to work, of course he stopped in to see me, and we had a joyous reunion . . . ahem, in bed . . . and in the afterglow, or rather the middleglow, we were talking about what a pain that we lived so far apart, and then he got into the “it would be so much easier if we just lived together . . . so we could get married or something . . .” And I said something like, “Yeah, we could do that.”

Pretty blah. But at least he was on his knees . . . sort of. :wink:

We had to wait until after I got out of school, so I wouldn’t lose any financial aid because of his income. So we moved in together and started making tentative wedding plans. I graduated and got my first Real Job. I’d been there all of one week when I started wondering why we were waiting (probably another year yet) to get married just for the sake of a big party.

So when he got home from work that day, I said, “We should get married.” He looked at me funny and said, “Well, yeah, I thought that was the plan.” I said, “No, I mean why are we waiting? I’m out of school and have a job, we’re living together . . . Let’s just do it, as soon as we can throw something together.”

That was fine with him, and 6 weeks later we got married at the courthouse, with our closest family and friends as guests. It would have been 2 weeks sooner, but someone had a previous commitment and couldn’t make it.

So:
Met spring 1988
Couple summer 1988
Engaged spring 1989
Married summer 1990

Not bad considering one of us never pictured herself finding a spouse, and the other having tried and removed himself from consideration.

13

This, almost exactly (As usual, WhyNot, you’ve done it again!). We always just sort of knew we were going to get married at some point from the time we began dating seriously. And while in the middle of a vacation along the central coast of California, we just happened to run across a pretty little wedding chapel that was perfectly suited for the type of wedding we both wanted. And thus it was mutually decided that we’d found where we would be wed, and the planning began in earnest from that moment. No proposal of any kind. It was just a done deal.

Not really. I mean, it’s fun to hear other people’s stories of romantic proposals and such – I really do enjoy that. It’s just not how it was with us, nor who we are/were.

14

No real proposal here, either. Mr. Q and I had been living together for a couple of years. I worked up a big long “aren’t we ever going to get married?” speech, but only got a bit into before he said, “Well, I think we should get married.” And that was that. I confess that I was a little disappointed that I wasn’t able to get through all of my speech, but I was happy with the outcome!

I’m not a fan of traditional gender roles, so I think I would have been uncomfortable with the whole down on one knee thing. Also, I would have really hated to have been surprised with a ring. Previous to our engagement, I’d had a couple of nightmares about being presented with a horrible ring and having to pretend to like it for the rest of my life.

15

My husband proposed three times. Not that I kept saying no, it was just that the first time was on the phone (I was in the US, he was in the UK and even though I was going to be there in a few weeks, he couldn’t wait). The second time was in a romantic spot in the UK, but it was after hours and we got buzzed by the cops. The third time was when my mom gave him her old engagement ring to give to me.

He’s a romantic fellow. :slight_smile:

16

I kind of got a proposal.

It was just before Valentine’s Day, and I noticed that someone had been messing with a little box that I kept on my dresser, since some stuff that was supposed to be in it was lying next to it. I opened it up and found a ring box. My boyfriend was standing right there, so I asked what was up. He indicated that I could open it, and that it was my Valentine’s present. I was a very pretty amethyst ring that I just loved.

Later on that evening we were driving up to Pittsburgh to watch WVU play basketball against Duquesne, and I was admiring my new ring. He said, “Well, maybe if we win tonight you can consider it an engagement ring.” The Mountaineers won that evening, and we were married about six months later.

What a romantic. I do feel like I missed out on something, but nothing I can’t live without.

17

So did you ever thank the Mountaineers? I won the money for our wedding invitations on a Browns game.

18

The very wonderful Tripler knelt in the surf on Isle of Palms and proposed to me, ring and all. I would have missed a proposal if I hadn’t gotten it and we’d just started planning.

19

I think we’ve thanked them enough by way of the amount we’ve spent on football and basketball tickets over the past 25 years. Not to mention the tuition payments from me, my husband, my daughter (a freshman this year), and my son (a freshman next year).

20

I have a feeling that my proposal story will be a lot like yours, WhyNot. As it is, I can’t remember exactly when we decided to move in together, or when that turned into the decision to buy a home together… both of those seemed to be a natural progression over a series of discussions, rather than one of us popping the question (so to speak).

To be honest, I think we’re halfway there already. We’ve already decided that we’re going to get married at some point, but haven’t quite figured out when “at some point” is.

I’m sure that when I look back on it afterwards, the closest I’ll be able to find to a proposal is his off-hand comment last week of “I’m just not sure I want to be planning a wedding AND getting the roof replaced in the same summer, if you’re okay with that.”

Yeah, we’re romantic like that. :slight_smile: