Go get him girl!

It’s a leap year, so it’s acceptable for women to propose to their beloved. Forty-two percent of men would say ‘yes’, but are those safe odds, asks Sue Leonard

FORTY-TWO per cent of Irishmen would say ‘yes,’ if their girlfriend proposed. At first glance the statistic, from a survey carried out by PopCap Games, looks like good news for a woman planning to pop the question this leap year. But hang on. If 42% would say ‘yes’ that means a whopping 58% of Irishmen would say ‘no’ to marriage. It’s a sobering thought.

In my research, I didn’t meet any women who had been turned down. Gilly Fraser, a writer with Mills and Boon, made her love story come true in 2000 by proposing. She’s still blissfully happy. Grandmother Nell Newman proposed — and she’s been married 42 years.

One woman wasn’t so lucky. When she popped the question, her boyfriend accepted. She was thrilled and organised the big white wedding. But three days before the ceremony, he legged it. This doesn’t surprise Gerry Hickey, a Dublin-based psychotherapist and counsellor. Mr Hickey says women should proceed with caution.

“Men would prefer to do the proposing,” he says, “and if they’re not doing it, there is something wrong. And it’s probably that he doesn’t want to make a commitment. If a woman does propose, she may be seen as moving things on too fast. And she could sabotage the relationship.”

Even if he says ‘yes,’ things mightn’t work out.

“The man mightn’t want to hurt the woman by saying, ‘no.’ So you end up with one person seriously delighted and the other in a fear zone. You’re into wedding-planning territory and all hell breaks loose,” Mr Hickey says.

“The person who doesn’t really want to get married will want a foreign wedding with a few of his mates and she will want the Pro-cathedral with the Vienna Boys’ Choir. That will lead to panic, and, while he might not renege at the altar steps, it’s unlikely a marriage will, ultimately, work.”

If a woman wants to propose, how should she proceed?

“She should flag the idea. Say something about leap year in a humorous way and watch his reaction. Men tend to do that, before they propose. They won’t propose if there’s a high risk of rejection. It’s all about timing,” he says.

You’d think, with liberation, women would be proposing to men all the time. Not so.

“It’s rare to find a woman who proposed to her fiancé,” says Caroline Hendry, of nuptials.ie. “Women dream of the proposal; of their boyfriend getting down on bended knee. They don’t want to miss out by proposing themselves.”

How should a woman propose? Derry O’Donnell, who runs the website, www.willyoumarryme.ie, says that, like men, women should include elements of romance and surprise. “It doesn’t have to be extravagant or over-the-top. I know one woman who proposed at leap year and she climbed in a boyfriend’s window and proposed to him. She said, left to him, they’d never have married,” Mr O’Donnell says. If she wants to make an extravagant gesture?

“She could book him a flying lesson. And have the words, ‘Will you marry me,’ printed on black polythene and rolled across a field,” he says. “That would be pretty impressive.”

Romantic novelist Maria Duffy proposed to Paddy just three months after they’d met. She was 22 and he 25.

“We’d booked to go out to dinner in the Trocadero in Dublin and I had this plan in my head. I wrote this poem and in the last line it asked him to marry me. I slipped the paper across the table, and he read it.

“He said, ‘that’s a brilliant poem.’ Then he said, ‘Are you serious?’ He was shocked, but delighted too. We then went on to discuss it more.”

Author of Any Dream Will Do, Maria first met Paddy in a nightclub.

“I was there with my girlfriends. They were protective, because I’d just come out of a relationship. But I spotted Paddy, who is 6ft 5 inches, and when he asked me to dance, the girls said, ‘go on.’

“We danced for 10 or 15 minutes, and we chatted. I told him my first name and mentioned that I worked in the Bank of Ireland in Walkinstown. Then, I thought my friends had gone and I panicked, and rushed off to find them.

“The following Monday, in work, I heard a girl on the phone saying, ‘which Maria? We have three here.’ He’d rung looking for me. For the first six weeks, I was holding back, but he was patient. He was a lovely, respectful guy; everything I wanted in a man. So when I proposed, I was saying, ‘here I am. I’m ready. You’ve shown how much you love me’,” she says.The couple felt like shouting the news from the rooftops, but they held back. “We didn’t want people telling us we were rushing. It would have spoilt the sense of celebration.

So we kept it as something delicious, between ourselves. And we started planning a trip to Australia for the coming Christmas. We decided we’d make it official there,” she says.

The couple bought the ring in Singapore on the way out. But Paddy wanted to be in control; to present it sometime, to have an element of surprise. His big plan, though, proved more complicated than he could have imagined.

“Paddy decided to propose, at sunrise, at the top of Ayres Rock. But we slept through the alarm. We headed off, anyway, and started climbing.

But when I looked down from the first resting place, I froze. There was no way I was going further. I met others who were chickening out. I went down with them, and Paddy climbed the rock by himself.

“He decided to propose at the base of the rock, and he called me over. But I’d got sunstroke and felt sick. I slept it off, and he, finally, produced the ring that night,” she says. The couple married in Apr, 1994.

They have four children. To celebrate the anniversary of that first proposal, Paddy has booked dinner for the couple — back in the Trocadero.

TIME TO POP THE QUESTION?

42% of men would say ‘yes,’ if their girlfriend proposed.

23% of women think their boyfriend would say ‘yes,’ unconditionally.

19% of people know a girl who has proposed to her boyfriend.

25% of people think the ‘man must propose’ tradition is outdated.

29% of men would be embarrassed to tell their friends that their girlfriend had proposed.

11% of Irishmen said they’d like their girlfriend to propose, because, then, they wouldn’t have to buy an engagement ring.

— PopCap Games