While listening to morning radio, I heard this song by Train, and immediately started sighing.
It's a times like this when I wish I'm more "girly".
There's a version where Martina Mcbride sings with Train, but for some reason, it sounds better when sung by a man. Maybe because saying "Marry me" sounds either so imperative or pleading, and seeing as I was raised in a country where men serenade women (harana) and even--this happened to my aunt and her husband-- engage in paninilbihan (literally translated as "servitude"); a practice where a man, in an effort to prove his love, will fulfill chores for the woman's family, like fetching water from the well and the ol' splitting-wood-with-an-axe, among others. (I tried to find a link to a video for paninilbihan on Youtube, but all I saw were courtship dances.) In a world where women are taking on behaviour that were at some point in the recent past thought was proper only for men to take part in, or at least initiate--asking someone out on a date, paying for the meal or a movie ticket--asking for someone's hand in marriage seems strangely restricted to men. Even in the USA, the self-appointed eternal purveyor of "modern" ideals, a woman who asks for a man to marry her at best raises eyebrows and at worst mocked outright, being branded unwanted, and therefore, desperate.
Of course, limited as my scope of vision is, there might be places on Earth where a woman who proposes marriage is an everyday occurence. I'm not an expert on these things. The fact remains, however, that I was raised in a country where, amidst claims of this generation being more "liberal" than previous ones, a woman does NOT propose to a man.There are exceptions of course, but as far as tradition is concerned, it simply isn't done.
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