I think a lot of people struggle to understand how deeply ingrained the eerie to be ‘asked’ is. There were centuries of women being asked to marry by men and that happening before they lived together. We are really only 2 generations into people living together as the norm first. Attitudes and inbuilt senses don’t change over night.
Whether there’s a formal proposal or a simple chat and agreement to marry, somewhere along the line, for it to happen, both people have to agree. Someone has to initiate the conversation, or progress a conversation that might have started tentatively and theoretically but then progresses. And we know that not all men and all women want to get married. There is always a risk or fear that the other person might not want to if you do. So for many, it isn’t as simple as ‘just deciding’. Lots of people live together and within that lots have 1 partner who don’t actually want to be committed much at all, some have one who isn’t sure and some are committed but don’t want to marry. And that’s hard for the one who wants to marrry. When only one wants to, often it’s the woman who wants to.
So I think that many women still yearn for a proposal, or an initiation from the man. Often, they’ve made it claear they’d like to get married. What they want is the man to say the same….to confirm it. Until they actually say it, whether you call it asking or proposing or just saying, most women who want to get married, don’t feel 100% sure it is going to happen. They want the man to say it/ask because it shows an active choice. People don’t generally want engagement to be something the other person just found they’d slipped into, without really wanting it to happen and without actively making that choice.
Today, so much happens in relationships which in a sense is ‘slipped into’ without a conscious effort or commitment. People have sex early in a relationship and often it isn’t a reflection of whether they want something longer term or not. People often move in together after a short period. It’s often a bit of a ‘try’ but with no commitment to anything longer, and an understanding either spoken or unspoken that if things don’t work out, the tenancy is only 6 months, so it will be easy to move on from. And then it becomes a second tenancy and maybe a third…but it’s still a bit of a sense of drift and for many hasn’t really invovled both agreeing anything about forever or the longer term future. And often people have a child. Many haven’t made any commitment to each other. Some are committed in some sense, but whether that’s forever or will lead to marriage still isn’t clear. No formal commitment or decision has been required for any of those things. In many ways, the relationship can still be quite open ended after all of that. But marriage is something more definite and involves making active choices and speaking something out both when deciding to do it, and when getting married itself. That active choice is actually really important still to many people. Society is more traditional than we might think or some hope. Most women would still like to be asked to marry their man, by them. Him saying it and asking is different to just finding you’ve drifted into living together.
Clearly, not everyone wants to marry and not every woman feels she wants or needs the man to launch the proposal, or there even to be a sense of being engaged. Many feel it’s meaningless or the show takes over from what matters. But many women who are now married, or are in couples and would like to be married, or those who are single, either did before they were married, or still today, hope that their man or a man will propose one day. It was important to them. Personally I think it’s okay to feel like that and not being a traitor to progress.