Brianna Parkins: Women are taught to achieve marriage, men are ‘tricked’ into it

Part and parcel of having friends and family is the obligation to attend weddings occasionally. The people in our lives who would notice us missing and notify the police in a timely manner tend to have an annoying habit of falling in love, getting married and demanding your involvement in the process. Making small talk with their friends from social tennis or their old job is a small price to pay in the scheme of things for making sure your body would be found before it decomposed.

Sometimes it’s even quite fun, and you end up coming away with a new friend, or at the very least, an acquaintance you will add on social media and never speak to again – you’ll just watch their lives take shape from afar as you get oddly invested in their Instagram posts. There are people I met at an event 10 years ago who I have watched split from their partner, remarry and have a baby through tiny tiles of pictures on the internet, like a benign but slightly creepy guardian angel rooting for them in silence as they finally start their dream decorative balloon arch business.

So, when I sit down to a table of strangers, I am on my game. These are people who could be in my social media feeds for years to come, and me in theirs, so I have to make a good impression. Once we slog through the “how do you know so and so” and “what do you do for work” introductions, we’re out in open water. Like other neurodivergent people, I try to workshop a small talk script beforehand so I don’t accidentally ask someone what their tax return was, or if they have any childhood trauma, before the main course is served.

[ Nancy Harris: ‘There’s something about other people’s weddings that tell us where we’re at in our lives’ ]

[ Brianna Parkins: How to plan a wedding, without breaking the bank ]

If there are couples, I stick to the social safe harbour of asking “so how did you meet?” It’s a useful one because people like talking about themselves, they have rehearsed this story before, and if they have an embarrassing one they’d rather not talk about, they will have a mutually pre-agreed lie they tell people anyway. Everyone wins but especially me, securing the title of “Most very normal wedding guest chat maker” of the evening.

Brianna Parkins: What’s infuriating about neurotypicals? Here’s a list

---

Brianna Parkins: Taylor Swift isn’t the first to monetise her heartbreak. Here are five of the best examples

---

Brianna Parkins: I’m sick of being asked why I don’t have kids

---

Cillian Murphy would like us all to know that’s just his face. Okay!

---

At a wedding recently, I was one-upped when a fellow attendee asked how the men of the engaged and married couples “popped the question” to their female partners. I wanted to know how you go about asking another person to hang around with you for the rest of your life when they could be doing something else. It’s odd that a one-sentence question on a beach is more popular than presenting a deck of slides as a sales pitch, but that’s how love works.

Some were quite sweet (one had written and printed a book of letters with the question at the end), some seemed manipulative (asking in a crowded tourist attraction where there was an audience and she would feel pressured into saying yes) and some were just odd.

“She was at me to do it for ages and we weren’t getting younger,” said one man, in a joking-but-not-really tone, the one where the woman rolls her eyes and the man looks for approval from other men at the table. I had heard it before, in a groom’s speech at another wedding. “Well she finally got her way and dragged me up the aisle‚” said the man of his new wife who had got up at 6am to get her makeup done. They had been together for 10 years and had three kids. She made him dinner every night. He did not find himself waking up on a navy vessel after drunkenly enlisting while on a bender, but he kept hinting that he’d been shanghaied into marrying a woman who he clearly loved and was committed to.

[ Home weddings: Going to the garden ... and we’re going to get married ]

[ Flirt review: Grace Mulvey’s hilarious tour through the life of a thirtysomething single woman ]

At another wedding, the bride described the proposal during the ceremony. The couple were away on holiday when they had a row. She broke down in frustrated tears because he had not asked her to marry him yet. She was tired of waiting. Wasn’t she good enough? “Ergh, just a second,” he said and fetched the ring from his bag. Everyone laughed at the story, which personally I would have not admitted under the pain of torture.

Surely we all know that women want nothing more than to marry, to achieve being married, while men must avoid it for as long as they can – even though it benefits men more, according to research on happiness and health outcomes. We have made coaxing men into marrying women into a cottage industry with dating coaches and relationship gurus flogging books about how to “get the ring”, with thousands of pages of conflicting and complicated rules like “don’t ever say you want to get married for you must conceal every real thought and feeling from him until you have him in the net”, and “don’t move in with him, men won’t buy a cow when he’s getting the milk for free because women are livestock”. Some say to cook for him to advertise the benefits, others say don’t “do wife duties at girlfriend prices”. It’s a confusing high-stakes game with everything on the line.

It’s a shame really. Imagine if women didn’t feel pressured to audition for men, or to provide a free trial service in the hope they won’t cancel with the full subscription charged. Women could use the energy and effort to get another degree, to learn a language or take up competitive table tennis. They could spend their one precious life enjoying themselves instead of convincing a reluctant man to take it off their hands and join it with his.

And if a proposal does happen, there will be a better story to tell awkward chatty strangers at weddings.