Suppose You Propose

The moment of proposing marriage and presenting the ring is one of the few times left when a man can be theatrical and poetic about love without massive amounts of feminine eye-rolling ensuing. It's also a moment when mild amounts of sneakiness are encouraged, and now that I'm coming up on my first anniversary, I'm a little sad that I can't do it again. We live in a tragically practical society that doesn't value symbolism acted out.

With my wife, I can tell her that she's really pretty and special and give her chocolate, and she likes that, but more involved attempts at romance, such as telling her hair flows like my favorite violin concerto makes her gag and then she says "silly boy." Such lovely similes, squashed!

But, when I proposed marriage, I got away with a little bit of theater, and I think she liked it. (We are married after all.)

So, men, what can you do to have a little fun with this special moment? And, how can you do it in a manner that reflects your faith and our tradition? I can offer some advice here as one guy who did it...

First, make sure that the answer is probably going to be yes before you go ring shopping. This Youtube video is a pretty good example of the consequences of hoping that a shaky relationship will suddenly be made solid when you wow her by whipping out a ring:



It's going to hurt, walking away with a fuzzy basketball team mascot as your only friend to comfort you.

For starters, talk to the girl about it! Choosing one moment to break forth with your declaration that you've been carrying a torch for your best friend ever since you met in Sunday school at the age of 7 and she tackled you on the playground and now you want to spent the rest of your life together is likely to freak her out.

Surprise is a good thing, but don't shock her. Use surprise in moderation. Surprise at proposing should be like taking her for a walk in the woods and you come around a corner and there's a hidden gorgeous waterfall. Catapulting a ring at her, totally unexpected, is the equivalent of throwing her in the waterfall.

After you get a good sense of her interest in marriage, find out if there are any important family traditions to be respected. I've heard that in Serbian families, the man should propose at the end of a big formal dinner with the bride's family... which the hopeful young man has to convince the bride's family to put on. And, trying to convince your sweetie's mother to spend hours laboring in the kitchen is not something that sneakiness is going to help. In such a formal setting, talking to the parents about the proposal would probably help.

In my case, I tried to ask for Miri's father's blessing the first time she took me home to Boise, but Miri wouldn't let me, as she thought it was too soon. Two weeks later, her father came to visit her San Francisco, and the first thing he said to me was, "What's this I hear about my daughter telling you that you can't ask for a blessing? Who wears the pants in this relationship?" The result of this conversation was that I'd need a blessing to do anything other than marry Miri.

If there aren't any major barriers to picking your moment, then you can embark upon some romantic subterfuge, a term I just invented for sneakily getting the perfect moment prepared.

In the early months of my relationship with Miri, I had told her a good 30 or 40 times that I'd like to marry her, and she said, "When you ask me for real, you have to surprise me." I needed something more surprising than a ring.

Here, the principle of positive distraction is helpful. Positive distraction means she's engaged in doing something she really likes and she's not paying attention to her boyfriend reaching for the square object in his pocket.

Here's another video that illustrates the basic concept:



Getting a trained dolphin to carry the ring is probably a bit more work than you're interested in doing, but I hope it makes the basic point clear. This girl isn't expecting a ring, she's playing with dolphins, which is a really out-of-the-ordinary experience that takes our minds off of the future. This ceremony gets started suddenly at a moment that's already pretty interesting.

The way we celebrate significant events, such as engagements, tells the story, in ceremony form, of who we are. We as Orthodox Christians should be able to understand this better than anyone, as every word of the Divine Liturgy connects our humanity to Christ's humanity and deifies our humanity through prayer and sacrament. A proposal doesn't need to be that cosmic, but it should tell a story. The girl in the dolphin proposal video is probably a dolphin lover. I'm guessing the guy in the basketball proposal really liked the Houston Rockets. If your sweetie is a choir singer, you could get the choir director to make the choir practice "Behold the bridegroom comes at midnight" during which you can sneak in and drop to one knee.

Connecting this moment with your faith

It's natural that we want an event such as an engagement to not only express our love for the girl, but also our love for God. Christians would naturally look to the Bible for a good example of courtship. We're supposed to bear witness to Christ in our lives, and since He was one of us, we join our life to His, our suffering to His, our death to His, our resurrection to His, our suffering to His, and our courtship to... uh... here's where it gets a little difficult. Jesus didn't really get romantic, and imagining that he did borders on Gnosticism.

The Bible doesn't really have courtship stories of men and women getting acquainted and "clicking" the way we do. There's the story of Jacob laboring for seven years to marry Rachel, but the years seems as but a few days because of his love for her, which is pretty romantic, but then accidentally marrying the girl who you thought was your future sister-in-law isn't so romantic.

The Old Testament prophecies are full of the imagery of marriage as God describes Israel as His bride, whom he pursues and entices as a bridegroom pursuing her. But, this metaphor, when it appears, is usually accompanied by accusations of adultery (idolatry) and God explaining his chastisement for that (barbarian invasions, hot rocks falling from the skies, etc.) which isn't so romantic.

This isn't to say that the Bible can't provide guidance here, but there isn't a good parable that fits this occasion, really. Romance as we know it, didn't figure in much to the cultures in which the Bible was written.

But, we still want this to be a Christian moment. There are plenty of good ways to do that. Here's my story. The setup for my romantic subterfuge took a couple of months.

It started in Kiev, Ukraine, when I went to a shop selling churches books and supplies at the Caves Monastery. On a shelf behind the counter, I saw two silver wedding crowns. I thought, "I'd really like to have those for Miri." Now, I have to stop to explain that I'd been seeing Miri for about a week and a half at that point. Taking off on a trip to Ukraine, where they pride themselves on having the world's prettiest girls, right after starting a relationship, might not have been the best idea (I was good, I promise), but I reserved the tickets at the beginning of September, and Miri and I had our first date on the 21st of September. So, I abandoned my lady just after meeting her, which made me really, really miss her. I thought, "These crowns would be a perfect wedding gift." So I bought them.

A brief note about wedding crowns for those who aren't Orthodox: When we get married, we have crowns on our heads as way of saying that marriage is a symbol of the Kingdom of Heaven and also to refer to the martyrdom of marriage. (Martyrs wear crowns.) Don't laugh, this is a reference to how St. Paul commands husbands to love their wives as Christ loves the Church, meaning, be willing to give up your life for her. In the Greek Orthodox Church, the crowns are made of branches and flowers, in the Russian Orthodox Church, they are metal and are held above the head of the bride and groom (an odd and uncomfortable tradition, especially for the best man and groomsmen when the groom is 6 feet 9 inches tall). This picture will give an idea:



In the month after I got back to San Francisco, I told Miri about 40 times that I thought we ought to get married. Once, when we were sitting in my apartment, she said, "When you ask me for real, you have to surprise me."

To which I responded, "Oh, you want a surprise? Close your eyes."

"What are you going to do?" she asked suspiciously.

"Just close your eyes." She did, and I pulled out one of the crowns and stuck it on her head. Then I said, "I want you to open your eyes for just a second." And then I took a picture of her.



"Now close your eyes again." And I took the crown and hid it.

"What did you put on my head?" she demanded.

"No, no, you wanted a surprise," I said, and gave her some chocolate.

So that was that step of the plan. A month later, after both parental meetings had gone well, I called up her mother and I said:

"I'd like to e-mail you a photo, but you have to promise to pretend you haven't seen it."

"Okay..." And I sent it. She opened the e-mail and said, "What did you do to her?"

"I bought it for her, only she's never seen it. She doesn't know what was on her head."

"So what do you want me to do?"

"I'm going to make an 8 x 10 print of the photo, and put it in a frame. Then, I want to mail it to you, and then, I want you to mail to her for her birthday present. When she opens it, I'll whip out the crown and stick it on her head and get down on one knee."

My future mother-in-law said she could do that, and she did. I should take a moment here to give a little thought to conspirators in your subterfuge. To create a good positive distraction, you're probably going to need help to make it look real. Her family members and friends make great candidates for conspirators, especially as they'll be able to advise you on sneakiness that will actually work. You'll also need to pick conspirators who can keep a secret. Momtushka did a good job of keeping it from Miri, but, considering that she is a priest's wife, the ROCOR matushka network found out about the engagement a week before Miri did.

Miri's birthday came around a few weeks later. The package arrived at Miri's duplex with a note on it saying "Open this with Thomas." We went out to dinner with two of my friends, and then we went to her house... I'll let a quotation from Miri's letter to her friends explain what happened next:

When we got home, Thomas asked me what I wanted to do, so of course I wanted to open my birthday presents! :) I was required to open his first - a nice warm pair of long underwear - which is actually something I wanted so...cool. My next present was from Mom and Dad and I was told it was actually for both of us and we had to open it together. It was a picture. Of me. In a wedding crown. WHAT THE??? Where did this picture come from??? I was sitting there trying to figure it out, when Thomas reached behind me and put something on my head. Lo, and behold it was the very same wedding crown. And not only that, he had a lovely ring in his hand and asked me to marry him! To put all your minds at ease, I will tell you now that I said yes. :)

So it worked pretty well, the birthday presents providing the positive distraction, the weird picture of herself shocking her, and the magically appearing crown letting her know what this was all about. Miri had actually forgotten about the picture I had taken of her with the odd object on her head, so she was thinking that her parents had created the picture in Photoshop or something.

I'm not claiming exclusive rights to this idea, guys, so you can give it a try, but good luck finding crowns in the United States that won't put you in the poorhouse. And no, you can't borrow mine.

Other (untested) ideas for coming up with a good positive distraction:

• Give her a plate of prosphora to cut up into antidiron, and put the ring box in the center with a sign on it that says, "Will you marry me?" Be there to drop to one knee (and grab the ring).
  
• Ask her priest to call her and ask her to come to church to help with something, and then you can be there with the ring when she comes.
• Tell her that you've been put in charge of flowers at church and that you need her to help you redo the floral arrangements just before a big feast day. Hide the ring in the bouquet you give her to rearrange.

These are just ideas. This list from The Knot wedding Web site will give you another 50 ideas. Some are pretty cheesy, and some require you to be living together first to make it work, so they wouldn't be appropriate, but there are a few that have merit. Pay particular attention to the difference in attitude between the public and private proposal. If your lady is a shy one, the public proposals probably wouldn't be such a good idea.

Finally, I'd like to close with one more Youtube video of a girl hyperventilating when her boyfriend proposes to her during her favorite TV show:



This proposal happened in 2007, about the same time I proposed to Miri. Rand's original intent was to get the ad to air during the Super Bowl, and he had a sponsor lined up to pay for it, but the sponsor backed out at the last minute. So, he paid for a spot on Tacoma's channel 11 during Veronica Mars, his girlfriend's favorite show, as reported in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. (It must be true; I used to work there.)

Apparently, the proposal worked, as Rand's blog indicates that they're getting married in two weeks, on Sept. 14, 2008, in Ashland, Ore.

To me, it seems that Rand went a little overboard, but the charming sneakiness of his proposal, plus the total freakout she went through really made me happy.