With all the talk of same sex marriage in the news lately, I got to wondering about how an actual marriage proposal works with a same sex couple. The traditional way to propose marriage is for the man to get down on one knee and present the woman with a ring, but when both people are the same sex, I don’t see how this would work.
Now, I realize that marriage proposals don’t HAVE to work this way, and same-sex couples are, by definition, not terribly traditional. But I still feel compelled to ask: can any semblance of this tradition be employed in a same sex marriage proposal? If so, how would that work? (i.e., who does the proposing, do both people wear rings, etc.)
I apologize if any of this comes across as ignorant or insensitive, I’m simply trying to fight my own ignorance here.
That’s traditional in the US. In Spain the usual way has long been a conversation, held in normal speaking positions, the lady was as likely to be the one saying “do we get married?” as the guy for at least the last 50 years. The traditional and now-abandoned ceremony of “asking for her hand” would take place later and involve an exchange of gifts (and of course, any guy doing it without having received the requested-for hand beforehand [1] would get kicked out on his ear).
The conversation method works equally well for same-sex couples as for different-sex ones.
My brother’s “proposal” took the form of “if I’m going to support you, I want to be supporting my wife, not my girlfriend who lives with her parents.” Halfway between a proposal and an ultimatum, but if I was him I would have been pissed at the circumstances too… (her parents wanted her to go on living at home, but without receiving anything beyond room and food and without working outside the home).
We’re not a same sex couple and we decided to get married by talking about it. There was no “proposal”, there was me saying “Okay, I’m going to bring up the elephant in the living room now…” (er, not me, the fact that everybody kept ‘hilariously’ bringing it up at the dinner table) and we decided it was what we wanted to do. I assume same sex couples have the same continuum between that and the beach thing with the skywriting airplane and the knee and the diamond ring.
Even in same-sex relationships, individuals differ in their behavior. One way of describing this difference is to describe one partner as more dominant and one as more submissive, and it is not uncommon for the more dominant partner to do the proposing. There are as many ways for same-sex couples to propose to each other as their are for hetero couples.
I asked my married lesbian friends who proposed, and this was the response (it was a txt message, so excuse her casual typing):
I proposed to my husband, but it wasn’t a big deal thing. I went to his office after work on the day the Massachusetts SJC ruling was announced. Flowers were purchased just for kicks.
We had been together for quite a while so really the only barrier was the law, so once that changed getting married was pretty obvious. Proposing was my way of saying “did you hear about the new ruling?”
One member of the couple is probably more assertive or demonstrative than the other. But no one I know in real life has ever had a Hollywood-type suprise proposal.
We will get married when it becomes legal in this state (apparently, no time soon). Neither of us has ever formally proposed; it’s just something we’ve discussed over the 24 years we’ve been together, and are in agreement on.
My boyfriend and I have discussed marriage, when we would feel comfortable with it, what our tradition would be, etc. We have decided that we’d both like to go pick out some simple rings, wear them like engagement rings, and then either move them to the correct finger on our wedding day, or get new rings entirely for that.
As for the proposing? Well, we’ve already pretty much proposed by just talking about it and making our plans. Eventually one of us will probably be like “ok let’s go down and look at rings this weekend!” and that’ll be our “proposal.” Although I am a bit of a romantic nut so maybe I’ll incorporate some sort of over-the-top romantic aspect to it. Probably a really cheesy but funny poem about why I love him so much.