YORK: Tower Gardens

On August 5th 2010 me and Joe got engaged. It's amazing to think a whole year has gone by since Joe proposed on a bench in the Tower Gardens by the River in York - named after the famous Clifford's Tower [bottom picture]. We'd spent the morning travelling back from Manchester Airport and were all excited about our little weeks holiday together as tourists in York, I know I wasn't properly blogging at the time, so none of these ever really got mentioned sadly. We'd planed a trip on the night cruise on the river boat and ended up, killing time just walking along the river and sitting on a bench watching the boats cruise up and down. It was then that that bench became christened as "ours" just as Joe asked me to marry him. We'd return to to same spot in March this year only to find it was no longer there! Perhaps another winter river flooding caused its removal.

I hadn't been back to "our" bench until the year anniversary [if we can call it that] of our engagement, the idea of it always felt so odd going there without Joe, but I wanted to visually capture the gardens, the river, all the boats and the warehouse [named as the Bonding Warehouse] which we use to talk about while sitting on our bench or on the cut down tree trunk by the edge. I think every time we head back to York we'll always pop in and visit our spot, it has so many happy memories of our time together and beginning our future. I just wish Joe could have visited it again with me.

Holiday snaps

Thank you to everyone who's given us there's congratulations and best wishes for getting engaged. It still feels like an amazingly good dream. I guess we should pretend to be all grown up now?! So here's just some piccies of us on our holiday together in York. No doubt there'll be countless other blogs about what we got up too. 

Lazying in the sun just by our special place where we got engaged

Snuggles behind the Minster

We're right posers, I know.

Love

My guy :D

No more piccccccies!

Best week of my life. Loved it.

Thank you all again

Riverside Romance and an Engagement to Boot

The Thursday before last me and Joe took what just seemed to be a normal little wander through York. After spending the early evening watching Funny Face with Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn and eating Spag Bol and endless quickly melting Ben and Jerrys [because there was no freezer and it was melting too fast] we headed towards the river. We found a perfect little bench just by Skledergate Bridge just sat watching the world go by, the river cruises, the geese and the ducks.

And then somewhere out of the dream Joe asked me to marry him, mid kiss. The whole world seemed to stop, my heart went giddy up. And everything went amazingly perfect. We finished off the evening with a ride on the floodlit river tour down to Bishopthorpe Palace and a stroll through the city.

The women at the jewellery store was surprised at the tiny sized fingers - saying that she's given me a complex about it now. We choose the ring together, its everything I could ever want, small, pretty and shiney. I love it and I really really can't wait to marry Joe - he makes life so fun and amazing.

The uncoventional proposal

Today I posted on a female magazine based forum on which I regularly write upon (call it yet another addiction) a discussion regarding women asking men for their hand in marriage. I was wondering why women feel it is not their role to ask, what stops them and if it still remains a man's position. Don't get me wrong I have no man to marry, but it got me thinking. I started this topic on the forum in response to the growing number of postings by women remarking their wonderment and their wait for their guy to pop those magical words of proposal. While badgering their partners for years, no sign of a ring was in the pipeline. Yet surely after knowing your partners views on the subject of marriage, engagement and the whole wider "lets spend our lives together" situation, (I don't believe proposals should come randomly out the blue - you do have to some extent know your partners wishes on this matter) a woman could feel enough within herself to ask him to marry her? Therefore limiting this wait for a ring to magically pop up and a guy to fall onto his knee.

As a sociologist, somewhat a femininst and as a twenty something, I'm wondering if i'm getting too feminist in my assumptions? Or am I merely so unromantic that I consider it ok for a women to ask a guy to marry her?

Sure I love my men to be proper men. I like a guy to take control, to buy me flowers, to shower me with love (dreamer!). And okay the idea of a guy going down on one knee asking me those words, would be romantic. However - if I knew he wanted to get married, that we had chatted about it, and I believed we were in the "right" place in our relationship then yes - I would feel okay about asking him to marry me.

I'd do this merely to save my mind from passively wondering when, or if he'd ever get around to asking. I don't want be waiting till he randomly has his light bulb moment and think "hmmm marriage ... now!" drops on one knee and there you go. I have the ability to make my own decisions and make my own choices and act by them. I don't need a man, even in this situation to wait to make up his mind.

A lot of replies to my post in the forum claimed ideas that for a woman to propose it would somehow threaten a man's masculinity and therefore their macho position when it comes to romance, of this one occasion when a man can be romantic. Thus for a women to ask for his hand in marriage would therefore take away the man's role.

Then remains this whole notion of tradition. To some extent I believe traditions are there to be broken. I know i'll be one of them women that will have children late (if at all) and that's my choice. I don't really fancy getting married until i'm in my 30s (again my choice). That's my view. But I don't agree in the assumed tradition that only a man can do the proposing.

Many claimed that it would lack romance - but surely as contemporary, worldly experienced women, we have the ability within us to be able to make a night special and romantic for us to ask a man for marriage. Not only men in this occasion can be romantic!

I really wonder what a man's view on this matter is. Do they really feel that it is their role to do the asking? Would they feel threatened and "hurt" if their girlfriend was to ask them? Or would they just think they were taking the piss? Or as I hope they would think, would they feel it romantic and sexy that their women, their partner loves them enough to ask them?