Speed Dating Events

`You got to get married,’ said Uncle Penstemon. ‘That’s the way of it. I done it long before I was your age. Its nat’ral — like poaching, or drinking, or wind on the stummik. You can’t ‘elp it, and there you are!’

THE IDEAL PROPOSAL is a magical moment, a peak of ecstasy amid a whirl of impression of beauty — ballgowns and roses, passion and palm trees, with the strains of heavenly music wafting in the distance. But many people’s experience falls far short of this ideal — they get the strains without the music.

Yes, well, it would, wouldn’t it? In fairness the Baxter swain had been doing sterling work nursing his inamorata through a combination of Montezuma’s Revenge and the Black Death, on what was supposed to be a jolly holiday in Spain. When language broke down with the Mediterranean medico, he even carried devotion to the extent of miming her complaint for the doctor’s better understanding — which was, in fact, diarrhoea!

Now a man who’ll mime diarrhoea for you in front of a grinning foreigner is clearly a man of many parts, but a sense of timing was not among them. He waited until his true love was philosophizing from the depths of the bathroom about the division of the Spanish nation into sadists and masochists — ‘the sadists manufacture the toilet paper, and the masochists use it’ — and chose this tender moment to pop the question. As she says herself:

There can’t be all that many people who’ve received a proposal of marriage through a lavatory door and I sometimes consider ringing up the Guinness Book Of Records, but perhaps an ex-nurse friend of mine has the edge on me. Her husband proposed to her after shed given him an enema.

Ah. Yes, well, could have been worse, then! But either way, one of the obstacles to a proper proposal is the lack of a sense of romance. To some, marriage is not an emotional adventure, but a dragging social duty. This is how it strikes the writer Michaelis in D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. He is, on his own admission, a lonely bird, but he has no hope that his loneliness would be relieved by marriage:

`I’m thirty . . . yes, I’m thirty!’ said Michaelis sharply and suddenly, . . and I’m going to marry. Oh yes, I must marry.’

`It sounds like going to have your tonsils out,’ laughed Connie. `Will it be an effort?’

`Well, Lady Chatterley, somehow it will!’

You can just imagine from this the sort of woman he will choose, a beak-faced harpy who will make proposing feel like having your tonsils taken out, without anaesthetic. Some men simply are not the stuff that a good proposer is made of. Groucho Marx just can’t see the reason for it all, as he explains in his Memoirs Of A Mangy Lover:

Personally, I don’t see why a man can’t have a dog AND a girl. But if you can afford only one, get a dog. For example, if your dog sees you playing with another dog, does he rush to his lawyer and bark that your marriage is on the rocks and that he wants 600 bones a month alimony, the good car, and the little fortythousand-dollar home that still has a nineteen-thousanddollar mortgage on it?

Even when the man is up to the mark, obstacles may bar his way. Every budding couple needs peace and privacy to get things sorted out on their own. But in the history of courtship and proposal, families are all too often determined that this is the last thing they should have. That’s why all the really great lovers of history and legend, from Antony and Cleopatra to Hepburn and Tracy, have nobody but themselves on the scene. They are alone together in their own private world. Having a family can have the direst possible consequences for lovers — witness Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

The greater the family, the greater the capacity for interference. When Lord Randolph Churchill fell in love with Miss Jennie Jerome, the family did its utmost to strangle marriage plans at birth. She was, after all, American, and her father was in business. These twin handicaps meant that she was far more likely to be shown the tradesman’s entrance of a great English ducal house, than be allowed to marry into it.

The parents were content to play a waiting game. But Randolph’s elder brother had himself made a bitterly unhappy marriage, which in his view made him an expert on the subject. He came down on Randolph like a ton of bricks, in a letter positively pulsating with rage:

Consider once more! Risk anything! BUT DON’T MARRY! I tell you that you are mad simply mad. I don’t care if la demoiselle was the incarnation of all moral excellencies and physical beauties on God’s earth . . . marriage is a delusion and a snare like all the rest, only with this disagreeable addition that it is irrevocable.

Have you any solid end in view in this affair? No!

Do you marry for a fortune? No!

Do you marry to get children? No!

Do you marry because you have loved a woman for years? No!

Do you marry because you are getting old and played out? No!

You really only want to marry because you are in love with an idea. DAMNATION! My dear Randolph for God’s sake listen to me . . .

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)
The Forces Against, Roses, Passion, Music part 1

• The Forces Against, Roses, Passion, Music part 3
• The Forces Against, Roses, Passion, Music part 2
• Modest Proposal, Have Some Madeira, My Love part 2
• Popping the Question, Every man has a proposal in him- somewhere
• Modest Proposal, Have Some Madeira, My Love part 1
• Farewell, Beloved part 2
• What a Nerve! Man proposes, God disposes part 4
• Marriage, Romantics the Way It Used To Be
• Farewell, Beloved part 3
• Farewell, Beloved part 1