Oh hey everybody. Today on the show we're talking about proposals which got me thinking
why do we give rings? Why don't we just offer each other medals, being like hey, you won!
Me! Oh that's not real gold, is it? Lies!
@LisCarto2014 tweeted me @CristenConger with a great question. 'Could you do a video about
women proposing to men? In 2015 why do we not see more of this?' Presumably we will
be seeing more of this just by virtue of more same-sex couples getting married with the
legalization in the United States. I would assume that if you know to women are in relationship
and decide to get married, a woman will be doing the proposing, unless they're like you
know what we don't want to buck gender traditions any more than we already have, let's just
like bring in a guy. Maybe that's like a whole cottage industry that could pop up. Propose-a-dude,
he just comes over, gets on one knee, you know, offers the ring and then, the lady is
off to the side being like, 'huh?' But it's true that when it comes to opposite sex couples,
as much progress as we've made in terms of evolving culturally with women's roles, there
are these entrenched, gender-based traditions. Probably one of the most steadfast among them
is the proposal tradition. The reason why it has held so steady? Women don't want to
propose, a lot of them, and even more men don't want women to propose.This is largely
based on a 2012 study out of UC Santa Cruz in which the researchers polled 277 college
kids so a little bit of a grain of salt there I guess, and asked their comfort levels with
men doing the proposing, women doing the proposing. Zero percent of men were in any way at all
comfortable with the idea of women proposing to them. And they only found a very small
percentage of women who were somewhat comfortable with the idea of them proposing to a dude
but zero percent of those women were definitely comfortable and intending to propose to a
guy. And the three main reasons cited make a lot of sense. Upholding tradition, avoiding
emasculation, that it would dilute the romance of the moment. Of a guy getting down on one
knee and offering up a ring, they symbol of all of his love that just makes everything
worth it, all the pain and the heartache. If a woman gets down on one knee and the guy's
just standing there and he starts doing this then what's that? There was one poll conducted
in 2014 by the Associated Press which found funnily enough that three-fourths of respondents
said yeah it's totally fine if a woman wants to propose. But only five percent of the married
women that responded to that poll said that yeah, they had actually done the proposing.
So even if we might be theoretically inclined to say yeah, that's totally fine, it's far
rarer even still for it to happen. What interests me more than trying to get more women to propose
to their boyfriends is examining and dismantling a lot of the logic that this tradition is
predicated upon. It does say that we only trust men to come to a long-term committed
monogamous relationship on their own terms. If a woman asks a man then she is rushing
him. To me that does a little disservice to men and continually promotes this idea that
all men want to have sex with everything all of the time and have no interest in commitment.
And on the flip-side of that it's doing a disservice to women for a) being a little
bit distrustful of men and also assuming that women's end all be all goal is always marriage
and a committed long-term relationship. There are tiny grains of truths on individual levels
of course in all of this but as a blanket truth, no. It especially doesn't hold up in
the context of modern day relationships. If you think about the history of marriage, it
started as something entirely transactional. Only recently transitioned into something
more based on mutual attraction and romance. It's shifted into something that is focused
even more on partnership and as someone who is engaged and planning a wedding I like the
idea of being able to pick and choose from these kinds of traditions and reinvent traditions
and figure out what kind of things best express my relationship and my love and my commitment
to my future husband. When it comes to the actual proposal, yeah, I guess we went pretty
traditional. That was the process of a lot of conversations and joint ring-shopping and
a trip to China and like all of these things that we planned and we did together and him
specifically asking me to be able to do the proposing. To me that conversation and a joint
vision for the future is far more important than whose knee hits the ground and lifts
up a ring. Now I want to know from you. Would you like for it to be more accepted for women
to do the proposing? How would you like to see these kinds of marriage and wedding traditions
evolve? Let me know in the comments. Thanks everybody who watched and commented on last
week's Ask Cristen video, 'Do age of Consent laws really work?' It seemed like the major
consensus in the comments was uuuuuhhhhmmmm. J Kwong said, 'How does your 'older' self
convince your 'younger' self that your decisions that look good at the time is wrong? "Because
I said so" didn't work for 15 year old me!' Kimiko Tekuno also said, 'It's a really tricky
subject because there is not magic age that makes you ready for sex. Everyone develops
and becomes mature at different rates. Some youth need that freedom while others need
that protection and it is impossible to draw a line between them, so there really is no
right answer.' Speaking of which, let me know your questions. They don't have to be related
to this video whatsoever. If you got questions I want to know them so I can give you some
answers. And umm, shots of my engagement ring hand.