Christmas marriage proposals: Why they can be a terrible idea

If you have to trap someone in front of your entire family on one of the few days in the year when they can’t jump on a train home, then they’d probably have preferred a chocolate orange

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Watch out, women! According to two new surveys, there’s a good chance that you might be proposed to this Christmas.

In one romantic document, Facebook explores “how engaged couples prepare for their wedding and how marketers can help meet their needs”, revealing that 2.6 million people changed their Facebook status to “engaged” in the past year in the US alone. The most common days for that to happen were Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year’s Day and Valentine’s Day.

Another, a survey of 10,000 people in the UK by an events agency called Chillisauce, backs this up. A third of men polled will propose on Christmas Eve, it found. But wait! Twenty nine per cent of women would rather you saved it for Valentine’s Day. In fact, 83 per cent of women would not prefer to be proposed to at Christmas.

One of the explanations cited is proximity to family, and this is precisely why Christmas proposals can be a terrible idea. First, if you say, “Merry Christmas, darling, and your present is ME for the rest of your life!”, a fair response is “Did you forget to buy wrapping paper?” But most importantly, if you have to trap someone into a proposal in front of your entire family on one of the few days in the year when they can’t jump on a train home, then probably, in your heart of hearts, you know that they’d really have preferred a chocolate orange.

It’s the public aspect of a Christmas proposal that raises the most risk. If you don’t believe me, type “food court proposal guy” into a search engine to see what happens when you try to guilt someone into marrying you and don’t pay attention to the signs. The point at which the proposee puts her fingers in her ears is when food court guy really should have stopped, put the ring away, and called off the guitarist…. Though you’ve got to love the response of one sanguine passer-by: “The Cinnabon lady said she’d marry him”.

As a feminist, I think that if women want to micromanage things, they should jolly well do the proposing themselves, obviously. Unfortunately, 65 per cent of the men surveyed don’t think that women proposing is at all appropriate, but if 65 per cent of women want to marry men who don’t think they should have ideas then that’s up to them, I suppose.

It is, of course, entirely possible that I am the weirdo who is out of step with proposal etiquette. (I did, as it happens, become engaged on a Friday 13th.) It’s a thought that occurred to me on reading that 15 per cent of women would prefer to be proposed to using technology, ideally social media.

If that makes sense to you, or if you suspect that you know your intended better than I do, then good luck, and happy Christmas. But ladies, don’t say I didn’t warn you: beware the small box under the Christmas tree.

Twitter.com/@katyguest36912