The Vine: March 10, 2010
Dear Sars,
I really admire your writing and your advice, so I wanted to ask you some etiquette questions that have been on my mind lately. Specifically, I had some questions about wedding engagement etiquette, and same-sex engagements in particular.
My boyfriend and I have been together for a little over a year now and we have been talking about eventually getting married (and we are Canadian so we are lucky enough to have that opportunity). We have also talked about getting a house together, and of the two, we have agreed that the house is the higher priority. Buying a house will probably be two or three years down the road yet, and I’m totally committed to that timetable.
But a lot of my friends have been getting married lately, or will be in the near future, and I find myself getting swept up in the romance of it all. I am eager to take a step towards building a life together and asking him officially to marry me.
So my first question is: how long an engagement is too long? Can a proposal just be what I intend, a promise to marry this man someday? Or does it set an expectation among family and friends that we will be getting married sooner rather than later? My three most recently engaged friends (straight couples all, if that makes a difference) are getting married after 8-month to year-long engagements, so I guess I’m worried about jumping the gun if our wedding might be three or four years away.
Our predominantly straight circle of friends leads to my next question; how should a same-sex marriage proposal work? My boyfriend says that he feels better at the smaller, everyday loving gestures than grand, romantic ones. He’s not giving himself enough credit, but I do tend to be the more mushy, romantic type of the two of us. So I have told him that when we get engaged, I will do the proposing.
That said, while I’ve got a few ideas about when and how, there are matters of protocol on which I feel fuzzy. Most specifically, I don’t know what to do about a ring. My plans thus far tend towards the heteronormative, with me getting down on one knee and giving him…something. But a diamond ring doesn’t seem like the way to go here. Is there something else cool and classy I can present to him? Should I get a second whatever-it-is for him to put on me as he accepts? Or would something altogether less traditional be more appropriate?
I am probably getting a little too excited about this a little too early, but this is advice that I will need someday at least, so I hope you (or the readers?) can help me out.
Totally Gay for Weddings
Dear Gay,
If I don’t know the particulars of a couple or their engagement, what financial concerns might factor into the decision, et cetera, a long engagement (my definition of long: more than 18 months) raises an eyebrow with me. “Pre-engagements,” same thing. Yes, yes, a wedding is expensive and takes time to plan, I get that, but if you got engaged in order to get married, and not just to say that you got engaged, or pre-engaged, or whatever, then you find a way and you go ahead and get married.
And sometimes it is that the couple just wants to have some drama, I guess, or that one party is stalling, but it depends on the couple — one friend of mine told her fiancé that she’d get engaged if he felt strongly about it, and she’s faithful to him and they own their home together and all the rest, but she just doesn’t want to get married, so they have an engagement in perpetuity. That’s their deal. Presumably your friends know your deal, and for people who don’t know the specifics, who cares what they (or I) think anyway.
That said, try to separate the emotional desire to get married from the legal and financial ramifications. You can go ahead and buy a house and have a contract between you that lays out the terms of that, and not have marriage as a condition. You can go ahead and get married, and then the property laws that apply to married couples will apply when you purchase a home. But if you love the guy and you want to build a life with him, landowners or not, leave the house out of it. You can’t line everything up exactly right in life; you can try, but sometimes you just have to go ahead with what you know you want and trust yourself to figure everything else out in whatever order.
As far as the actual proposal…you tell me. You know the guy better than anyone, presumably; if you think he would want a ring, something platinum with an engraving, you should get him that. If you think he would want to give you something in exchange, if you think he would want the same thing he received from you — I don’t know him, so I can’t really say. You get matching tattoos, you buy him a watch, whatever you think he would like and whatever token you think would have meaning to both of you is what you should go with. I can guess, but it’s like you guessing that I might like a traditional engagement setting — I wouldn’t, in fact, and anyone proposing to me would know that, if you see what I mean.
Trust yourself, and trust him to appreciate whichever gesture you pick. And congratulations in advance!
Hey Sars,
I’ve got a cat question for you. A few weeks ago my cat managed to be one of the few non-overweight cats to get herself diagnosed with Fatty Liver Disease. It seems to have been caused by her getting bored with her cat food while I was away for the weekend. She started eating immediately when I bought her a new brand of food, but the damage was already done.
Luckily, since the illness wasn’t brought on by any other underlying cause, she didn’t have to be force-fed or have a feeding tube put in. My vet pronounced her the most energetic jaundiced cat he’d ever seen and told me the main thing to do was to get her to eat as much as she could to flush the fat from her liver. I switched her to wet food since I knew that would be more appealing and she’s been scarfing down 1.5-2 cans a day.
She’s much less yellow now and I’d like to start switching her back to dry food. I tried mixing some of it in with the wet food and got the cat equivalent of a “bitch please” face. Do you have any other tips for turning a cat back to dry food?
Everything Smells Like Wellness Turkey-and-Salmon
Dear Turkey,
If she’s well enough to miss a few meals, then she can suck it up and eat what you put down. Cats will eventually eat whatever’s there; they just have to get hungry enough. I alternate my cats’ dry food between a hairball formula and a senior formula, and every time there’s a changing of the guard, there’s also the sitting next to the kibble all slumped over and sighing…and the Sarah shrugging, “Suit yourself, Butterpantses,” and leaving the room…and right on cue, the sound of crunching. Beleaguered crunching, but: crunching.
So, if it’s not imperative that she eat steadily for a couple of days, mix more and more dry food into the wet each time until it’s all dry. She’s going to get hungry after a while and eat it, and if you’re allowed to let her get hungry, the bitch-please faces won’t last long. Just ignore them.
You can also try putting a daub of Petromalt onto the dry-food mix for a couple of feedings, if she likes the fish pastes and if your vet says it’s okay (it might be contraindicated for her condition, so ask first).
Dear Sars,
Here’s the situation: husband and I have been married for 6+ years, and as relationships go, things are pretty good. We have our ups and downs, but no large problems.
Over the past three years, there’s a guy in my life who has moved into the “very good personal friend” category. That’s not a euphemism — we’ve had a lot of heart-to-heart talks over the phone, but we live in different states, and it’s unlikely that we’ll be in the same geographic region anytime soon. We’ve talked about a lot of intensely personal stuff, and occasionally our relationships to significant others are part of the discussion, but our conversations cover a wide ground — professional and personal lives, feelings, emotions, family and dysfunctional relationships — the gamut.
Recently I’ve been dealing with the near-death of a family member and a cross-country move; he’s been going through a breakup and tough job situation.Our communication tends to ebb and flow, and while in the past, we’ve gone a month or so without connecting, that’s unusual. We’re in a pattern right now of 3-4 phone conversations per week, some longer than others, and there’s something that I’ve noticed in our recent conversations. I think that I’m attracted to him and I think that he may be attracted to me.
Let me state for the record that I have no intention of cheating on my spouse. In fact, my husband and I talk about everything that my friend and I discuss, which I think allows some of the emotional tension to disappear. Friend and I definitely have a strong emotional bond, and I think that’s what’s setting off a warning signal for me. My husband is not a good communicator, and really doesn’t like having long discussions about philosophy and feelings. In some ways, this friendship has helped me to see what I’ve been missing and to attempt to develop these kinds of conversations in my marriage.
While I believe that all of us have different needs that are met by different people, and that a single person cannot “complete” me, I want to make sure that I’m not crossing a line for either my husband or my friend. I love my husband and would not leave him or cheat on him. I also really care about my friend, and do not want to desert him.
I think there’s probably a way to scale things back a bit, to allow some more of the tension to disperse without breaking things off. There are probably some boundaries that I could set.
What would you do? Can boys and girls really be friends?
Sally
Dear Sally,
Yes, boys and girls can really be friends — until one or both parties develop(s) more-than-friendly feelings, at which time you can’t keep telling yourself that it’s about the friendship, you don’t want to lose the friendship, you value the friendship too much to blah blah the friendship is gone now, sad to say. The friendship is now some other relationship, and the fact that you’ve written to me to ask about setting boundaries suggests that, while this kind of relationship isn’t inappropriate in every marriage, you know it’s inappropriate in yours.
You say you “think there’s probably a way to scale things back a bit,” but you sound reluctant to actually do it — and you’ll need to. You can tell Friend that the level of closeness is starting to feel improper to you, given your marriage, and while you don’t want him to feel abandoned, you’ll need to take a step back from the relationship for a while. You can tell Friend nothing, and pull back a bit on your own. But you need to acknowledge that the friendship is now compromised, and it’s not impossible for it to return to a strictly platonic meeting of the minds — the key word being “return.”
This hasn’t gone too far yet, but it could, and I don’t mean that you sleep with Friend. Emotional attachments do count as cheating to some people, and unless your husband has expressly stated, believably, that he’s fine with it, the situation isn’t fair to him — or you, really.
What you tell Friend is up to you, but those boundaries want setting, and soon.
Tags: boys (and girls) cats etiquette
When I was a good bit younger, I had a work buddy who I clicked with right away, and we became good friends in the context of work (which was lifeguarding, and sometimes offered lots of time to talk when the beach was not busy). He had a troubled marriage, and I was single most of the time, but there was never anything between us. His wife didn’t see it that way, and for quite some time, he cut our friendship off out of respect to her. I didn’t find out about this until years later, though, when we were friends again and this time it was the wife who actually was having an emotional affair with one of her professors. He started to confide in me, and we spent a lot of time together, but by now I had gotten over my naivete that we could have a friendship outside the bounds of their marriage. I started hanging out with his wife, too, and for every time I would go on a run with my friend, I would go for a bike ride with his wife. He and I were able to maintain our friendship, which I know was a help to him during some of their struggles, but she stopped seeing me as a threat and instead we became friends. I also got to spend a lot of time with their kids, who I love dearly, and I think we all realized that anyone who is not a genuine friend of the family is not a friend at all. Just my experience…it wasn’t always easy to understand how to make a friendship work with a man who was trying to stay married when I didn’t have the same worries, but it was worth it to keep a great friend, and make another in his wife.
Hoo boy, Sally’s situation really strikes a chord.
A year or so ago, after many years in a happy relationship, I got talking with someone who showed up at a work event – this guy and I had a LOT in common (profession, background, quirky in taste music, etc. etc.) and talked pretty much just to each other all night. Had I not been in a long-term relationship I would have been honest with myself and described my reaction that evening as “smitten”. Email addresses were exchanged.
Fast forward a few weeks and we’d exchanged numerous lengthy messages pouring our hearts out about everything under the sun, and although it all stayed completely above board I just couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something just not right about how intense and intimate I was suddenly being with someone outside of my relationship – it felt like a betrayal, probably because it kind of was.
After a few weeks of justifying it by telling myself “well why CAN’T I have a new friend, just because he happens to be male?”, the guy suggested meeting up for some drinks, and fortunately this snapped me out of it – I clearly had a crush, and who knows, it could have all been completely innocent from his perspective, but I just felt it would have been a bad, bad idea to go down that road. So I cut things off before risking any real damage – and am so relieved that I did.
Margaret, you always have something so interesting and useful to say. Hee – I have enough invested in my fidelity that it’s almost unfortunate, right now, that I won’t be able to just use “skidmarks, skidmarks, skidmarks” as a kind of mantra to ensure it. But I will use it whenever such advice might be useful for my friends! (The proximity of the term “crapshoot” is also amusing me like a 13-year-old boy right now …)
@Gay: Yay, you’re getting engayged! I recently got engaged to get gay-married myself, although we have the misfortune of living in California, not Canada. We had been waffling between getting married this fall and next fall, and finally decided to just bite the bullet and do it this fall, for various reasons. We had been waiting for a few years to get engaged, so we wanted to jump in and get moving and actually progress toward marriage, rather than waiting even longer.
I strongly recommend http://www.soyoureengayged.com. It’s a wedding planning site for gay couples that also has stories about real weddings and engagements, and it might give you some good ideas.
There’s so much invested in wedding traditions that it’s hard to balance between traditional (“we’re just like everyone else!”) and nontraditional (“why pretend we’re straight when we’re not?”). The only answer, for your engagement and wedding, has to be to do what feels right to you, what serves you best, and what feels like the best way to honor your love and commitment.
Congrats!!
I am now enjoying “meep and deaningful”, which sounds like a rather whimsical ad agency.
I wasn’t at all attempting to suggest that folks adopt our strategy of how we handle opposite sex friends, but it has worked for us. Just wanted to share it.
“Beleaguered crunching, but: crunching.”
Sars, this made me LOL. First time all day. Thanks!
I wish I @Turkey’s problem. The orange portent got to be 14 lbs. on kibble, so that the vet said “Give him half wet, it’ll help him lose weight slowly and safely.” Both cats had to go on the same diet, of course, because there is no separating the boy and his kibble.
Well, they both were picky eaters to start with… and while they accept the way of things now (i.e. that they only get 1/3 of a cup of kibble every half day, and the rest of the time they get to split 1 sizable can of food), they still pine away for their dry food. Sometimes the orange boy will tear into wet food with gusto (mostly if it something that smells like some disgusting fish), but mostly you can audibly hear him do the cat equivalent of a sigh. The girl is actually pickier, so unless she gets Weruva’s tuna-centric flavors, she will take two polite bites and then look up at me as if to say “I tried, but look at what I gotta work with!”
They’re certainly not starving though. They lost about a pound a piece, and seem to have stabilized at their current weight.
“Butterpantses”. If I ever write one of those “skewer-1950s-suburbian-families” short stories, the protagonists SHALL be named “Butterpants”. :D
@Gay: Do you and/or Boyfriend have anything time-and-energy-intensive going on that can reasonably be expected to last for at least the next year or more, like college or job training? If so, then I think you can ‘reasonably’ get away with telling people that you’re not getting married until after that’s done with.
This is what my fiance and I have done, actually; we’ve told folks who’ve asked that yes, we’re engaged and no, we’re not even setting a date until after we’ve both graduated from university. Which means that we’re going to be engaged for the next four years, at minimum; more likely, far longer than that since he’s probably going to go into law.
(And by ‘reasonable’ I just mean that people aren’t really going to start asking ‘why’ over and over, like overgrown toddlers until you’ve explained it in essay-length detail. If they’re on close enough terms that they’re asking at all, they should know the sitch already.)
My vet recommended my giant bundle of scaredy go on a lot more wet food and a lot less dry (she currently eats a quarter of a can of wet per day, and about 1/2 to 2/3 cup of kibble). I took his advice, and was immediately confronted by a multi-week-long ordeal of diarrhea, which kept coming and going enough that I never quite got to the point where I felt I needed to call the doctor — she has a very sensitive stomach and barfs at the drop of a hat, something her vet is well aware of — but I did have to go buy butt wipes, which I used to, well, wipe her butt, and clean drippy poop off the floor multiple times a week. And she would look so BALEFULLY at me before running off to the litter box for the third time in ten minutes. Poor thing. It was altogether NOT the right situation for her. I finally switched back to her previous food ratio and she’s been fine.
One time when she was much younger I switched her to hairball food and she threw up for like a solid week. My understanding was that they throw up a little to get it all out of their systems, and after that the hairballs go down instead of up, but it lasted long enough that I decided to abort. So basically, I don’t mess with her food too much if she’s in a non-barfing cycle.
She’d eat a pound of canned food a day if she could, but she also eats the dry without complaining. She likes to nibble on it throughout the day, which is fine by me. If she had her way, of course, she’d probably eat exclusively cream cheese.
Regarding cats and their feeding: I know opinions differ, and I’m no expert, but I started making my cats the Poultry Delight recipe from Dr. Pitcairn’s Natural Guide to Health for Cats and Dogs (the recipe is essentially raw turkey, raw eggs, cooked millet, and supplements), and the change, especially in my previously sour tortie, has been remarkable. She was always kind of generally unhappy, and would sulk about and hide most of the time. Now she’s affectionate, plays with toys, and is generally a different, much happier cat.
What’s more, I tried recently to switch to a raw but store-bought variety, and she went on hunger strike for two days and then commenced licking the floor for crumbs and subsequently throwing up lint moments later. Whereupon I broke down and made some more Poultry Delight.
Sorry for the late reply, but thank you all so much for your encouragement and support for me and my beau!