As summer wedding season comes to a close, the holiday engagement spell will be upon us in only a few short months. Behind the scenes of these romantic Christmas engagements, countless men will wrestle with one question – should they ask the father of their girlfriend for permission to marry their daughter?
For years, asking for a father’s permission or blessing before proposing has been an unspoken expectation. It’s also a tradition that many women find endearing while many men find traumatizing.
Recently, this tradition has come under fire as a sexist practice, a whisper of days gone by when women were stripped of their individuality and given away as property to the “highest bidder” at the approval of their father.
“It’s still hard to deny that asking a father specifically – asking for permission, or his blessing – plays into long-standing and deeply-held misogynist ideas of what marriage is for,” Jill Filipovic writes in an op-ed for Cosmopolitan.
Asking for permission only increases the idea of a husband’s ownership over a wife, Filipovic asserts.
According to a 2015 survey conducted by The Knot, approximately three-quarters of men (or 77 percent) ask for permission from their girlfriend’s father before they propose. Interestingly, this number was an increase from 71 percent in 2011.
If this tradition is so misogynistic, why has the number of men asking for the blessing of their future father-in-law only increased in recent years?
According to an etiquette guide from The Knot, “As love became more important to marriage than money, this tradition has continued…Today, when a man asks his girlfriend’s father for her hand in marriage, he does so more out of respect than anything else.”
Others disagree with this assertion and believe that respect is the dying tradition.
“In their reckless pursuit for total equality, the baby boomers have razed the male hierarchy, and today young men approach their girlfriends’ dads with the goal of becoming ‘buddies,’” writes James Bassil for Ask Men. “Well, guess what? He doesn’t want to be your buddy. He wants your respect, but has been socialized to no longer expect it. When you give it to him, you’ll set yourself apart from every other guy under 30 in his life — including all his daughter’s ex-boyfriends.”
It could be that men continue to ask fathers for their blessing because their girlfriends view this longstanding tradition as romantic (gasp), rather than restrictive. Therefore, a man wanting to respect the wishes of his girlfriend and future father-in-law is a man worth keeping around.
It should also be noted that if women are looking to throw out longstanding, misogynistic traditions surrounding marriage, then they will also need to blow their sparkly engagement rings a big kiss goodbye.
According to the same survey conducted by The Knot, 67 percent of brides browse ring styles long before the question is ever popped. 71 percent of women admitted to dropping hints to their partner as to what style was their favorite, and 36 percent confessed that they told their partner outright what kind of ring they wanted.
Engagement rings have not always been a romantic gesture, however.
According to the Reader’s Digest, hundreds of years ago, “its symbolism wasn’t so much about love as it was ownership. According to Pliny the Elder, the groom first gave the bride a gold ring to wear during the betrothal ceremony…then an iron ring to wear at home, signifying her binding legal agreement to his ownership of her.”
There is no shortage to modern traditions that were derived from less than ideal circumstances hundreds of years ago, but hold honorable and even romantic connotations today.
Perhaps instead of attempting to rip each well-intentioned tradition apart based on its often irrelevant history, women should simply let men continue trying to be the car door opening, flower giving, respectful gentlemen their own fathers raised them to be. As it turns out, respect is a lot harder to find than the perfect engagement ring.
