Proposals

Dara O'Brian does a very good sketch in his stand-up show about how everyone's wedding proposal is 'perfect'. As in, 'It. Was. Perfect.' Normally to be accompanied by hand waving of the sort normally associated with society IT girls or the like. It's fairly understandable – the wedding is meant to be the most important day of your life, particularly if you're a woman, and this should extend to the proposal as well.

But I have some problems with the notion of perfection. For a start, when I spoke to many of my friends, the male ones looked embarrassed and muttered something along the lines of, 'Well, she told me we were getting married and we did......' The female ones looked at me and replied in either an extremely sweet don't-mess-with-me voice or a strident I'm-a-modern-woman voice, 'Proposal? I'd be 80 if I were to wait for a proposal from him.  Men can't make big decisions like that!' And they say sexism is dead.  It seems that outside of Hollywood or the world of princesses, most of us do without the Perfect Proposal. IN fact most of us do without the proposal at all!

I'm a case in point. I've been engaged for a year. The church is booked, the hotel is booked, I've started to look at dresses and wonder vaguely about bridesmaids and hen dos. I've not been proposed to yet, nor is it likely to happen any time soon. He has yet to purchase a ring – although he has pointed out this is my fault for not finding one I like that won't cost more than the deposit for a small house. Or indeed, that won't rival the cost of said house in its entirety. I know I can't be that unusual in this.

None of this bothers me – I'm not a girly-girl at all. My mother is still in shock I'm wearing a dress for my wedding, hair and make-up will be extremely minimal, there will be as little fuss as possible about this wedding. Thankfully, my fiancé is even less concerned with the whole thing than I am. In the grand tradition of bridegrooms everywhere, he is trying his best to ignore the whole thing and leave as many decisions to me as possible which, in all fairness, isn't the worst attitude he could have. I'd rather he be like that than to change personality completely and develop a worrying interest in flower arrangements as a friend of mine once did.

I'm sure Al will get around to proposing to me eventually – probably when he sees me at the altar, although I'm hoping for a ring before then – but this isn't the important thing to me. The trappings of the day aren't the important bit. We don't live in a society where a woman's life as herself is over once she marries and so her wedding day is her last hurrah as it were. We live in a society where a woman is perfectly entitled to and capable of having a marriage and a life outside the home, so the wedding day is more a declaration of intent than an excuse to enjoy one last day where she is the centre of attention. It is a declaration that she and her husband are standing up in front of their family, friends and in some cases God, to say that they will spend the rest of their lives together, they will support each other, they will love each other and they will be there for each other. This is not something that is even necessary any more – it is a deliberate choice that each woman has to make.

I would hope that the days of women expecting a fairy-tale world of perfection and idealism are gone. I would hope that these days people realise that marriage is hard work, and will probably always be hard work. Rose tinted glasses soon become faded when the realities of housekeeping in the modern world come creeping in. Most people these days manage to live together before the wedding day so some of this is dealt with even before the wedding, but it never hurts to have a realistic view of the situation. A piece of paper, which is all a marriage cert is in reality, will not make life easier or harder in itself. It is the expectations that come with the bit of paper that cause the problems. And possibly in this generation, because we have the options we do in life, those expectations are higher than ever before.

So maybe expecting the perfect proposal isn't the way most people go about it, but maybe expecting the perfect proposal and then getting one that isn't quite perfect can wake a woman up from the dream of handsome princes and 'happily-ever-after' endings. Maybe we need to stand up and make our own happy endings, rather than depending on the man in our lives to make them.