A decent proposal

According to custom, February 29 is the day belles ask their beaus to marry them. Yet I say in the feminist tradition of Greer, Faludi or Dvorkin (maybe not Dvorkin) women should have the right to ask men to marry them every day and not on just one day of a leap year.

For too long men have stood back and said nothing. We have been greedy keepers of the marriage proposal rights.

Back in 1288 the Scottish Queen Margaret said that on February 29 in a leap year, (what other year does such a date occur?) a woman can propose to any unmarried man she likes - and if the would-be husband refuses, he has to pay a £1 fine.

Seems a pretty cheap fine but a pound went a long way back then (as now). What penalty awaits the man these days who fails to say “I do” sometime between the oysters and the osso buco?

Eternal damnation in the letters pages of Cosmo or Cleo, his female friends treat him like a herpes outbreak and everyday seems like Monday.

The first complaint over this sexist hegemony came from 5th century Ireland. St Bridget complained to St Patrick about women having to wait for so long for a man to propose.

Proposals would have been scarce as St Bridget and her mates were nuns. Anyway, according to legend, St Patrick said the yearning females could have a crack on February 29 because it was an odd sort of day and no religious festivals were ever planned then, as they were bad luck.

This is an early example of a man telling a woman what she can and cannot do and then sabotaging the outcome. The fact that most women couldn’t read or write in 500AD was a handicap.

Yet with a bit of chalk and a slate the girls could have worked out that the actual length of a year is 365.242 days, not 365 days. So every four years an extra day is added to the calendar on February 29th.

For women today, popping the question is no longer regarded as anything out of the ordinary.

American Internet provider AOL conducted an incredibly dodgy survey of 7,000 people in 2004. It found that 59 per cent of women and 48 per cent of men thought women who proposed were modern and confident, rather than "scary or intimidating".

Yet a recent Irish poll of women conducted by leprechauns in County Clare this year, contradicts the American findings. It shows that independent, savvy women will take the initiative in most areas of their life except when it comes to popping the question.

The poll revealed that a staggering 91 per cent of those in a relationship would not be proposing to their boyfriends this leap year. Those Sineads and Colleens want their men on their knees - or rather, one knee.

One quarter of those went further and said it was a “man's place to do it”, while 20 per cent of women felt it was too forward and they would be scared of rejection.

Do I detect a girlish titter?

Let us stop and ponder the word "rejection". It seems that many women, when it comes to taking a guy out to some chic over-priced Etruscan restaurant and staring in a long, soft-yet poignant way, while getting the guts to say “Will you … ?” are scared of rejection.

Reject the triumphantist urge men! What would we know about rejection? Remember Ursula of the tight jeans and very loose t-shirt who you followed around for six weeks when you were 12 and all she could say was “bugger off dog’s vomit”? Remember the therapy bills.

My step-father was a pilot officer in World War II in Europe. He asked an English woman to marry him half a dozen times but she’d always say, “No, I don’t want to be a widow all of my life”. He used to try and put that thought out of his mind every time he cranked up the Lancaster.

Interestingly, 79 per cent of Irish women who were not in a relationship said they wished they were in one. This showed that many women are not only traditional when it comes to proposing marriages but are also hopeless romantics who would prefer to be wooed than single.

Don’t you love the word “wooed”. It’s up there with “giggle with all those vowels and consonants crammed together like couples at a bar.

My girlfriend proposed to me on December 11 some years ago in a bar in Acland Street, St Kilda. I said what? She said do ya wanna? And I said “yes” thinking she meant something else. It has been gravy all the way.

And that’s why women need to overthrow this last bastion of male tyranny. They need to gird their loins or loin their girds. Forget the dour and sour emotional litigation if the man hasn’t popped the question. Assume the active voice and leap in first this February 29.