You see a pair of laughing eyes,

And suddenly you’re sighing sighs,

You think there’s something wrong,

You string along,

And then — snap!

Those eyes, those sighs, they’re part of the tender trap.

A proposal is a paradox – just as it can be the liberation of a woman, it can also be the clanging of the trap door for a man. The state matrimonial has not always had a good press. Marriage is an institution, said Oscar Wilde, and who wants to live in an institution? His view received some support from Ogden Nash in a wry poem called I Do, I Will, I Have:

Just as 1 am unsure of the difference between flora and fauna and flotsam and jetsam,

I am quite sure that marriage is an alliance of two people one of whom never remembers birthdays and the other never forgetsam,

And he refuses to believe there is a leak in the water pipe or the gas pipe and she is convinced she is about to asphyxiate or drown,

And she says, Quick get up and get my hairbrushes off the windowsill, its raining in and he replies

Oh they’re all right, it’s only raining straight down.

That is why marriage is so much more interesting than divorce,

Because it’s the only known example of the happy meeting of the immovable object and the irresistible force.

In the past, men were often deliberately trapped by those who believed that as marriage was an inescapable social duty, a man might as well get on with it as soon as possible. Marriage was not seen as a romantic exchange between two people in private — it was a business, a very serious business, and in some cases an industry.

Among those at the mass-market end of the marriage trade are the Reverend and Mrs Allaby, who have no less than seven daughters to get off in Samuel Butler’s sardonic critique of Victorian hypocrisy, The Way Of All Flesh. As the mother of the seven disposables, Mrs Allaby is a keen proponent of Austen’s Law,’ and tireless in her pursuit of any available single male.

A prime victim is Theobald, a hapless young curate who is drawn into the family circle, fussed over and buttered up. But who is to have him? At the cynical suggestion of their father, the girls play cards, with the prospective husband as the stake. Theobald is then manoeuvred into proposing to the winner, Miss Christina. But he is really unsure about the whole thing, and his reluctance comes through in his letter of declaration — he solicits rejection in every line:

‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife’ — Pride and Prejudice.

DEAREST MISS CHRISTINA,

I do not know whether you have guessed the feelings that I have long entertained for you — feelings which I have concealed as much as I could for fear of drawing you into an engagement which, i f you enter into it, must be prolonged for a considerable time; but however this may be, it is out of my power to conceal them longer; I love you, ardently, devotedly, and send these few lines asking you to be my wife because I dare not trust my tongue to give adequate expression to the magnitude of my affection for you . . .

I ought to warn you that in the event of your consenting to be my wife, it may be years before our union can be consummated, for I cannot marry until a college living is offered to me. If you see fit to reject me, I shall be grieved rather than surprised —

Theobald is pleased with this. He has at least tried to sound like a lover. Even more pleased is Christina, who accepts him prontissimo, and eventually the pair marry, to live as happily as can be expected under the circumstances.

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