Speed Dating Events

Signed, sealed, delivered. Cecily’s dazzling adroitness at tying the knot, in the absence and without the knowledge of her intended, can only evoke the purest admiration. Sheer professionalism, that’s what it is. Wilde more than once makes the observation that men often propose for practice. Judging from Cecily’s expertise, they must all propose to the same girls!

That is certainly the experience of the heroine of Judith Krantz’ Scruples, the fabulously sexy Billy Winthrop, who learns from her best friend Jessica to rate her men out of ten, and keeps score in quite the literalest sense of the word:

Billy had seven proposals of marriage from nines she didn’t love, and, reluctantly, she had to replace them. It would not have been playing the game fairly to keep them on the string after honourable intentions had been declared. Jessica had twelve proposals in the same period of time, but they decided that it amounted to an even number, because only men over six feet tall proposed to Billy, while tiny Jessica had a much wider field to appeal to.

In a straightforward reversal of old-time practice, the declaration of honourable intent is, for all these men, the way out of their ladies’ beds, rather than the way in! They just have to go when they get serious. But for the girls, as Liddy says in Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd, ‘How sweet to be able to disdain!’ And maybe even ‘nines’, sexually speaking, have not cracked the art of propc to as opposed to pleasuring a woman.

And maybe, too, more attention is given to the style proposal in the Old World than in the New. HI James constantly says: the English are the most romantic people in the world.

He shares Wilde’s faith in the powers of the upper so echelons if not to get the girl, at least to get the o right. Here is the altogether too divine Lord Warburtor. Portrait Of A Lady. He is not only a poppet in himself, 1 further adorned with a hundred thousand a year (pound not dollars), fifty thousand acres, half a dozen stately homes, and cultivated tastes in literature, art and scier to boot. And in addition, his lordship can propose as the manor born:

. . . said Lord Warburton, ‘I care only for you.’

`You have known me too short a time to have a right to say that, and I cannot believe you are serious.’

`One’s right in such a matter is not measured by the time, Miss Archer, it is measured by the feeling itself . . . Of course I have seen you very little, but my impression dates from the very first hour we met. I lost no time; I fell in love with you then . . nothing you said, nothing you did, was lost on me. All these days I have thought of nothing else.

`I don’t go off easily, but when I am touched, it’s for life. It’s for life, Miss Archer, it’s for life,’ f e,’ LordWarburton repeated in the kindest, tenderest, pleasantest voice Isabel had ever heard, and looking at her with eyes that shone with the light of a passion that had sifted itself clear of the baser parts of emotion — the heat, the violence, the unreason — and which burned as steadily as a lamp in a windless place . . . ‘If you will be my wife, then I shall know you, and when I tell you all the good I think of you, you will not be able to say it is from ignorance.’

Oh, the love! How can she resist? For she does, dear reader, she does! Henry James probably overloads the worldly attractions — even for a lord, Warburton seems to have a few houses, acres and ackers over the odds — but he does succeed in making him such a pie-faced sweetheart that you could just eat him up. This is the first time, but not the last, that you want to give Isabel a good shake — along with the instruction that if she disdains her lovely lord, she should pass him on to someone who will appreciate him!

So it’s not quite true as the old proverb says that ‘all the world loves a lord‘. But it’s nice to know that lordly proposals, old-style, do still come off even in this day and age. In her cheerful autobiography, Nicole Nobody, the unjustly self-styled ‘nobody’ describes her courtship by the present Duke of Bedford, lord of Woburn Abbey. Nicole Milinaire had lived life to the full, through good times and bad. She had survived an unhappy marriage, the wartime fall of her beloved France, and lived to make it as a TV producer and business woman in France, England and America. Along the way she met Ian, Duke of Bedford, one new face among many in her busy life:

. . . I flew to Hollywood to discuss a picture deal, and returned to London on 2 October.

1 arrived back desperately tired. I wanted to shut out the world, take a bath and go to sleep. The doorbell rang. I opened the door gingerly. It was the Duke of Bedford. I was amazed to see him, because at that point we were acquaintances rather than friends . . .

I noticed for the first time that he had an enorm bouquet of white lilies half hidden behind his back. `What’s so special about today?’ I asked.

Ian looked down at me with a singularly tender lot He has an almost superhuman gentleness when he wishd and in his slow, hesitant way he said:

`I have come to ask you to marry me.’

In crises, in moments of great joy, I laugh . . laughed and laughed and parried:

`Won’t you settle for a drink instead?’

Naturally Nicole felt some hesitation. The responsible of becoming chatelaine of Woburn Abbey daunted and, touchingly, she also wanted to know what children thought of the idea. But then she accepted hi

We laughed a lot together, and to this day I tell him that is why I married him . . 1 knew that my lift, without him would be empty. He had become so much part of it, with his gentle manners, his soft sense of humour, his wit, that when we were apart I missed him not a little, but very much. It was as simple as that. Hi had become indispensable to my happiness.

And that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?

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