To ask whether your proposal/engagement was really a ‘surprise’?

[Daxibel]

There’s been various posts on here recently about time periods for getting engaged, ‘how long to wait’, whether to impose deadlines and all sorts. I genuinely find it surprising seeing how many people in adult relationships claim to just sit back and wait for a proposal without discussing future plans with their partner beforehand and both agreeing timescales for marriage as soon as things start to get serious (if both parties want to marry of course).

It seems that many women still expect a fairytale proposal out of the blue which comes as a complete surprise. In my mind, those are the sorts of scenarios that happen mostly in movies and much more rarely in real life?!

So I’m genuinely interested to know, for those of you married or engaged, had you previously already discussed your plans for the future and timescales e.g. both agreed you’d like to marry by xyz number of years together, or was your proposal at the time period it occurred a complete surprise?

YABU - we hadn’t discussed it beforehand
YANBU - we had already spoken about our expectations and timescales around marriage

We'd have both hated the performance of a 'proposal'.

Asking somebody to marry you doesn’t have to be a “performance”.

It’s a simple question.

@rhubarb84

Didn't bother with a proposal at all! We'd chatted about marriage a bit to make sure it was on the cards for both of us. Then one of those conversations turned into us agreeing we would like to get married, and that was us engaged. We'd have both hated the performance of a 'proposal'.

Why do you think it's performative?

It was a total shock when DH proposed.
Unknown to me, he had visited my parents and asked their permission before booking a weekend away to get down on one knee.

We hadnt discussed marriage or kids or anything hence it was a total shock.
I did think it was a wind up at first to be honest but several teaes later were still married with a new baby.

My DH didn't propose - marriage was always on the cards for us, I think we both knew it very early on. It came up in conversation every now and again, and once we'd started down the road of buying a house, we just went and got married in a low-key way. No regrets.