The greatest curse of womanhood is also its biggest blessing. If you’re a woman, it’s easy to find strong opinions and instructions that will inform you exactly how you are expected to conduct yourself during any given occasion. Plenty of the advice is useless, contradictory and mad, but if you want to live a peaceful, uneventful and rather dull life as a woman in the 21st century, you can get by if you use the following terms as broad instructions: “Don’t make a scene” and “midi dresses”.
Men, on the other hand – hoo boy. My heart breaks for you all. We’re furious with you for failing to constantly acknowledge that you’re benefiting from centuries of systematic privilege. We’ve convinced ourselves that you’re all happy-go-lucky pay-gap profiteers who couldn’t describe a vacuum cleaner if it came up during a game of Articulate. If I’d never met a man in real life and only seen them on the news, I’d be convinced that no man had ever had the handle of a bag for life snap off in the bus queue or had an entire chocolate Digestive collapse in their tea. Whatever you’re doing, in 2019, we’re quick to tell you that you’re doing it wrong – but unlike women you don’t have an instructive legacy of completely insane advice to guide you. Where is your Goop? Who is your Elizabeth Gilbert, your Oprah? Your inspirational beacon is Jack from last year’s Love Island, a 28-year-old man who can’t be trusted not to spoil his dinner by ripping into three sharing bags of Doritos before he opens his Old El Paso kit.
In spite of these clashes and contradictions, many men and women fall in love, and they plan to spend their lives together. Bafflingly, it’s usually left to the men to make this decision official. No one can come up with a good reason for this. It’s “traditional” – like the Eurovision song contest. It’s “romantic” – like a book about a teenage girl falling for a million-year-old vampire that likes to watch her sleep. It’s stupid. But in 2019, we still do it.
If the tradition were flipped, and women were the ones who were expected to propose marriage, there would be no bad proposal stories. The rules would be rigid. We would be expected to have a list of proposal dos and don’ts tattooed inside our forearms. Instead of Say Yes To The Dress we would watch Make Him Say Yes – Or Else. However, men are on their own, because it’s manly. That way we can all be furious when they inevitably get it wrong.
Edgaras Averbuchas is the latest bad proposer, following in the footsteps of Qin Kai, at the 2016 Olympics. Averbuchas proposed to his girlfriend Agne Banuskeviciute during her graduation ceremony at the University of Essex. She accepted, saying, “I think that this day became even more beautiful with this proposal.” However, the university has removed the video clip of the event from its website as it has received so much criticism. Cambridge University research associate Dr Jana Bacevic tweeted: “Imagine being a man and feeling so threatened by a woman’s intellectual success that you have to force her to frame her identity/agency in relation to you on the very day she is being celebrated for her intellect.” Woman’s March organiser Aisha Ali-Khan said it “smacked of egotism”.
I don’t think many people in their right mind would consider making a public proposal. The trouble is that when you are asking a terrifying question and making yourself extremely vulnerable to rejection, you’re not in your right mind. We assume the public proposers are manipulative wrong ’uns who are, at best, showboating – and at worst, using a form of coercive control and putting their partner in a position where they don’t feel they can say no. However, I suspect the majority are panicky idiots who simply want to experience the most frightening moment of their life in a safe space.
Averbuchas knew that Banuskeviciute would probably be in a good mood, and that he’d be in a place where it would be relatively easy to get hold of some champagne afterwards. If the proposal was a maths test, I wouldn’t give him any marks for his conclusion, but he might get a point for showing flawed but consistent working.
We need to acknowledge that when it comes to love and marriage, many of us are clinging on to outdated ideas and traditions that hurt men and women. Marriage is a partnership, and every party involved should enter it as an equal. It’s not fair on anyone when we assume it’s up to men to ask, and up to women to gratefully answer in the affirmative. When you’re choosing to spend the rest of your lives together, you should both spend a few months discussing it. It should be the first of many shared decisions. I don’t think the majority of heterosexual men are Christian Grey wannabes looking for women to control. I think they want to build lives with women who know themselves, respect themselves and are able to make split-second decisions during tricky moments in multistorey car parks.
Ultimately it won’t matter how a proposal is executed when we get to the point where it doesn’t matter who is proposing. But if public proposals leave a bad taste in your mouth, we need to remember that they are a symptom of a society in which rigid gender rules ensure that everybody loses.
Where not to propose
Ikea
“Will you marry me?” might sound like the perfect way to defuse your partner’s furious response to your first question: “Are you sure you need 8,000 tea lights?” Take a deep breath, open your mouth and fill it with meatballs instead.
The airport security queue
This could turn a Kafkaesque nightmare into a really special occasion, but as soon as that diamond goes on it will need to come off and into a mood-killing grey plastic tray.
Claire’s
“Let’s choose a ring! I’ve budgeted for something in the £4-£6 range.”
On a rail replacement bus service
You will forever associate one of the most significant moments of your life with the scent of wet dog.
Another wedding
It’s just not on. Unless you do it strategically. “Will you marry me? Now, I didn’t bring a present, so can yours be from both of us?”