It all started off so innocuously. I had been thinking about marriage between a man and a woman, specifically, the fairy tale stereotype so often attached. You know the one: ‘Woman Spends Life Hoping Someday Some Man Will Want To Marry Her (Preferably, A Prince)’. It’s as old as fairy tales themselves.
I, alongside many others I’m sure, grew up to the Disney tunes of ‘Some Day My Prince Will Come’ (Snow White), ‘Once Upon A Dream’ (Sleeping Beauty) and ‘A Dream Is A Wish Your Heart Makes’ (Cinderella) – songs I sang along to which either directly implied I was waiting for my prince to show up, or dreaming that one day he might.
For one reason or another, these songs have recently returned to my radar. And it occurred to me whilst listening to them that maybe the princes on the other end of these fairy tales were also waiting, also dreaming...
So I checked. They were…
Cinderella: ‘For lo, there she stands, the girl of his dreams,’ said the Duke as the Prince spotted the girl of his dreams, Cinderella
Sleeping Beauty: ‘We’ve met before… you said so yourself, once upon a dream. I know you, I walked with you once upon a dream…’ sang the Prince
Snow White: ‘The Prince who had searched far and wide [presumably for his true love] heard of the maiden in the glass coffin’ read the narration
It suddenly dawned on me that, hang on a sec, men in these fairy tales want to get married too. I don’t know why this surprised me so much, but it felt like a monumental epiphany. Why was this story not written about?
I’ve had a long think over this. And I’ve come to some conclusions. (Disclaimer: massive generalisations about to take place…)This story is not written about because men don’t talk about wanting to get married. Why is that? I have three theories.
Theory one: men start thinking properly about marriage at the exact point they’re ready to get married. Before then, it’s all unconscious.
Theory two (and this is contentious, I know, but all in my own view, you understand): men who want to get married assume they are going to get married. Women who want to get married are less certain. This is possibly because tradition dictates that heterosexual women must be reliant on men for marriage. From infancy, these women are taught – through Disney etc – that they have to wait; wait for their princes to come, and then for their princes to propose. (Woe betide such women find their future husbands themselves and propose to them first. Because then they’d be burdened with another stereotype: desperate.) So they wait. And they might wait years, decades, countless relationships even.
And so because such women are not certain they will get married, they have to be more proactive about it. Hence, the marriage talk. Men, confident that some day it will all happen for them because it’s down to them to make it happen, have no reason to talk about it.
As a side point, what also adds to these women’s uncertainties are the biological clocks they have to contend with. If they want children, and wish to be married first, marriage is not something they can be entirely blasé about. This time pressure makes them more actively involved in the starting of conversations around marriage. In some cases, they start them sooner than their male counterparts are ready for. Does this mean though, it’s all the women? That those men would never be interested in a ‘happily ever after’ otherwise?
I just don’t think that’s true.
Theory three: there’s the masculinity thing. I’m not privy to men-on-men group chats but I can’t imagine they gather down the pub to kick-off such convos as: ‘When I get married, I’ll…’
I think some men see it as unmanly to admit they want to get married, to want someone else permanently in their lives, especially if they’re not, at the time, in a relationship. I think they see it as needy – and neediness is ‘weak’.
Women see it differently. Those who want to get married have no problem admitting it or talking about it. They see marriage as something to look forward to – the companionship, the feeling of being loved and wanted for a lifetime. Women don’t see a reason to feel ashamed.
I started to think more intensely about this. Why is the narrative always that women are desperate to get married, whereas men, what? Aren’t fussed? Don’t want to?
I did some Googling and discovered through the most recent England and Wales population estimates by marital status (taken from the Office of National Statistics, released this month) that in the year 2016, 50.7% of the population were in heterosexual marriages.
I found another (unrelated) statistic, which stated that 95% of men in heterosexual marriages proposed to their wives. I took this as an indication that those married men wanted to get married. So, I considered, if over half the population were in heterosexual marriages, and if – using the unrelated statistic, mathematicians look away – 95% of that half were men who proposed to their wives, with a lot of assumptions (like assuming the female to male population ratio were half and half, and assuming all those who proposed wanted to get married, and assuming that some of the 49.3% of unmarried men in the 16-under 30 age group would get married eventually, thus technically raising the 50.7% to a more generous margin, and that it would be a similar figure a year on in 2017…) could it be stated that theoretically ‘most men want to get married’?
I put the question to Facebook.
I was ridiculed.
Sensible observations included the fact it was impossible to tell with so little information and that my ‘equation’ relied too heavily on numerous assumptions.
Fair enough.
The most interesting comment, however, was made by the man who said this:
‘How many of the 95% have a gun to their head?’
This was one of the first responses. It became abundantly clear what I was up against.
I would not be able to prove that most men want to get married. Not just because of my crap maths, but because the signal I was using as a given to prove that those who are married, want to be – their marriage proposal – I couldn’t even take as a theoretical given. Because, of course most of those men’s proposals would have to have been orchestrated by a desperate female partner… Of course, they wouldn’t have come to the marriage conclusion were they not fearing for their lives… How stupid was I to take for granted the idea that a man might fall in love with a woman and want to be with her forever?
It was a depressing realisation.
But I refuse to be cowered by it. I don’t care if my embarrassing maths can’t prove men want to get married. I don’t even care if men don’t want to admit it. I’m still resolute in my opinion that men want to get married just as much as women do.
And if anyone asks for proof, I shall remind them of this: the fairy tales, all written by men, say so.
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