Have you proposed to your partner and been turned down?

[Showmehalcy]

I'm thinking of asking my partner of 3 years to marry me. Neither of us have ever been married before. We are mid forties. I have young children and he has none.

I've very recently asked if he'd consider moving in together and he's agreeable to that. Now I'm thinking, I bloody love him to bits, the kids love him, they've been calling him Daddy for years now, he loves them, why not go the whole hog?

I suspect he'd respond with something like 'in time' or 'that's for the future', but I'm going to be 50 in a few years, life is precious and that's been starkly illustrated to me in the past year for a couple of reasons, but I'm worried how I'd feel if he turned me down? Would it put me off the whole thing and not want to move in with him then?

He stays at weekends and we holiday together and so on, but he's only lived on his own for around 5 years as he went straight from his parents to live-in relationship, before he became single again for a couple of years prior to meeting me.

Do I just bite the bullet and ask? What is there to lose but crushing dignity and humiliation? Or are you only supposed to ask when you're absolutely sure someone will say yes??

Is it possible that he does want to marry you, but is scared to ask because of your previous reaction?

I do hope so, I love a happy ending.

I appreciate it's 2015, my experience is generally if you ask a man out, chase them, in any way are showing more initiative than them it ends in tears. They aren't daft they know what they want and 99% of them go and get it. I cannot tell you how many of my friends have dropped hints, even had proposals and rings but then when they split up mr I'm not sure becomes bloody sure and marries or has kids with the next one, deep down he knew the ex wasn't the one.

Just my experience but just as men don't lose your number, they aren't afraid of commitment if they want something they make it happen.

I asked DH once; he wasn't ready at the time but it wasn't embarrassing or awful or anything. 20 years on we're still together and are married now.
I asked him out in the first place too. He definitely appreciated that

Dropping hints however, eurgh. I hate that even from my children when they won't out and ask for whatever it is but insinuate up to me. Not attractive in a grown man or woman.

Sounds to me like his previous "proposal" was a testing the water to see how you'd react. Why would he ask again without some heavy duty encouragement?

If I were you, I'd bring the subject up (not hinting but as a discussion "I've been thinking about the time you proposed" with a view to establishing how he feels about it now).

Most people don't proposed cold and blind. We'd been chatting about marriage and engagement on and off and DH knew that I wanted to marry him and that if he asked I'd say yes.

Doing it cold is asking for trouble in my view. It ramps it up too much and you may find that he says no out of shock, you get upset and it becomes something that assumes such huge proportions that you can't get past it.

If you want to propose, I'd go for the direct discussion route first at the very least.

Here's an update :) ...

Somehow people's Vegas weddings came up in text conversation (I know it's only text not face to face verbal, but we don't see eachother during the week so I suppose text is our primary communication then) and he mentioned that he wouldn't get married in Vegas, it would be somewhere else, and that it will be me

I guess that's a happy enough outcome!

I think you need to stop thinking about a romantic proposal and talk to him... Talk about everything to do with his moving in - childcare, housework, finances etc, and also marriage.

I may sound like the least romantic person ever but that's what I did my with my now dh. I was 35, I knew I wanted marriage and kids, and I didn't want to mess around. We talked about our future, our approaches to life, money, child rearing etc... We were on the same page.

He then proposed on holiday, but if he hadn't I'd have done it :)

Just observing, but I don't get why marriage and who does the proposing is such a touchy subject? Yet it seems it is. It should be simple on the face of it: you either do or you don't want to marry the person you love. If you do, what's with waiting until the other person asks? A person could die of old age waiting because there might never be such a proposal.

Couldn't people who really care about each other state marriage as an aim and discuss it, and if its what they both want make a mutual agreement to marry, instead of at some unspecified time be the grateful beneficiary of their partner's unilateral grand gesture? As they say, you only get one shot at life, and I second PPs who say romantic moments are vastly over-rated. It's a huge life decision, not to be scripted by Barbara Cartland.

As a slight aside, someone I know would be very happy to marry his partner, but to her regret her DD has recently married a very difficult person, and my friend fears that if he dies his new SIL will go all out to claim on his estate and leave his own DCs disadvantaged. I think it rough that my friend can't think of his own happiness and to hell with marauding in-laws. I don't know, maybe there's a legal way to stop that happening?

He was testing the water that time infront of the tele