I don’t very often tell the story of how I proposed to my wife Rebecca. That’s her on the right in the photo above (my son Colum is on the left, the fetus(es) that will become our next child (or two) are slightly to the lower-rightish).
There are people who go to elaborate lengths in their proposals and a mini-industry dedicated to celebrating their romanticism. Famously, there are the much-derided guys who get their “Julie, will you marry me?” message flashed momentarily onscreen at baseball games and whatnot, a high-risk idea that could possibly backfire (even if the backfiring is often planned, as demonstrated by a rash of declined-proposal hoaxes recently). My cousin Adam’s then-girlfriend Loretta, who lived a six-hour drive away, sent him on a wild chase involving custom-made crossword puzzles hidden in lockers and multiple gifts in various places that finally led him to a Niagra Falls hotel room. The night he arrived, she popped the question onstage during a dinner theatre performance. Public shenanigans aren’t everyone’s thing, obviously, but the stories are memorable.
More classically, you’ve got your foolproof bended-knee “will you make me the happiest man in the world?” thing. Scratch that, it ain’t foolproof. The deal with proposals is that you always risk foolishness (and heartbreak) if you aren’t positive what the answer will be.
This is part of the dynamic of historic gender roles in romance, in which women have been the courted and men the courters — since he is presumed to be the stronger, more dominant partner and she the gatekeeper of virtue, he does all the risking and she does all the waiting around for him to work up the guts. So a woman, unfairly, was unable to invite a man for a date but she (also unfairly) retained all the power to humiliate undesirables who would ask her. There’s some crazy stuff that may or may not derive from evolutionary imperatives there, but essentially men were expected to suffer the risks and reap the rewards of being aggressive in courtship while women were expected to look pretty and cross their fingers that a suitable offer would come along (and cross their legs for a good while after it did). It was in many ways a condescending model, too, of course, as I think much gentlemanly beahviour was — the person who was naturally deemed to be superior was the one honour-bound to attempt to make the weaker, inferior party comfortable (laying jackets over mud-puddles, holding doors, picking up cheques, etc.). And all that. Though, as Loretta showed, a lot of this has changed, we can still see the hangover of these traditions in who is doing the buying of drinks for strangers in bars and who thinks it is appropriate to phone whom after a night of romance. And in who is generally expected to propose.
I guess in retrospect I look foolish in my own proposal story, but not because of rejection. Because I pretty much assumed the lowest-risk proposal method I’ve ever heard of. Basically, after we’d been dating a year, Rebecca and I were out one night dancing to British Invasion and soul music in a nightclub, pleasantly tipsy-bordering-on-hammered, as was often the case back then. After we left the club, we were eating Chinese food in a joint with white plastic tablecloths on Spadina in Toronto, very possibly drinking cold tea.
Over a bite of cantonese chow mein, it suddenly occurred to me for the first time in my life that I wouldn’t mind getting married, and that Rebecca seemed like a good person to be married to. So essentially as soon as I thought it, I slurred, “About this relationship — I’m thinking that maybe I could see it heading towards marriage. What about you?” I was 27 years old, then, a short-order cook, a failure as a restauranteur, an unpublished fiction writer living in my parents basement and still hoping to make a living one day by writing but with no idea how I’d make that happen. She was a 21-year-old university student and waitress with nothing but her whole life ahead of her. So naturally, she said something like, “Yeah, I hadn’t thought about it quite like that yet, but that’s about what I had in mind.” Couple of hopeless romantics we are.
Two days later, drunk again, I phoned my brother in the middle of the night to tell him I was getting married. Rebecca was puzzled by that but also thrilled. That’s about the point when Rebecca realized the cup of clear liquid I was drinking was full of Stolichnaya, not water. She was puzzled by that and not so thrilled. Which later became a theme in our relationship. That weekend, we announced our engagement to our respective parents. Some many months later, I gave her a tiny diamond for her birthday.
There’s a musician in Toronto named Kevin Quain who, the first time you hear him you think he’s ripping off early Tom Waits, later you just think he’s a kick-ass songwriter and performer. He has a lot of songs about drunken nights and hopeless cases. Rebecca and I used to go and see him on Sunday nights at the Cameron House all the time, and when he’d sing, “When I said that I loved you I was drunk, but I meant it anyway,” we’d share a smile. Coulda been our wedding song.
Anyway, the thing: the most pathetic part of that story is that, up to that point in our relationship, that proposal was the most mature thing I had done, and it was also the most mature thing I would do for a couple more years. (The happy ending is told in the photo at the top of this post.) When Rebecca and I first started dating, I kind of put off committing to her in any way at all for several months. Then she gave me an ultimatum: If I wanted to keep my options open, we’d go our separate ways, but if I wanted to be with her it had to be more than casual. Initially I told her (honestly) I wasn’t ready for anything as heavy as calling her my girlfriend, since I pretty much considered my life a train wreck on all fronts at that point, but then within 24 hours I asked her to give me a shot. After we were engaged and moved in together, she encouraged me to quit cooking to write full time, and supported me financially and otherwise while I spent nine months without any real income before I got hired as a staff writer for an alt-weekly.
Later, she coached me through my anxiety over whether I was ready to become a father, right up until I realized the decision was well behind us. (“Are you ever going to feel ready?” seems pretty much to be the right question for nearly any guy in that situation. The answer always appears to be no. Which means, “no time like the present,” I guess.) She’s relentlessly encouraged me to quit drinking, which, assuming it sticks this time, will be among the most significant positive choices I’ve ever made. And I’m (mostly) a grown up now, finally in a position to support her financially and otherwise while she attempts to establish her post-university career.
That long confession would be my way of explaining to commenter “acidbill” that when I discuss the apparent rise of male fairy-tale fantasies of being saved by a woman, I’m not trying to make fun of the men in question. I’m one of them. For those not paying attention to the comments sections of these posts, after I noted that Kay Hymowitz’s interpretation of Knocked Up as a fairy tale in which the handsome princess saves the poor dude-sel in distress, acidbill wrote:
I find the idea that men being “rescued” by women is somehow a bad thing, or that the men are “like, way stupid, dude,” to be unrealistic. Men learning things, regardless of their source, is good. I think the fact that men who learn from women, or are positively influenced by relationships with women, are ridiculed, speaks volumes about our gender training. It’s as if being ignorant is preferable to learning from someone who we’re wrongly taught to believe is innately inferior (a woman.)
Other than wondering if acidbill went to school at the University of 1940, where he was apparently taught that women are innately inferior, I don’t have much to say except to point to my own biography to make the obvious point that, like, of course you aren’t way stupid to learn from whomever is doing the teaching, dude.
But it is interesting that increasingly it isn’t just a fact that many men are coached into adulthood by significant others, but that they are fantasizing about it and making it a major theme of guy-centric pop culture products. Historically, the plotline of fairy tales and romance novels has been that a woman, powerless to affect her own dire circumstances independently (enslaved by wicked step-sisters, fugitive from a wicked and magical step-mother, semi-permanently asleep, destined to marry — or already married to — the wrong man) needs the handsome, charming prince or loveable rogue to sweep her away and give her a better life. Nothing wrong with marrying up, for anyone, I don’t think, but the feminist critique would traditionally be that though women are the lead characters in these stories, they are either passive (Snow White, Cinderella) or wicked (stepmothers, stepsisters). A professor sums up some of that critique over here:
Feminist criticism and re-visioning of fairy tales has centered on exposing the gender ideology that is perpetuated in tales. Criticism has focused on the passivity of young girls waiting to be rescued, the encoded binaries in a text that equate beauty with goodness, the representation of evil stepmothers, and the closures which seal a girl’s dependency on a prince.
It’s for the same reasons, acidbill (can I call you acid? Your full handle seems so formal), that one might find a growing rise in helpless male characters awaiting a good woman to kiss them and wake them up from their culture of adolescence alarming, or at least interesting.
This is the first of three posts considering Knocked Up, male fairy tales and related matters. Tomorrow: The Handsome Prince didn’t have much in the way of personality, either.
Legong: I know I am replying to this pathetic, racist statement a little late and the whole ignorant rant probably doesn’t even deserve a reply. Wanhenglo, if we were all to generalise about...
Legong: I know I am replying to this pathetic, racist statement a little late and the whole ignorant rant probably doesn’t even deserve a reply. Wanhenglo, if we were all to generalise about...
Sky Goodden: This is startling, refreshing, overdue, and damn good. Thank you, Shary.
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Seenloitering: The “gender analysis” in this article is upside down. Marie Calloway is a threat to the status quo because she threatens the myth that women are morally superior, above...
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Guest: I didn’t want babies or a period any more. I KNEW without a doubt I did not want children so I had been asking for a hysterectomy since I was 19. I finally got it at 39. My...
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