Without feeling like you’re proposing to yourself, but still feeling empowered in your relationship, how did you discuss or plan the topic?
Engaged/married progressive women: how did you broach the topic of engagement?
r/AskWomen
Without feeling like you’re proposing to yourself, but still feeling empowered in your relationship, how did you discuss or plan the topic?
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Sat down and had a talk with my partner about what we both wanted for the future. I didn’t propose to myself, but we both made it clear what our desires were for going forward/if we got married/engaged. Thankfully I have a respectful partner so he respected my wishes when he proposed.
Just discussions about the future. What we both wanted career-wise, how long I wanted to stay at my current job, etc. and asked him the same things. Broached the topic of marriage and we mutually agreed on a general time frame. I also made sure to tell him that I wanted to get married in a certain month (which he already knew) and that I would need at least a year to plan the wedding (which surprised him) so that he understood if he wanted us to get married at a specific time he’d need to propose at least a year prior to that.
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It wasn’t a single conversation but a lot of them over the years. Honestly I think my (now) husband broached the subject more/first lol
I was living with my boyfriend for more than a year and dating for 2-3 years, and rent was going up on our city apartment. We had a talk about long term plans, marriage, kids, where we want to live. Engagement came up, and we agreed we’re both ready. He asked how I’d like to do it. Do I want a surprise ring and proposal? Would I like to go pick out a ring together? I wanted to pick it out together, and then we staged the proposal at a music festival with all of our friends. It was still magical even though I knew it was coming. And I like that he gave me the choice on how I would like to do things.
It was just something we slowly started to talk about over the years. I made it clear that I was open to marriage but after I finished Uni.
He is American, being legally married made importing him MUCH easier lol
Im not pro marriage but I am not anti marriage. I’m very apathetic about it. Nothing has changed since getting married (not even my last name). I wouldn’t change anything for the world! We aren’t even having children.
I didn’t need to. We started talking about our plans for the future which included relocating, and we discussed that we wanted to make sure that we got married before we moved to make things simple for us employment and insurance-wise. That led us directly into discussing when we wanted to get married and started the planning process for the wedding. There was no separate engagement or discussion of it.
My husband (Then Boyfriend) and I talked about it long before we actually got engaged. I was the one that initially brought it up, we had gotten to a point where I was spending more time at his place than I was at mine. We talked about what it meant for both of our lives currently and how we both saw the future.
I will add I wasn’t going to let him have all the fun of proposing to me, I wanted to propose to him as well so I did. We both wear an engagement band and wedding band.
“I will not take the job before signing a contract, you want me to act the wife part, I want the ring.” I said it from the beggining of the relationship. I told him I was dating to marry, I was “too old” to waste time.
We didnt even lived together before marriage because I simply would not take on the social responsabilities without the legal benefits. I know this is not the norm nowadays but it was my boundary.
We sat down, put our cards on the table, and we decided on a plan. He asked what kind of ring I wanted, I told him color, size and shape (nothing fancy, I wanted something I could wear everyday without being scared of getting robbed). He got what I wanted, he proposed at my favorite artist’s concert. I got him a watch.
We paid each other’s wedding bands, and we had a courthouse wedding.
We decided we were going to get married within 5 minutes of meeting each other. I have a hard rule of not moving in before 6 months together (broke that) and my partner proposed after a full year of dating and getting to know one another. This was during COVID and the original plan was dashed by a scare (worked in the morgue, we were all constantly in a state of testing) so it happened on a remote mountain 🏔️
We talked about it, decided we wanted to get engaged, bought the ring together. Told my family and friends we were engaged before the proposal even lol
I just mentioned how we’re gonna have a baby and how I want to have a cool wedding story for our kid, and an engagement/wedding ring to pass down to her. He was already planning it but didn’t think I believed in marriage
I want a ring before you live with me because if I’m changing up and effectively disrupting my life for you (I’m a very routine person) then I want to know you’re whole heartedly in it for the long haul. For me, that is a sign of commitment. And I do not want to have to drag you to it, if you don’t want to, that’s fine, give me your timeline as to what you want and we’ll see whether that’s something I can live with or whether we can meet in the middle.
Whether we get legally married or how we mix finances will depend on how the laws of the country are currently working (we don’t want kids, otherwise my view would be different), but I want something solid there before I migrate the metaphorical eggs into one basket.
We have similar values and share the same perspectives when it comes to the practicalities, not just the romance,.so we have already talked as to what compromises we each would have to make in ‘married/live together forever’ life and whether we’re ok with those or not.
I’m short, we didn’t really talk about engagement proposal itself until it came to ‘hey I think it would be nice if we did it at X location, what are your thoughts on that?’ him: ‘i mean, I thought I already did on the couch but sure we can do it at X location if you want something formal’. Talk about the marriage first, the engagement talk follows naturally after.
Early on in the relationship, like just a few months in, I’d always say I never wanted to get married. I explained all the different reasons why… and if that was a dealbreaker for someone, we clearly were not meant to be. My HUSBAND (lol I did get married) was completely fine with this and about a year and a half into a relationship turned over to me while we were watching TV in bed and said that if I ever wanted to, he would marry me.
I decided that we would get married, just the two of us, about four years into our relationship. I made sure he would still good with that, which was perfectly fine with him. My decision was based on the fact that I wanted to make sure I had every legal right when it came to my husband and his family did not. I wanted to make sure that if something happened to him, I could make all of his medical decisions without any kind of fight. We were already basically living like we were married so it wasn’t really a big change for us, we just signed the papers.
We were talking about the future. Prior to this we had already spoken about getting married, but when hadn’t really been discussed yet. I jokingly asked him what his availability was for the rest of his life, and he proposed.
It was just something that occasionally came up. One, it just really felt like the relationship was heading in that direction and the idea of not eventually marrying would’ve seemed odd; and two, my husband is British and I’m Canadian and we were long distance for over four years and we knew that marriage would be part of the plan for living together eventually. There was no big engagement moment, just that when he put in his notice at his job and started planning the move and we knew spousal sponsorship was how we were going about things, we realised that meant we were effectively engaged lol. (Finally just got married on the 17th.)
Welp since we’re often associated with being masculine. I told my spouse marriage/engagement is one day/thing I wanna feel like a little princess but I also told him I will propose as well so we both get engagement rings which i think is cute. Haha.
It comes up naturally…. You talk about the future, your future as a couple, someone says something that implies marriage, you feel it out… etc
I don’t remember the first time my future husband & i broached the topic but it came up hundreds of times. Never a formal sit down discussion, just… walking home from the train, imagining what our lives would be like in five years. By the time he proposed I knew it was coming
I told him I want kids in the next two years, and I love him and would like to have them with him. I have my eggs frozen in a country where I need to be married to fertilize them, so if he also loved me and wants kids with me we need to discuss marriage. He said okay and proposed three months later.
It didn’t feel like I was proposing to myself it felt like I was explaining to my partner what I wanted my future to look like, and making sure he wanted to be a part of it.
My partners and I had planned our wedding date years in advance. We didn’t really do a proposal/engagement phase. I’ve chosen and bought all three of the rings in my wedding set myself.
I told the guy I was talking to exactly what I was looking for in a relationship and where I wanted it to go. I was ready to get married and that was the purpose of me dating at all. I just let him know that if he was the kind of guy who doesn’t believe in marriage, or if he didn’t feel like he was ready for that in his own life, we shouldn’t bother to waste each other’s time. I was really sweet about it, but I just laid everything out on the line before we were even officially dating. Once we started dating it was really to see if we wanted to marry each other, not to just date and see where it went. I wouldn’t even move in until we were officially engaged because it would just make it harder to break up if we decided not to get married. What would the point be? That isn’t for everyone, but I’m in my 40s and I’ve done the long term go nowhere relationships and it just isn’t what I wanted again, so I was just honest about it. I didn’t have anything to lose, I wasn’t even dating him at that point, we were just getting to know each other. We dated for about 2.5 years, engaged for one, and just married like a month ago
Marriage was a topic of conversation from day one of (the romantic portion of) our relationship. We’d been platonic friends for about eight months before that.
Background, he had been engaged before, to a woman who died before the wedding could happen. He took a couple of years to grieve and recover, and eventually re-entered the dating pool and landed on me. He told me on day one that he was looking for a life partner, not just a casual fling, so I had an “out” at the beginning if I wasn’t on the same page.
For my part, it wasn’t important to me to wait until marriage for sex, but I wanted to know that marriage was on the table. That was one of my conditions for starting a sexual relationship. It took me a few months to gather the courage (he’s my first and only partner). But the night I offered my sexual consent for the first time, that was an implicit statement that I was open to a proposal – which happened a few months after that.
We’re getting married in two weeks and I couldn’t be happier!
You talk about your relationship and future and plan something that is true to who you both are. For me and my husband. We talked about our relationship, our future, what we wanted a lot. While many marriage and weddings traditions in North America are steeped in misogyny – we knew we wanted to be together and to do that we had get to married for visa reasons. It was also important to my husband that we get married because he felt it still signified something serious. He proposed where we had our first kiss with a non traditional ring he had designed with a jeweler friend of mine. We got married 6 weeks later in a self officiated ceremony with just the 2 of us on the anniversary of our first date and then promptly packed up and moved 5000 miles and an ocean away.
It came naturally when talking about the future. We discussed eventually moving in together, getting married, buying a condo, having kids, ideally in that order.
We talked about it a few times before the proposal, just for symbolism he gave me a ring, we had a weekend getaway and had a picnic on the beach, it was sweet and intimate, and we both knew that we were going to get engaged that weekend, no surprises, no pressure and no other people besides ourselves.
Within the first week of dating, I told him I wanted to be married one day. It came up casually in conversation often, such as noting food we thought we’d want at our wedding “someday”. After about 3 years of dating, he asked me one day to go ring shopping, and that was that. I made him officially propose once we bought the ring, but he knew the answer was already yes.
We were discussing our finances over a spreadsheet, plotting out our projected earnings over a few years and our big savings goals. So we were talking like “Ok we want to buy our second house which we should be able to afford in 5 years’ time if we assume we can save this much and have this much equity. Because we want a bigger house before we have kids and we want to be married for a few years before we have kids so if we want to be married next year that means we should probably be engaged… Now?”
And my now-husband turns to me and says, “Cool send me a picture of the engagement ring you want and I’ll plan a proposal.” So I did, he ordered it, and when it arrived 6 weeks later, he proposed.
We moved very quickly. Moved in at 3 months, engaged at 6 months, married at 1.5 years. We talked and agreed we were both all in and ready to get married. We picked out rings together and I knew exactly when and where he was going to propose. He actually couldn’t decide where so he proposed twice.
I didn’t feel like I proposed to myself. We just decided together to get married which feels like empowerment to me. We are truly teammates and equals.
I never wanted to get married until I had an epiphany about my SO and changed my mind. I went to him and said “My thoughts on marriage have changed. If you ever want to get married, I’d like to marry you.”
A couple of months later, he said, “We should look for a ring.” That’s basically how it went.
Me and my husband very early on spoke about what we wanted in the future, he actually bought it up first. We got engaged after 1 year and 8 months together but before we got engaged he would call me his wife, he would send me morning messages mentioning about how he’s excited for our future together etc. It did fell very natural to be able to talk to him about what I wanted. We both wanted 2 kids and marriage and now after 7 years together, 3 years married we have 2 kids.
My grandmother was dying and I told him I wanted to be able to tell her I was engaged before she passed. We had been together for 3 years, living together for two (some of which was covid) and worked through most of our issues (the normal ones that come from living with another person). From there, we talked about what engagement meant to each of us, and agreed that a long engagement was prefered (again, covid).
I think the most progressive thing either partner can do is clearly state their wants and needs, when they arise, and talk through them together. It’s not an ultimatum, saying “I’ve been thinking about _ a lot and would like to __. I realize you may have not given this as much thought as I have, can we have a conversation about it in a month?” Gives them the space to think through it and talk through it with others they trust, like family or close friends.
IDK we talked about getting married? Do you want to, etc. I was divorced and didn’t really have an opinion. Told him if he wanted to get married, then he could ask. He asked me to send him rings I liked, bought one when he was ready, and then proposed when he wanted to.
“Plan” the topic?
Uhm….we talked about wanting to get married later down the road quite early in our relationship (his idea actually, and he was the one bringing it up). That’s it. We talked about it and agreed upon marrying later, thus we were engaged.
Yeah like others said it’s an ongoing conversation. Engagement shouldn’t be a surprise in my opinion, just exactly when and how it happens. The concept of when you both want to get married should be openly discussed and agreed upon, like everything else important (kids, finances, moving, etc).
I told him I would let him know when he was allowed to propose.
We’d been together for 8 years at that point and we’re both getting very close to being done with school and needing to figure out what was next. So we had a conversation where I (nicely) told him he either needed to decide on marrying me or I was going to find someone who fit my values. Long engagement? Sure. Simple courthouse wedding? Fine. But I wasn’t going to move potentially out of state without that legal protection (his earning potential was always going to be more than mine so we would have prioritized his job prospects). Been married 12 years now. Together for almost 21.
I told him the first few weeks of dating that I was dating to get married. I was upfront. I didn’t waiver but I didn’t pressure him. I told him that I told all the guys I dated since turning 30 they had 18-24 months to figure out if I was “the one”. I was clear I would walk away (you have to mean it and you can’t use it as a threat- EVER if you argue). I’d check in and we’d talk extensively like we always did about values and what we want in life and then he eventually let me know he really did want to get married to me. He had some job issues so I told him I am willing to give him some time to sort himself out as long as he was still serious about us.
I was proposed to 2 years and two weeks into our relationship and we get married next May. He’s the best.
We talked about our thoughts on marriage.
I let them know how long I wanted to date before I would entertain marriage (3 years) then we got married at the 6 year mark.
No proposing really happened, it was more of a let’s do this kinda thing.
We got married at the court house and bought our rings online. (He did get down on one knee to give me the ring, then I did the same for him.)
He’s amazing and I couldn’t be happier! 😀
Plus we get to save all the money we were going to use for a wedding and use it on a honeymoon to Japan.
My husband is an accountant and married couples get better tax returns lol. Also, we knew we wanted children and neither of us wanted our children to have different last names to us. We talked about both things frankly and I helped him pick a ring (we even returned the first one because I ended up not liking it on my hand). There was never a moment of “surprise” but I’m not keen on surprise.
We had been together about 6 months and I told my now husband that I know we are dating seriously, but what was his timeline for engagement, since we are both in our mid thirties. (We had already said “I love you” at this point) He told me he’d propose to me immediately if I was ready for it. That he’s already known he’d ask me to marry him. He asked me what type of ring I’d like. I told him a round diamond solitaire. As simple a setting as possible. One month later, while we were on vacation together, he proposed.