Q. Dear Goddess, can a woman push a man into action (okay, I mean marriage) by issuing a demand?
A. Ah, the Ultimatum. One of my favorite topics. Listen closely to this one, because the goddess knows her stuff.
Women are not taught to think in terms of outright demands, of course, but rather in terms of persuasion (“influence” is what it used to be called in Victorian times) and yet many a woman has delivered a chilling ultimatum so deftly that while it may have felt to her lover like a stake through the heart, it didn’t feel to him like, well, pressure. Clearly, artfulness is the key to such a seemingly impossible, obviously incongrous, feat.
With something as big as marriage, threatening a walk-out has doomed many women to one of two unpleasant scenarios: The first, that she doesn’t really leave, but skulks around unhappily and bitterly while he kind of wishes she would. The most horrible scenario, though, is the one where she actually keeps her vow to leave, and then lives to see her marriage-phobic guy proposing in six months–to his new girlfriend, with whom he somehow feel ready after only three months of dating.
So don’t deliver a marriage ultimatum. Believe your goddess on this one: getting a man to marry you is as easy as saying you don’t care whether he does or doesn’t marry you.
But you have to reach that point yourself. It has to be a genuine feeling. In other words, it’s not “If you don’t marry me now, I will leave.” And it’s not, “You know how I feel, and I’m not going to push you anymore. So I’m afraid this is goodbye.” It’s a re-thinking of how very much men want to marry, and how we all act as if they don’t.
Trust me: Men ADORE marriage. They thrive in it–more so, physically and emotionally, than women do. The very best “ultimatum” with regard to marriage, then, is to tell your lover that you ‘ve thought a lot about it and have come to understand his skittishness, and that you don’t like being the one fighting for something that is in his best interest as well as your own; and that–here it is in a nutshell, you’ve come to see it his way: You don’t need to be married. You are a modern, unconventional girl who doesn’t need that slip of paper in order to be happy, and that your life is not about getting married, not about doing what others do, not about making your parents happy–but about staying with each other and making each other happy.
This presupposes two things: that you mean it (you have to make the decision internally, which can take some time) And, second, that you truly understand how very, very important marriage is to men, and how inevitable it is that your guy WILL marry. Only it will be on his time–boy time. Which can mean three years from now or three weeks.
Once you really take that in, deep in your bones, you will be able to stop pushing for marriage and get on with your life together. You will give him psychic space. We’re talking here about one of my favorite themes– The power of the least interested–but we’re also talking about being strong, perhaps a bit radical; certainly unconventional. Strong women lead men–but not when they need men. So, my darling wedding-hungry earth girls, do that internal work. Meditate. Read (May I recommend a book written in my earthly persona, called “Marriage Shock“?) Learn about who really thrives in marriage, and what kind of marriage you want to be in so that YOU thrive. And for now, pack up your desire to be a bride, and mean it, and you’ll be married in no time. Not because you want to be married, but because he does.