We’d been talking about marriage on and off since we started dating- we were dating to see if we were marriage-compatible- but I’d asked him not to propose until we’d been together two years. We were in my bedroom at college, talking, and he mentioned the promise. I said that he didn’t have to wait if he didn’t want to.
He dropped to his knees right then and proposed.
We kissed, went back to his residence, ran into a couple of friends, and went out for cheap Ethiopian food together to celebrate. It was oddly romantic. I bought the ring the next summer at an antique shop. He has no taste in jewellery, and he knows it.
I moved in to his place less than 2 weeks ago, but it seems like we’ve been talking about it forever – we were just waiting for me to finish grad school and get closer to the end of my lease (which isn’t up for another two months). We’ve been together for 1.5 years, and I think the “living together” talk started around the 10-month mark, but I have no idea how it came up or who mentioned it first. As you said, it just seemed like a natural progression.
Marriage is not a goal for either of us (and he’s already done it once), but it’s also not out of the question. I think we’d both be perfectly happy to keep living together forever, but I also won’t be surprised if we do wind up getting married one of these days: every now and then one of us will start a sentence with “If we ever get married…” We definitely don’t want kids, so there’s no pressure/hurry in that regard. I could see us having an “If we were to get married, what would you have in mind?” conversation sometime this year, and I have a feeling that in lieu of a proposal one day one of us will slip and say “when we get married” instead of “if we get married,” and the other won’t really notice but will find him/herself saying “when” as well.
I definitely proposed, since we were about as far from just inching into marriage as you can get.
We never lived closer than 600 miles apart. In fact, we hadn’t even seen each other for over a year, but we had started talking on the phone frequently for six months. Though we weren’t officially a couple at the moment, we just couldn’t drift away for each other in the five years we had known each other. So, since she had taken a leave from grad school, I invited her to come help me move from Illinois to Louisiana, and she said yes. I had sensed in talking to her that she was ready for the next thing, so I proposed the first night she was there. I think I got on my knees, but that was an ironic statement. And she said yes. And we went to see Star Wars (first release) the next night to celebrate.
No proposal here, and wouldn’t have wanted one. I’m about as non-traditional as possible (and a raging tomboy) so the whole wedding-tradition thing kind of turned me off. The spouse and I started dating in 1985, moved in together shortly afterward, and eventually I sort of suggested the idea and he was agreeable, so we got married in January '89. No ring (our wedding rings are titanium…no engagement ring), no white dress, pizza at the wedding reception. We liked it that way. But the closest thing to a proposal was made by me, not him.
Well. He’s kind of a joker, you know. So when he started telling me he loved me about a week after we met, I did one of these -> :dubious: and said “uh-huh.” Then a few weeks later when he started asking me to marry him, I did one of these -> :dubious: and said “yeah, sure.” It wasn’t until months went by that he finally backed me into a corner and made me admit I loved him, too. And somewhere along the line, we started taking his marriage proposals and my acceptances seriously.
Then he started introducing me as his fiancee. We never had a real engagement ring, but after a big fight, he got down on his knees and asked me to marry him with an “engagement ring” made out of a wire wrap (he’s an electrician.)
Eventually my mom pushed us to set a date so she could get going on wedding plans (she did a LOT of the planning and work–I just put out the outlines–in the park, pink roses, etc.)
Fourteen years later, I’m still not sure how we ended up married…? Oh, but now we regularly propose marriage to each other. “Man, that was a delicious dinner. Will you marry me?” “Damn, you look handsome in that suit. Will you marry me?”
We were sitting on the sofa in her apartment, watching Deliverance. (It would make a better story if it were, but no, not that scene.)I didn’t get down on one knee, and we only got the ring later.
Me: “Do you want to get married?”
Her: “Yes.”
Me: “OK, let’s”.
Her: “Really?”
Me: “Yes.”
So we did. We were engaged about a year and a half, and have been married for twenty six years (so far).
He did propose to me. In fact, he completely surprised me and those who know me will tell you that’s VERY difficult to do.
He took the ring in his carry on bag as we left for a trip to London and then Rome. Someone at work had been teasing me saying that I would get a proposal on that trip but my Spidey senses most definitely were NOT tingling.
So we were about to land at Gatwick–seriously the pilot was in the middle of his “we are about to land” speech and Mr Contrary asked me if I would be angry if he made me cry. I sat there thinking “if you are about to break up with me at the START of this vacation, I’ll do more than cry.”
He got interrupted probably three times, and finally sort of sighed in exasperation and said “I can’t imagine living the rest of my life without you. Will you marry me?”
I gaped at him like a fish out of water and said “What?!” Yeah that was my eloquent reply. And yes, I said yes.
Seriously I was jet lagged, the flight attendants had been complete grumpy buckets and he had just warned me he was about to make me cry. So I sure didn’t expect a marriage proposal.
Hmm. he mentioned marriage in an offhad way a few weeks after we started dating. I just figured he’d get over it. A year and a half later, we moved in together, and one morning I said “you want to get married?” , he said “sure”, we got dressed, adn were married five hours later.
On our second date, which was pretty much just a day walking on the beach, he said to me “You’re going to marry me. Maybe in a year or 10 years, but you’re going to marry me.”
The long version: We were on Fraser Island, off the coast of Brisbane, a couple of days before Chrstmas 2006. Crusoe had been trying (and failing) to pluck up the courage to propose for several days (I don’t know why, he must’ve known I’d say yes). Finally, on the last day of the trip, he realised that if he didn’t do it then, it’d be too late, so as we sat on a log in the forest at sunset waiting for the little shuttle bus that would take us from our log cabin to the restaurant in the main resort, he put his arm around me and said “So…will you marry me?”
I immediately burst into tears, and cried for a good five minutes before he asked “Um - was that a yes then?” Clearly it must have been, as our wedding’s on the 12th July.
It took me a year longer than she would have liked, but I finally proposed after 4 and a half years of dating.
I had just finished up with an opera wherein I played a quack of a doctor who seduces and proposes to a woman in order to get a hold of her money (to his credit, he is very up front about this fact). Fast forward to the cast party, where I sneaked the ring in in my mother’s purse and popped the question in front of everybody thus: “I figured after two months of delivering a fake proposal to the wrong woman, it was about time to deliver a real one to the right woman.” My girlfriend was a little startled by it all and was caught mid bite in one of the hostess’s brownies. She’s been a little wary of brownies since, always wondering what I’m going to say.
My girlfriend and I were in a long-distance relationship. We knew I was permanently moving back to the area later in the year, but had not made any official plans at that point.
One day, she called me to tell me that she had just been given a German Shepherd puppy, and was filling out the AKC paperwork. According to her, the AKC strongly preferred to have a co-owner listed on their forms, in case something happened to the primary owner (or something like that). She asked if she could list me as co-owner. I said “Sure”!
It wasn’t until after I hung up the phone that I realized that I had just received, and had accepted, a proposal of marriage.
We were married a year later, and are still married some 22 years later. The dog, a true friend and gentle companion, had to leave us about ten years ago, unfortunately.
He did say “will you marry me?” over dinner, but we’d both known for months if not years that we would get married. We thought he’d better say it out loud to make it official and our 6 year anniversary was as good as any. I realised we would get married the same way I realised I loved him - one unpinpointable day I just knew, and when I knew, it didn’t feel like a revalation because I had already known for a long time without realising it.
A couple of friends have asked if I was disappointed that I didn’t get a more traditional proposal, but I think the way we did it was wildly romantic and very us. I don’t think we’re “engagement ring in the champagne” kind of people.
I’m with the WhyNot and misnomer crowd…after a while, it just became obvious to me and my then-boyfriend that we ought to mate for life, so we did. In fact, I don’t even understand the surprise-proposal-on-bended-knee phenomenon: if it is actually NEWS to you that some guy wants to marry you, are you sure that’s such a good idea? (But that’s just me; obviously it works for other people.)
We had a big church wedding that was excruciating for us both, a mere 9 days after graduating from graduate school. Not at all what we wanted, but both sets of parents would have been upset if we had been “living in sin” (does anyone even use that term any more?) and my mother had been dreaming for years of the elaborate, preppy wedding she was going to arrange for me. So we gritted our teeth and let my parents engineer a very traditional ceremony. Our favorite part was escaping to Burger King when it was all finally over
I had something of a marriage phobia and didn’t want to talk about it, whereas he made up his mind that I was the one about 3 weeks after we started dating. He was smart enough to keep quiet for a while, but then he started talking about the M word a bit. So I got him to promise not to ask me for several months.
One night I finally managed to give it some serious thought and decided that I would probably say yes, though it was still safely off in the future.
The next night we were hanging out at his place. Several friends were in the other room, including one who was going to drive me home. We were just talking when all of a sudden he popped the question, which he had not planned to do. I’m ashamed to admit that I went into something resembling very quiet hysterics, and managed to reply that I guessed so. At this point my friend loudly demanded when I was going to be ready to leave already?
So she drove me to my house and we woke up my roomies and they went and got Martinelli’s and we celebrated a bit. And I called my parents, even though it was 2am by that time.
At this point we had been dating for several months, so it wasn’t like we’d been together for years or anything. When we got married we’d known each other for a year.
Originally Posted by lobotomyboy63
When I proposed to my ex, I didn’t have a ring. For one thing it wasn’t planned:
Me: Want to get married?
Her: OK.
The whole thing was practicality—based on other plans, it would be easier to get married now etc. The idea had already been kicked around some so it wasn’t a total bombshell or anything.
IME marrying for convenience is a bad idea. I know others have posted a similar build up and it worked out fine. But I think we were too nonchalant about it, didn’t ask ourselves some hard questions first. YMMV.
On my Dad’s birthday, many years ago, Mom cooked him a nice dinner, and he proposed. She said “Um, I need to think about this a bit”.*
A few days to a week later, she accepted, 4 months later they got married, and they’ve celebrated their 35th wedding anniversary and are still going strong.
In contrast, when my brother proposed, the timing of the proposal was a shock, the fact that he already had the ring was a shock, but they were in fact in pre-marital counseling with the minister who would eventually officiate at the wedding, so that he proposed at all was not a shock.
*Mom had issues caused by her mom. Also, Mom had always said she wouldn’t get married until she’d paid off her student loans (which she actually did the week AFTER the wedding). Still, my mother is always baffled by people who are planning weddings years in advance. She didn’t know before she was proposed to that that was the direction they were heading or how fast.
We definitely don’t want kids, so there’s no pressure/hurry in that regard. I could see us having an “If we were to get married, what would you have in mind?” conversation sometime this year, and I have a feeling that in lieu of a proposal one day one of us will slip and say “when we get married” instead of “if we get married,” and the other won’t really notice but will find him/herself saying “when” as well.
:eek: