Have you ever been led on to believe you were going to get married only to have your proposal rejected? The Good Men Project wants your story.
I heard a really intense story the other day. A man had taken his girlfriend out to one of these Great Lakes beach lookouts—the kind on a platform up in the dunes—and with the sun setting got on one knee to propose. He never saw her rejection coming. Now they had to drive back to Chicago knowing their relationship was over, that she would have to make plans to move her stuff from his apartment, etcetera.
I’m led to believe that this happens more often than we suspect. Sadly, perhaps it should happen more often than it does. We’ve published stories here that dealt with people who married when they didn’t want to, possibly out of a sense of obligation or peer pressure. All of those people should have rejected the proposal, as it hurts a lot less than divorce and is much less complicated.
But this does not mean that having your proposal rejected is any pleasant stuff. If you have a story like this, an experience that left a hole in your chest, I hope you’ll share it. Especially if it happened in public, with your face on a JumboTron at Yankee Stadium, or with a horde of people looking at you and your lover on a fancy cruise ship.
Photo by Steve Snodgrass