To wonder where the joy is in forcing someone to marry you?

[Fanfeckintastic]

This is probably going to sound awful and I'm so sorry if I offend!

A lot of my friends at the moment are getting engaged which I do think is lovely, but the vast majority have been trying to twist their DPs arm about it for at least a year+, a lot have been given ultimatums etc which I personally wouldn't be able to bear, I can see why if the woman wants to wait until married to have children etc and totally understand marriage is important to many people but personally I just think having to practically force someone to ask you would put a very bad taste in my mouth. But each and every time one of these guys propose to my friends, I genuinely am absolutely pleased for them, have even shed a tear of happiness knowing how much said friend has been waiting and worrying.
What I don't think the guys have been bargaining for is how fast said friends would start planning weddings and organising things. I get the impression these guys thought maybe the ring was buying them another couple of years but in so many cases I've seen friends enter wedding competitions, enquiring via Facebook about certain venues etc within days of getting the longed for proposal!
Why is it so often the women driving these things, does it not take the joy out of it?

AIBU for feeling this way? Do I sound jealous? I honestly don't think that's it at all, it just sometimes feels like watching a car crash about to happen!

Got engaged last night ! Basically I didn't ask him, but said lets just do it, book it fir next year. He said great and was genuinely delighted. Goin ring shopping this weekend!!!! He will prob ask me 'properly' when we get the ring. But if I hadn't taken the initiative (on safe mumsnet advice) it would still be on the long finger. So fricking happy right now! Venue already provisionally booked!! Btw together 6 years 2 kids...

The whole thing is like a foreign language to me. Otherwise intelligent, professional women mooning around waiting for their partners to make this huge decision on their behalf. Then the farce that is the proposal, what's that about?

We're expected to cry with joy because the guy finally caved and said will you marry me, under fear of being dumped?

It's all so illogical and anachronistic, I get quite irritated with it all.

Sorry that wasn't aimed at you gangie, hope you have fun with it all.

Now DH proposed to me just after he found out I was pregnant. That still stings a little that he proposed out of duty rather than love.

I ended up making an ultimatum over actually getting married after several years of being 'engaged'.

On a totally unrelated note being 'engaged' always makes me think of a busy public toilet. Yuck.

Morriszspp - don't worry I'm not offended, I didn't exactly force him !!

I know what you mean morriszapp. if you can't talk about it like an equal with a bf you've been with for a while then something isn't right!? sitting there passively waiting for him to give in and ask .......... like he's the prize, argh!

Gangie that's totally different from the guys I'm talking about. Some of them have been engaged for years, they have no intention of getting married, they have had every excuse under the sun not to think about it and now they are starting to run out.

Different where you have a discussion, raised by either party, you both decide and you start actioning it together.

Congratulations btw!

Arsenic Lackadaisical?

Ah

In my life I don't think I know female friends doing this. However, in this forum there are a lot of ladies posting that they have their proposal/fiancé , but he will no speak any further about wedding plans. Most posters say he is not that into you and run a mile. So OP you are Not unreasonable. From what I read the bride to be seems to be forcing the issue, which is quite sad really.

It's not nice to see when two people are on a different page in life.

Namechanged for this.
I gave DH an ultimatum. We had been together for several years. I didn't want to live with him without being married, so the next step was marriage or we moved on. After some to and fro-ing, I got fed up and issued it. Either we get engaged to get married or we split up. If it wasn't what he wanted then we weren't heading in the same direction anyway and there was no point dragging it out.

We had talked about marriage earlier in the relationship, so my feelings on marriage in a long term relationship weren't new to him. I think he had gone fmrom being ambivalent about it to thinking it was an unnecessary convention, which is/was his right, but it came to time to choose.

It was a very factual ultimatum and I told him to think about it and get back to me. I was prepared for the relationship to end with a differ of opinions to the extent his decision to stay surprised me.

My DH was very unenthusiastic about marriage - I told him we were doing it if he wanted to have kids & we got on with it. The day of the wedding he was happier than I've ever seen him, and the first 6 months post-marriage he said to me oractically every day that he couldn't believe we hadn't done it earlier. I knew that would happen, as he is very change-adverse and takes a lot of time to make life decisions and needed a nudge in the right direction.

I definitely would walk away from a guy who "proposed" and then didn't have any intention of actually making wedding plans. Although I suppose it's different if you've already got kids together. This is why I refused to have children with my now-DH until we were married - because that was important to me.

Thing is, marriage actually benefits men more than it does women. It was set up by men and arranged to be to their advantage. And the great cultural con trick has been to convince everyone that women are desperate to be married and men are desperate to 'stay free'. So some men use this concept as a way to get their female partners scurrying madly around trying to please them, indefinitely, while the man gets all his whims indulged and only has to administer the occasional dose of stick or carrot ('I was going to propose but you disobeyed me and now you've ruined it/I want to make everything special for you, including the proposal, and I'm almost sure it's the right time...) in order to maintain a comfortable status quo, while telling himself that the minute [SexyFamousMillionaireGirl] shows up single, he can just run off because he never actually married his patient, adequate, desperate Will Do For Now partner.

Apart from accidental pregnancy, I don't understand people who have children and then pressure the other parent into marriage, because they have children?

If marriage is so important because of the children, you really do need to get married first.

I don't think it's fair to pressurise someone or guilt trip them after you've chosen to have kids, or ever really.

Word.

That was to SGB, but worra speaks sense here too.

And I think there's some truth in what SGB said too.

If a man has the woman, the kids and the house...why does he need to get married if he doesn't want to?

He has it all, surely?

Oh I'm disappointed Morris

No-one has ever said 'word' to me

I don't agree that marriage is entirely for the benefit of men anymore although I think the stick and carrot comment has some truth in it. These days marriage protects the financially weaker partner which often is the woman especially if she takes time out from work to care for children. In our case I earn a lot more than DH and he was a SAHD so marriage protected him.

I got engaged last week. Been with DP six years, and to be honest, yes, I did sit down with him to have the marriage conversation about six months ago, and laid out all my cards to him.

He didn't see the point in marriage (likely, in my opinion, because his parents had a disastrous marriage).

I told him that marriage was very important to me, that I wouldn't have children until after I was married (he had already told me he wanted babies one day), and that I struggled with the idea of giving up that intention in my life.

I didn't exactly lay down an ultimatum, but I did tell him that I didn't want to wake up at 30 still unmarried (personal choice, just my intention). So I suppose I gave an indication of how I'd like things to work out, timewise (bags of time, really, I'm 24! DP is nearly 30), and stressed that I intended to be married and a wife someday, and he either needed to figure out if he wanted to marry me and be my husband, or come to the conclusion that we wanted different things and move on.

Anyway, INCREDIBLY romantic proposal last week and entirely out of the blue (for me), and we are both happier than ever. DP has had time to get his head around the whole marriage idea, and seems as enthusiastic as I am. It was his idea, for example, to throw an engagement bash for our families.

Personally, I don't see it that I twisted his arm at all. I needed to express to him how I felt about our relationship progressing. It would have been silly of me to keep quiet and "hoping", because DP wouldn't have known that marriage was important to me, especially re: future children.

Must add, I'm a bit annoyed at PP saying if you aren't making plans already, you aren't engaged to be married Finances, anyone? We have a conviction to buy our first house before we spend out lump sums on a wedding. Therefore, we won't be booking any venues for a while yet, and are planning a "long" engagement. I don't believe this means I'm not "engaged to be married" at all, though someone in RL has already had the lack of tact to say so...

I didn't have to twist DH's arm to get him to marry me. It was a mutual agreement on both our parts and we did it when we were both ready. He was ready before I was, I wanted to wait a bit. We talked about marriage before getting engaged, so we knew where each other stood on it. But we're both glad we waited because we were both happy and comfortable with it all.

But, ultimately, it's on the person that proposed. If he didn't want to make a lifelong commitment he shouldn't have done so. You know getting married ties all your money and assets to another person, so doing that with someone you're unsure of is stupid. Marriage is a big commitment, both morally and financially. It's a big risk and you're betting on a person who could change, and if you decide to break up it's expensive.

So I doubt them proposing was taken lightly. It's very possible it was a matter of they didn't want a ceremony but were fine with the commitment of spending the rest of their lives with their partner, so they proposed for that reason if they were truly resistant as their partners suggest.

See iffy, for me being engaged means being ready to get married - emotionally, practically and financially. So it's not that I don't think you're "engaged", I just don't see what the point of getting engaged is if you have no firm plans to actually get married. It's just a different point of view - I don't see being engaged as an intermediate relationship stage in and of its own right.

No Frank there's no "holes" in my OP because it's just my own opinion and observations, based on my own experiences, sweetie [hmmm]

Iffy, I can see the sense in having the conversation you had with your fiance, re wanting to get married and by what age. For me that's similar to laying your cards on the table to a partner who mentions never wanting children, for example.

An ex of mine (looooong time ago, I've been married for 14 years) who I loved with all my heart and I knew he adored me - we had a great relationship, told me about a year into our time together that he didn't, and never would, want children. The dynamics of our relationship changed that day as i knew he could never be The One, no matter how great things were.

If being married is important enough to you to be a deal-breaker then its an important conversation to have, at the right time. I can't imagine 'making do' any more than I can imagine forcing someone to want to marry me for any reason other than its what we both want.

I know a few women like this (not nearly as many as OP, fortunately). In general, I think they're less hung up on being married than they are on getting married. They want the big white wedding, the princess for a day thing etc, etc. It's not necessarily their fault. Society tells us our wedding day should be the happiest day of our lives, blah blah blah.

Personally, my DH's parents nagged him into proposing. They're old fashioned and religious (nice people, don't get me wrong, but not ready for the 20th century, let alone the 21st) and they couldn't believe we were happy living in sin. So we decided marriage was alright, especially since we knew we wanted kids someday, but we'd get married in a registry office instead of having a huge expensive do. We broke my MIL's heart, but you can't plan your wedding around what third parties want.

So it's not that I don't think you're "engaged", I just don't see what the point of getting engaged is if you have no firm plans to actually get married.

This. I have friends that are going on 3 years of being engaged. What's the point? We proposed when we were ready to actually tie the knot and put the date a year out.

I always sort of inwardly cringe when an engaged couple doesn't have a date set up (and I'm not talking newly just engaged in the last couple months). These guys are already living together so how is engagement a step up other than having a nice ring?

I also had friends that just filed taxes together (American here) and were common law married long before they had a ceremony or engagement.

But I had relatives that were "living in sin" for 50+ years and were madly in love the entire time up until they died of old age together. I also have relatives that ended up being train wrecked by divorce after only a few years. So marriage isn't an indication of commitment, that comes from the individuals involved.