How Long Is Too Long to Wait for a Proposal?
Olivia has been with her boyfriend for eight years. They’ve lived together for the last six, share a dog, and are even on the same health insurance plan. But no ring. No spontaneous trips to romantic destinations where she could secretly get a light pink manicure. No suspiciously shaped bulge in his pants on an otherwise normal date night.
At dinner recently, I asked her, impulsively and nosily: “Do you think he’s going to propose soon?” I didn’t mean to corner her; I just care. And also, I am a menace.
She looked down at her plate, cheeks flushing. “He better,” she said. “Or it’s over.”
Our friends have started getting engaged in slow, smug succession, one proposal announcement after another. And there we are, clapping and smiling, while privately calculating how long they’ve been dating and whether it’s less time than Olivia’s eight-year slow burn. Usually, it is, which feels unfair in the universally annoying way that aging and comparison always are.
Later that night, I trudged back to my apartment and flopped into bed, sliding under my pink sheets. I mentally compared my own situation to Olivia’s: Sure, she isn’t engaged yet, but she’s still going home to someone. Then, I picked up my laptop from the other side of the bed and clicked it on, ready to engage in my blue-light-and-Reddit routine. I ended up on a subreddit called Waiting to Wed that bills itself as a forum “for anyone waiting on a proposal or a wedding for any reason.” (Diplomatic and tragic.)
Scroll on for five minutes, though, and its real tone emerges. The people on this forum are suspended in emotional purgatory—some hopeful, others exhausted, many quietly realizing they’re waiting for something that may never arrive.
One of the first posts I clicked was titled, “How to stop hating him and yourself?”—so, you know, light nighttime reading. A woman wrote about spending five years with a man who swore he was “gonna” propose. Gonna turned out to be a stand-in, a sentimental I.O.U. he handed out every time she got too close to leaving. “It was what he felt he had to say to not lose me,” she explained.
I stared at the screen, imagining Olivia across town, probably brushing her teeth next to the man she hopes will someday wake up and choose her. And then there was me—lying in bed, doom-scrolling strangers’ heartbreak.