| Rating: | ★★★★ |
| Category: | Books |
| Genre: | Biographies & Memoirs |
| Author: | Kamy Wicoff |
Not a must read for all couples, but definitely would bring a chuckle or two for those in the midst of their wedding planning.
P.S. This book actually made me enjoy the movie "Enchanted" more - go figure. :p
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AN EXCERPT FROM I DO BUT I DON'T
The Proposal: Part One
I was determined not to think about it. To think about it, to obsess about it, really, would have made me one of those women—the ones who insistently inquire about the love lives of people they have just met because they are keeping score, the ones who want a ring on their finger (the bigger the better) to communicate to the world that they are wanted, they are wife, that they are more powerful than the single women still looking—or so they smugly assume—for what they’ve got. You know who I’m talking about. The Bridezillas. The Others. The ones who want a wedding so they can be the center of attention for a year and a star for a day.
But that was not me! In 1999, the summer I turned twenty-seven, my boyfriend Andrew turned thirty, and our relationship turned three, I could say without hesitation that I had my priorities straight. I knew that the partnership we had built together, which had taken more determination and fortitude than I had ever understood it would, was what mattered. So I was not obsessing about when Andrew might officially propose marriage to me, because to fixate on when and where we dressed up in fancy clothes and made our love legal would have been to reduce my feelings to tawdry marriage-lust.
At least that was what I kept telling myself as Andrew and I approached the Napa Valley that June in our rental car, headed for a romantic, vineyard-adjacent B&B for a three-day, three-year-anniversary weekend that my man had planned all by himself. This was notable since Andrew is generally reluctant to plan things on a Thursday for a Friday, his usual excuse being that his investment banking job—definitely my stiffest competition for his time, since with work he appeared to have no commitment-issues—might require his last-minute attention. My mother had certainly noted this and was sure a proposal was in the works. She was maddeningly free of conflicted feelings or shame when it came to admitting that she wanted a ring and a wedding, and soon. While I spent hours defending Andrew and our mature, mutually understood intention to marry when the time was right, my mother said things like, “Didn’t you always tell me that you wouldn’t date someone for more than three years if you weren’t engaged yet?”
“Mother! I said I wouldn’t date someone for more than three years if I knew that I was never going to marry that person! And Andrew and I are going to get married!”
My mother, ignoring this, had then added with flinty high-noon panache befitting a Texas mother on the hunt for her eldest daughter’s wedding, “The three years are up.”
The three years are up?! This from the woman who—in suburban San Antonio, Texas, no less—tried to convince me not to start shaving my legs in the seventh grade because it would mean a lifetime of enslavement to a sexist convention?
Perhaps I should have reminded myself that my mother had always shaved her legs. And in the car on the way to Napa I had to admit that she had gotten to me. Something had. Because I had bet all my girlfriends fifty dollars at poker night two days before that he was going to do it that weekend. My friend Jessica, a co-worker of mine at the television news show I produced for and then my only married friend, had immediately jumped in with a concerned look and counseled caution. “Don’t go into it like that,” she’d said. If she were Andrew, she would wait until we were both settled in together in New York to propose. I’d tried to conceal my startled dismay. She was talking about an event more than seven months away. Andrew and I were both living in L.A. at the time, but I had recently been accepted to a graduate writing program in New York to begin that fall and in perhaps the biggest commitment-statement of our relationship Andrew had agreed to follow me there in January. He wasn’t going to propose until January? Was Jessica serious? I was not sure she understood my situation. Her husband had proposed to her after they’d only been together a year—and he was ten years older than she was, and had probably never said to her, as Andrew liked to say to me, What’s the rush? We have time, sweetie! We have all the time in the world!
I’d attempted to keep up my I’m not one of those women front that night, but I had the disconcerting feeling that everybody found it difficult to believe. Did I believe it? I was trying to. But I had to admit that I’d been ready to get engaged for many months by then, while Andrew seemed incredibly happy with things just the way they were. After all, he was getting free milk. I, the proverbial cow, had moved into his house that March, and while it was only “temporary,” since I had docked my emergency-flotation-device (also known as the contents of my own apartment) in a storage locker in Culver City for safe-keeping until I moved to New York that fall on my own, in my mind this symbolic abandonment of my single, independent life meant that we were going to be together forever. I assumed that it meant the same thing to him. I realized, however, with some distress, that I hadn’t been able to have a very direct conversation with him about this. But it seemed to me that some things could be safely left unsaid, things that had been understood between us from the beginning.
We both knew, for example, that for us forever meant marriage. We’d begun our relationship knowing that at some point we would either marry or break up. We believed in marriage, and while it helped that our parents were still together after nearly thirty years, according to The National Marriage Project the vast majority of Americans our age still believe in marriage despite the fact that half grew up seeing it wrecked by divorce. Interestingly, a gay woman recently captured the essence of my feelings on the subject. “Why do I want to marry?” Donna Minkowitz wrote for The Nation. “For love. I believe that, in this world where all we have is our own mind, groping toward something good, two minds together—committed to each other’s happiness and passionate about wanting to continue their relation—add up to something holy…Why make it legal?...If I take the risk and marry, I need and want recognition by society that this person is part of my family, in fact the closest part.” Leave it to those excluded by marriage to make such a thoughtful case for it. Leave it to those entitled to marry to make a rule like this: two people who believe in marriage can’t get married until the one with the penis officially proposes to the one with the boobs.
I didn’t really want to think about why this was. But that was another thing that went without saying: Andrew wanted to ask me, and I wanted to be asked. In this I was not alone: I have polled legions of women on this question and have only rarely heard otherwise. “I believe a woman should be able to propose marriage,” Abbey, a thirty-year-old historian from Texas told me, “but something in me would find it very hard to go against such an established tradition.” Michelle, a twenty-eight-year-old writer from New York, put it this way: “I wanted a speech. I wanted one knee. I wanted to be surprised. Given the examples of TV, movies and books, this seemed what I ‘deserved,’ or what a great, sensitive guy was ‘supposed to do.’” My friend Gina simply said, “I wouldn’t need to propose if found the right person.” In a way I felt the same. If I proposed it would be because I “had” to. If I proposed it would be coercion, entrapment, desperation. If he proposed? Romance.
I would never have said, however, that the decision to marry was under Andrew’s control just because he was the man. It was simply that the timing was at his discretion. In my mind the proposal was strictly a formality—a moment we both anticipated and valued which would clearly be diminished if it came in response to pressure from me. I was determined not to be one of those nagging, passive-aggressive women, either! After all, when I realized he was The One and was visited by the full weight of that messianic term—which for me primarily consisted of the realization that Andrew might be the last man I was ever going to sleep with—I’d had a complete meltdown! Women aren’t supposed to have meltdowns about lifelong monogamy. Women are supposed to knock each other flat on dance floors trying to catch bridal bouquets, while men react with indifference to the garter-throwing portion of the evening, arms folded amusedly.
I knew, however, that I had not reached my girls-with-Barbies, happily-ever-after ending to the story by betraying the girl in me who had always ripped the heads off of Barbies. This comforted me. For awhile this had also made me feel kind of bad ass.
In the car on the way to Napa, however—as I found myself slipping into reveries about calling my family with the happy news and jerking myself out of them chidingly—it was clear: my bad ass was starting to go numb. And because I did not want to propose but to be proposed to, only Andrew had the power to wake it up again. And that wasn’t very bad ass at all.
Lately this “ritual,” this “formality,” this bit about his being the proposer and my being the proposee, had begun to seem like a lot more than a formality. It had begun to seem like real substantial power that had been placed squarely into Andrew’s manly hands. And lately it had begun to seem that for all my bluster and despite all my efforts, the gap between me and those women was closing in fast.
I remember, during that time in my life, feeling very alone. And very crazy. I alternated between denial (I don’t care about getting engaged!), frustration with Andrew (shouldn’t the man I want to marry want to marry me so much he’d ask before I had to feel this way?), exasperation with my mother (you’re the one who always told me that in this brave new world, marriage would not be the most important thing I did!), rescue-fantasies (Andrew will ask any minute, and then I will feel guilty for doubting him), and self-loathing (any woman with a shred of dignity, a fulfilling career and a love like mine would not be pining for a proposal like a dolled-up, scheming little Rules girl!). Every time I tried to talk about what I was feeling I would quickly stop myself short because each emotion, alone, felt untrue to the whole. Worse, each emotion felt like a betrayal—either of Andrew, of me, or of us.
Countless others of my friends have felt this way too, and on this subject even my closest confidants—women with whom I can usually talk about anything, the kind of women rarely at a loss for words—stumble, blurt, retract and withhold. My friend Caroline, a sharp-witted reporter who dated her boyfriend Chris for six years before he finally asked her to marry him, spent many hours exhausting herself as she attempted to justify, apologize for and express her desire to get married while at the same time trying to understand, criticize and defend her boyfriend’s continued stalling. It was hard. Eventually our conversations about the matter were few and far between, and having been in the same place myself, she didn’t have to tell me why.
Like me, Caroline felt split in two. Part of her cared so much about getting married she could easily have hailed from the 1950s. Part of her cared so much about resisting the tyrannical pressures put on women to marry she could easily have burned Brides. (Fuck the 1950s!) Neither side of herself told the whole story, but finding a comfortable place that was true to both sides proved practically impossible. Another friend of mine, a thirty-year-old screenwriter who has been dating her boyfriend, a thirty-one-year old PR executive, for four years, recently attempted to talk to me about how she was feeling and found herself caught in the same trap—and all over the map.
“I can’t see clearly,” April started by saying. “I don’t know how I feel. But I do know that it’s embarrassing! I’m embarrassed by wanting to be married. I don’t want to be the nag!” At the same time, she quickly pointed out, it was very difficult to accept that her boyfriend could see the situation so differently than she did, and refuse to propose while also insisting he loved her. “I never thought men and women were that different before,” she said. “But they are. But then it isn’t like Jon is some big selfish jerk! He so amazing, and sweet. I hate even having this conversation with you because I feel like I’m betraying him, but on the other hand I want him to be courageous for me, to do a brave thing. He gets the cow and the milk and I don’t even get a little cheese. Isn’t that a disgusting expression! The cow and the milk! My parents say that!”
“Wasn't he DYING to marry me?” my friend Michelle remembers thinking. “We would talk about it a little, but it was frustrating. I hated bringing it up—or the fact that it was always me who brought it up. I couldn't believe that he'd turned me into “that girl”—that girl who's pressuring her guy to marry her; that pathetic, desperate girl. I felt frustrated and powerless, and I hated it. I hated that in order for my life—and our relationship—to take the next step, he had to make the move. I was playing this passive role in my own life! I think it may be the only time in my life that that was the case. If I wanted something done, I could do it myself; if I wanted a change, I could change it. But when it came to marriage, suddenly this enormous life decision was out of my hands.”
No wonder April, Caroline, Michelle and I, and so many women like us, felt so crazy. The daughters of baby-boomers, we had come of age in a crazy in-between time, the feminism-saved-us/feminists-are-lesbians 1980s. We were members of what my friend Sharon has dubbed “the true sandwich generation:” the generation of women sandwiched between the feminist revolutions of the sixties and seventies (which had largely subsided from view by the time I reached adolescence in the 1980s), movements which had given us a sense of freedom, entitlement and power we mostly took for granted, and the reality that women—particularly when it comes to marriage and relationships—still find their freedom, entitlement, and power curtailed considerably.
The modern rules of engagement are a veritable thicket of the contradictions “sandwiched” women are expected to juggle. Women who have learned to demonstrate their strength by taking responsibility for major life decisions are told that when it comes to this major life decision, they can best demonstrate their strength by not “forcing the issue” themselves. (A Glamour article from 1999, the year of my engagement-discontent, addressed this contradiction cheerfully by saying, “Welcome to the passenger seat, ladies!” and cautioning Ms. Can-Do to accept the fact that “Strength, assertiveness and independence won’t win this race.”) Women who have been taught that they don’t need marriage any more than men do find that the men they’re involved with are mind-bogglingly, maddeningly free of anything but the vaguest desire to marry “someday,” which makes it difficult to believe that men and women begin from remotely equal positions when it comes to getting wed. (Does anyone doubt that the teary, hysterical female hopefuls on The Bachelor feel far more desperation about marriage than the cocky, mostly-dry-eyed male contestants of The Bachelorette?) Women who were taught that romantic, traditional proposals are harmless in a post-feminist world find that in fact the proposal still has powerful, significant meaning as part of a system where men have remained the choosers, while women have remained the chosen—roles that undermine a couple’s equality and give men a power that women simply don’t have.
I was straining under the weight of these contradictions. But I really didn’t want to think about them. Because more than anything I wanted to believe I could have it both ways: that I could have my romantic, traditional proposal—which I knew I needed and didn’t want to know why, especially if answering that question might threaten the gratification of my need—and my dignity, equality, and strength. I felt it was my right to have both, in fact, and this feeling was also characteristic of a woman of my generation. Ally McBeal-style, I wanted to stamp my foot and say, “I want it all and don’t you dare tell me I can’t have it!” I wanted to use feminist rhetoric, in other words, as a way to demand my right to pre-feminist pleasures—and to justify my need for them.
And what about Andrew? Did he have any idea what I was going through? Did he feel like a sandwiched man, too? He had certainly proved capable of doing the same thing I was doing: using feminist rhetoric when it suited him, and falling back on tradition when it suited him, too. Whenever I screwed up my righteous, this only-the-man-can-ask-thing-is-totally-unfair anger and made a comment to him along those lines, Andrew would quickly appeal to the very source of my outburst: my sense of post-feminist, independent-woman pride. “Sweetie!” he would cry, his dimpled cheeks feigning amused shock, “What’s happening to you? Are you really so worried about what everybody else thinks? Aren’t you confident enough in us (code: in yourself) to let things happen at our (code: my?) pace?” It was hard to argue with this. Hadn’t I learned that a truly strong woman was strong enough to let her man be a man? And his genuine, ardent belief in my self-confidence and strength meant a lot to me. Never mind that Andrew had no intention whatsoever of parting with his male privilege as proposer; to be perfectly traditional in that way suited him very well.
Both of us, then, were guilty of using feminism and traditionalism for our own purposes in a mix that was often inconsistent. But I couldn’t help feeling that I was bearing a disproportionate burden for the contradictions between old and new, and that he had conserved a disproportionate amount of the power. We both wanted our romantic proposal and our equality too, but we had failed to consider that as the party the tradition was traditionally intended to disempower, it would fall mostly to me to make our participation in it graceful for both of us. It did not contradict Andrew’s sense of himself to propose marriage, but it contradicted my sense of myself to wait around for his proposal….but then again it fit in perfectly with my sense of myself…but then again it was insulting…and oh there I was, sandwiched again.
As the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild has argued, modern American marriage unites people who’ve changed less (men), with people who’ve changed more (women), and as such it is not always a haven from the pressures of the larger world but instead “a major shock absorber” for the tensions of the society, which bear unevenly on men and women—and, in my humble opinion, make women more crazy.
Of course there was a way—which I could see very clearly—for Andrew to make our participation in the proposal-tradition graceful and smooth. He could ASK before I lost my mind. Couldn’t he see, I wondered as I struggled to keep my head above water in a sea of contradictions, that all he had to do was step up, put on his romantic-hero suit, and throw me the diamond life-ring that would get both of us out of this mess?
I didn’t know. But I hoped so. I was getting tired of swimming.
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