Getting A No – How To Cope If She Rejects Your Proposal
If you want to see the moment a man’s heart breaks, watch this clip. It’s filmed at a baseball game in the US on the night before Valentine’s Day. A plucky chap leads his girlfriend onto the court and proposes before the watchful eye of the crowd, the Jumbotron camera and the commentators, who joke that they’d like to see someone say no one time. She does exactly that, he’s gutted and the only person there to console him is a man dressed as giant mouse.
That luckless fellow is not alone: check out this, this and this for more of the same. But this isn’t a post about why you shouldn’t propose at a major sporting event; it’s a post about what those guys should do afterwards.
Whatever your response to a rejected proposal, some picking up and dusting off is going to be required. In proposing, you put yourself on the line, made your feelings clear and hoped – possibly even assumed – that your partner felt the same. The rejection will have come as a shock, and a major knock to the confidence. But you should stop and think before you hurl that ring into a river and hit the bottle.
The first major step is to come to some sort of understanding. If you and your partner are still talking, ask her why she rejected you. Having had some time to think about it, she’ll give you a more reasoned response than whatever she blurted out at the time. You need to ask her two things: why she doesn’t want to marry you right now and whether she can ever see you getting married. And more importantly, you need to ask yourself if you can pick up the pieces following the rejection.
Timing is a common reason for rejected proposals. Perhaps your partner feels she’s too young to be tied down. Perhaps she’s been married before and is wary of doing so again. Maybe she’s happy with your current situation and doesn’t want to rock the boat. If so, these are things that can be worked on together, either on your own or with couples counselling (see www.relate.org.uk).
If your partner’s reservations are based on deeper problems, maybe you need to think about your reasons for proposing. Are you proposing in an attempt to paper over the cracks in your relationship? Is there a history of affairs or a lack of trust in the relationship? Relate may be able to help, but you need to decide if your relationship is repairable first.
Or perhaps it’s nothing so serious at all. If the way you proposed didn’t match your partner’s dream, it’s perfectly understandable that she might want you to give it another go. Same applies if you were drunk at the time.
One girl who rejected her partner’s proposal has the following sound advice: “Ask her if she will ever want to marry you. If not, it’s time to move on. If she does want to marry you but just isn’t ready yet, it’s up to you if you want to keep going with the relationship until she’s ready.”
Where that individual continued to date her partner for a further two years, another girl took the proposal as the moment to cut and run. “It gave me the opportunity to tell him that although we had fun together, I did not see myself ever marrying him because of XY & Z,” she writes. “I broke up with him that night because I knew I was not going to change my mind.”
It’s never going to be easy to come back after such a stirring knock to the confidence, but there are ways forward. Staggered only hopes that if it happens to you, there’s a giant mouse nearby with a furry shoulder to cry on.
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