Are you planning to take the leap this year?

Feb 28 2008 by Emma Pinch, Liverpool Daily Post

Emma Pinch takes advice on the best way to take control of the romance in your life

SUE and Jenny had ordered their roses, scribbled their notes and, butterflies fluttering in their stomachs, were hoping for the best.

The date was February 28, 1984. On impulse, they had decided to take advantage of the old Leap Year tradition where women can use this day to ask their men to marry them.

At the time, the two women were both working at up-market jewellery shop Boodles, in Liver- pool, surrounded all day every day by sparkling engagement rings, and didn’t want to waste time waiting for a proposal.

"Jenny had said she was going to do it the day before, and I thought it was a good idea and that I thought I’d just chance my hand too," recalls Sue, from Melling.

Aged 29, she had met her boyfriend Ken, from Old Swan, a year earlier, while working at TJ Hughes and they had recently moved in together.

"I really loved him and I knew we would stay together but I was still a bit old-fashioned and I wanted us to get married. So, when Jenny was ordering her rose, I ordered one too and just wrote a card with it saying ‘will you marry me?’ and signed it Sue, with a kiss."

The rose was duly dispatched to the carpet department where he worked. But, due to a delivery mix-up, it arrived instead on the desk of his managing director.

The MD, who he only knew in an official capacity, made a special trip to the sales floor to present the rose to his red faced employee, much to the noisy amusement of his colleagues.

In blissful ignorance, Sue was counting down the minutes until she knew it would have been delivered. She rang him up and gigglingly asked him what his answer would be.

"He said ‘No’," says Sue. "I nearly fell off my chair. He told me he’d been made to look a right idiot. I think he was shocked I asked him, and maybe thought it was too soon."

Her friend, Jenny, was rebuffed, too.

Being absolutely sure your chosen man will say yes is one of the key recommendations Kate Reardon offers in her book Top Tips for Girls for women who are thinking of popping the question.

With still just 9% of women doing the asking, bucking convention still carries a high risk of social humiliation. "We get most of our social cues from Hollywood these days, from playing with Bridal Barbie to watching romantic Hollywood movies," says Reardon.

"But in how many Hollywood movies does the woman propose?"

Love tokens in place of engagement rings can prompt a positive reaction, she suggests. "A woman bought her future husband a vintage Rolex and had it engraved, ‘Will you marry me?’ on the back. He was so delighted with the watch that he said yes. You can always try bribing them."

She also advises avoiding making a proposal on bended knee because "it looks like begging. When a man does it, it’s chivalrous, when a woman does it, it just looks desperate."

There is no perfect place to propose, says Reardon, although a noisy venue may be preferable.

"You could always do it in a very noisy nightclub so that if he says, ‘No,’ you can pretend he didn’t hear you properly, or pretend it was a joke. You could say in a shocked or horrified voice, ’I said, Will you carry me? My feet are hurting, not will you marry me? Of course I don’t want to marry you’."

Fortunately for Sue, her gut feeling about Ken being the one proved correct. But what if you’re sure and he still says no?

"Basically, I nagged him," she says of the months following her rejected proposal. "I showed him the tax benefits, and how much easier it was for people sending Christmas cards and what a great excuse for a party a wedding would be."

She led Ken down the aisle in September that year, and they’ve now been married for 23 years and have a 17-year-old daughter together.

But there was a catch. "He never asked me to get married so I never did get an engagement ring," smiles Sue.

Hint to Ken – Boodles does some lovely anniversary gifts.

* TOP Tips For Girls, by Kate Reardon, is published by Headline, priced £9.99.

emma.pinch@dailypost.co.uk

Legends of love

LEGEND has it that the Leap Year tradition started when St Bridget complained to St Patrick about women having to wait for men to propose to them.

So St Patrick said that women could propose every four years, on February 29.

(Legend also says that he received a proposal the very next leap year – from St Bridget herself!) In English Law, February 29 actually had no legal status, so people assumed that traditions could be ignored on that day – traditions like women having to wait for men to propose marriage.

Scotland even passed a law in 1288 that not only allowed women to propose marriage on February 29, but also imposed fines on men who declined a marriage proposal in a Leap Year, ranging from a kiss to payment for a silk dress.