The question, like the ring, used to be a surprise.
In 1972, on a park bench in Birmingham, Ala., Garner Lee Green’s father proposed to her mother. The proposal came out of the blue. She said yes.
“That doesn’t happen to people anymore,” says Ms. Green, who is 30. And it certainly wasn’t the way her husband asked her to marry him several years ago. The two of them talked for a long time about how and when the proposal would happen. “I was ready before he was, so we had to come to a meeting of the minds about a time frame. The negotiations lasted about six months,” Ms. Green says.
She is not the only one who missed what used to be a classic big moment. Those romantic tales that get passed among friends and relatives—”One day he just showed up with a ring! I was completely surprised!”—are vestiges of the past. We’ve gone from popping the question to a long conversation, hammering out the details of when and how the engagement will happen.
The question, like the ring, used to be a surprise.
Amanda Miller, a sociology professor at the University of Central Oklahoma, conducted a study about how proposals are made among cohabiting couples. The result, titled “Waiting to Be Asked,” found that couples not only work together as a team to set the date. Ms. Miller says some women script the proposal first, telling their boyfriend something like: “I’d always wanted to be proposed to on Christmas morning in front of family.”
The engagement negotiation is not some repackaged version of the female proposal or part of an ultimatum. This new ritual simply points to a less unilateral and more pragmatic approach. In a world where two young people are juggling goals, the proposal language sounds something like: “I’ll be finishing up medical school, and then I’ll be doing my residency, so maybe we can do the wedding between the residency and my fellowship. So what if you propose in June?”
Consider the case of 29-year-old Ethan, a GMAT tutor in New York City (he asked that his last name not be used because details of his proposal process are not known to his future in-laws). He says and his fiancée talked about all but one thing ahead of time: “Essentially, the diamond was the only element of the proposal and the wedding that we did not negotiate.”
And then there’s Casie Zimmerman, a 27-year-old lawyer in New Orleans who is engaged to her boyfriend after dating him for five years. Their discussion was a now-typical one about how to shoehorn a wedding into career plans. “He wanted to finish law school and pass the bar before he proposed, and I wanted it to happen before I took a job in a new city, so we had a lot of back-and-forth on how it would happen.” As part of the contemporary transparent process, Ms. Zimmerman’s now-fiancé instructed her to go pick out rings in advance.
So how is all this bargaining affecting gender dynamics? “The norm that the man has to take control of the proposal has been greatly undermined and eroded,” says Kathleen Gerson, a professor of sociology at New York University. “Women want to feel they have more control of where a relationship is going instead of waiting to react.”
Yet the gender dance is still being worked out. Josh Brentan, who blogs at thegroomwithaview.com, proposed to his girlfriend in July after an open discussion about getting engaged. “But I was happy that I could surprise her with the actual proposal. It’s nice to still have some proprietary feeling over it,” he says. Ms. Green’s husband has said he feels slightly cheated that he didn’t get to surprise her with his proposal.
Even so, do not mistake this for a level playing field. While there is more negotiation and compromise about the marriage timetable, Ms. Miller says her research showed that the man still holds the power to shut down the marriage conversation. Men in their 20s and 30s don’t seem to view the backroom negotiation as emasculating or ceding their turf to a generation of empowered women either. On the contrary—all this talking may have simply eliminated the only scary aspect of a proposal for a man: that the woman will say no.
“You do not propose to a woman without absolute assurance that she’ll say yes,” says Ethan, and Mr. Brentan agrees. “I liked that Erica, my fiancée, brought up the topic of marriage with me first. It was nice knowing, before I proposed, that she wanted to spend the rest of her life with me.”
Ms. Seligson is the author of “A Little Bit Married: How to Know When It’s Time to Walk Down the Aisle or Out the Door” (Da Capo Press).
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