The Proposal

He has had the ring for eleven weeks. It has been in four different pockets, a desk drawer, and for one bad afternoon the glovebox of a car he then lent to his brother. He has rehearsed nothing, because every version he rehearsed sounded like somebody else. The proposal is a set-piece the genre treats as a reward and the best books treat as a scene. That difference is the whole of what follows. What the set-piece promises is a question asked out loud, in a form that requires an answer, by a person who has decided to be refusable. That last part is the machinery. Everything before this moment in a romance can be walked back. A proposal cannot. He has made himself a person who can be turned down, in a specific way, on a specific evening, and the reader is watching somebody voluntarily enter a position of maximum exposure. The make-or-break element is whether the answer is genuinely in doubt. This is the test, and most proposals in the genre fail it. If the reader knows she will say yes, and the characters know, and the only remaining question is how prettily it will be staged, the scene is a ceremony rather than a set-piece. Nothing is at stake and the prose has to work very hard to disguise that, usually by describing a location. The strong version puts something real in the balance. She has not resolved the thing that was keeping her from this. He is asking early, and knows he is asking early, and is doing it anyway because waiting has begun to cost more than being refused would. Or she says yes and the yes is complicated, arriving with a condition attached that he has to decide whether to accept. The failure mode is the proposal as epilogue decoration. It arrives after every conflict has been settled, functions as a bow on a resolved plot, and the reader reads it the way she reads a wedding photograph: pleasant, expected, and containing no information. There is a second failure that is specific to the elaborate proposal, and it is worth naming because it is fashionable. The staged public proposal, with the flash mob or the stadium screen or the assembled family, transfers the pressure onto her. She is now being asked in front of witnesses who have been recruited to want a particular answer. Books rarely notice this. The ones that do notice it can get a whole scene out of a woman who says yes and is angry about the conditions under which she was asked. The best proposals in the genre are usually small, badly timed, and interrupted. He asks in a kitchen, having planned to ask somewhere else, because the moment arrived and waiting had become impossible. There is no ring, or the ring is wrong, or the ring was his grandmother's and does not fit. The awkwardness is the evidence, because a proposal that goes smoothly is a proposal that was performed. She says something that is not yes and is not no, and he waits. That is the set-piece. Not the question. The seconds between the question and whatever comes next.