Proposals!

Back in the early 1970s, I was captain of my local Rugby club's third XV, and another player was late for a match, as usual. As he changed, I went to get his boots from his car, and was confronted by a gorgeous redhead. Fast forward a season or so, and word got round that they had split up. I seized the opportunity, and late DW and I were married in one week less than a year from our first actual date. I proposed in a 16th/17th century pub on the edge of Epping Forest, when I suggested that she accompany me to a business meeting in Paris, which we could combine with a honeymoon (we had already combined a similar trip with a holiday). She accepted without my having to kneel on a slightly murky pub floor.

A few weeks after our wedding in our tropical garden.

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A photo from our wedding in 1970 and one from DH's 80th birthday in August last year including his remaining brother and a neice and nephew. Photo taken by Persie so she's not there.

He came to work at the studio where I ran a department (I was 20) I was his boss he was almost 19 .We spent every day and evening together then 4 months in decided we,d get a flat together .
Glasgow in the early 70,s wasn’t like anywhere else ,or so I,m told We went to several agencies …not one would consider us as tenants without a marriage certificate .!
So we decided to get married bought an engagement ring 5 months to the day from we met and told our parents we were getting married after New year .They went ballistic and insisted on a real wedding so we waited until the July and a year from our first date and the parents arranged almost everything.Except the church ,that was our choice.
We,ve been married for over 50 years and worked together every day for the 51 years since we met.
Must be close on 100 years of a normal marriage and I love the bones of him and he of me.He makes me laugh every day .

What a lovely thread. What beautiful brides and handsome grooms. This wasn't our wedding but a short while afterwards.

A wonderful thread, thank you BlueSapphire, what a beautiful couple you were. On our third date, he proposed. I said ask me again in six months, it's too soon, (even though I knew he was the one). He did and we married a few months later. That was forty six years ago and still happily together.

What a fab photo, Kate. You look so happy and the dress reminds me of one I had. No wonder you DH noticed your legs.

LLFL What a fantastic start to married life in the Seychelles. Did you work as well?

You both look very 1970s. It was an interesting decade. We married in 1973 after living together for a year. We both just decided it would be a good idea...DH didn't actually propose so I hope he thought it was a good idea. Fifty three years next month. Too late to change his mind now.

Now that is a miniskirt Kate it is fabulous.
I was born too early for miniskirts but if I am honest my legs would never have let me wear one, not my best attribute.

What lovely memories! Met my lovely husband when I was a staff nurse on the ward. I had just got my favourite baby dressed and looking smart for his mum visiting. Laboratory technician arrived to take blood and splattered it over baby’s clothes. I told him off!
Met in the local pub he asked me out.
Brilliant 55 years, 3 birth children and 6 adopted children. Died three years ago and greatly missed !

No proposal, we just sort of knew and started to plan for the future.

We met at school. He was a newly appointed prefect aged 14 and I was a badly behaved 12 year old.
It was mutual dislike at first sight.
A few years after leaving school we met up again at my brother's 21st birthday party. We got on like a house on fire.
He asked me to marry him 3 weeks after our first date. I agreed but we kept quiet about it.

He proposed 'properly' 6 months later, just to make sure, I think. We married a couple of years later when I was 22 and he 24 and had 48 happy years together until his death in 2022.

We had already lived together abroad, but dh then started work in a country where I couldn’t have accompanied him unless we were married - they wouldn’t have given me a visa.

An additional factor was probably that food in the bachelor mess at the time was pretty awful!!

So after he’d been there for about a year, there wasn’t exactly a proposal as such, we just decided and set a date.

No engagement ring. I’d have quite liked one, but at the time, to dh, ‘getting engaged’ was desperately uncool!

However he bought me a lovely ring right after the birth of dd2, which to me meant a great deal more.

Anyway, it’ll be 54 years this coming June!

Proposed to on cliff top on island, wish I had never accepted. Marriage lasted 18 years, I was young, naive and innocent. He was after anything in a skirt and his affairs ended the marriage. If only we all had a crystal ball at times ...............................

One I still feel bad about now and then, came in a letter from my boyfriend - we’d been together for a couple of years before going to different universities quite a distance apart - in the days before no phones easily available, let alone email.

I liked him, but the proposal made me realise that I was never going to marry him. I don’t think I’d even met dh by then, but I still knew.
I didn’t even reply to the letter. I just didn’t know how to say it. Shameful, I know.

My parents moved area after my first uni year - 100 miles away - so I never saw him again.
They had really liked him, and my mother kept telling me I’d never find anyone else as nice!

Dh did fairly soon turn into ‘golden boy’ for her, though - that is, after Dbro, who was always Golden Boy Number One.

Found a house we wanted to buy but needed both our salaries to be considered. In the early 70s they'd only include mine if we were married. Call the registry office on Thursday married Saturday. Plus you could get the pill if you were married.

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Just flounder these. Sorry couldn’t resist posting. One just after we met and the other our wedding.

Found not floundered !!

Mines a cautionary tale. I met him at agricultural college. We dated for a year then he went to a different college 70miles away! So I got a job nearby and lived in digs for a year. I moved back home and he carried on at college. When he graduated he got a job with a tied cottage. No romantic proposal, just said one day “I suppose we better get engaged” so we did. I bought the ring as he had no money! We married and then ran our own, rented, smallholding for a few years. Had two kids. Gave up the smallholding and moved a couple of hundred miles away from family. I was happy but he clearly wasn’t as he had an affair and we divorced!

paddyann54

He came to work at the studio where I ran a department (I was 20) I was his boss he was almost 19 .We spent every day and evening together then 4 months in decided we,d get a flat together .
Glasgow in the early 70,s wasn’t like anywhere else ,or so I,m told We went to several agencies …not one would consider us as tenants without a marriage certificate .!
So we decided to get married bought an engagement ring 5 months to the day from we met and told our parents we were getting married after New year .They went ballistic and insisted on a real wedding so we waited until the July and a year from our first date and the parents arranged almost everything.Except the church ,that was our choice.
We,ve been married for over 50 years and worked together every day for the 51 years since we met.
Must be close on 100 years of a normal marriage and I love the bones of him and he of me.He makes me laugh every day .

Aw!!

Which I find reassuring that I made the right choice for me - ie never to marry anyone other than The One. Having never met The One = I never did get married (or even live together).

But you've reassured me that some of us at least do meet The One and so the rest of us should hold out for them - even if we do land up like me never having met them.

Can't say I didn't have my chances - though a couple of the times I think they were more "assuming we were going to - rather than asking". I did have one "proper proposal" - which went "Will you marry me and come and live on a boat with me?". The reason that I turned that one down so easily was I was thinking "Isn't there something you've missed saying here?". In hindsight it shouldn't have come as a surprise to me - given that he'd suggested we visit his family for a few days in Essex and so off we went and stayed with grandma, met his father and the second wife, met his mother and I got on with all of them. Took years for that penny to drop as to why he'd done that.....

So - it's reassuring that some people indeed do get "the Real Deal" so to say and I was correct to hang out for that personally.....

Abcdefg

Found a house we wanted to buy but needed both our salaries to be considered. In the early 70s they'd only include mine if we were married. Call the registry office on Thursday married Saturday. Plus you could get the pill if you were married.

Did that depend on what part of the country you were in - ie getting the Pill regardless or having barriers put up?

I took the precaution of asking to go on it when I lived briefly in Denmark in 1973 and was given it with no problem whatsoever. So when I came back to England in late 1973 I just went to the doctor round the corner from first house of bedsits and said "I'm on so-and-so Pill and I need a new prescription now please" and again there was absolutely no problem and prescription handed straight over (and I didnt even have a boyfriend at the time - but was just being pragmatic and thinking "I'm that age - so I need it now") - so I don't know whether there was no problem whatsoever about it then because I was clearly already on it (from Denmark) or it was a university city and I could easily have passed for one of the university students (ie he didn't want an academic argument LOL). Probably a bit of both......

I think lots of us meet 'the one' but that doesn't mean that you don't have periods when even being with 'the one' requires working at.

True dat....from what I can see as an outsider to that.....and can believe there are indeed "ups and downs".

My "could have been mother in law" that is still a friend of mine all these years later told me that one in some detail - ie "What you see is not necessarily what you get - and things can have been very different at times to now and there have been downs".

Spot on, Kitty😁!

Contraception of a reliable method was certainly hard to get in the 50’s /60’s ,it was the time of a family planning clinics and you either had to be married or on the verge to be seen.
The same thing with the pill I believe in the early days.