Last week, we learned that making one’s boyfriend a daily sandwich — in earnest reenactment of every 12-year-old boy’s first sexist joke — is a good way for working women to secure a marriage proposal. (Or at least a book deal.) But if the monotony of rinsing off the bread knife every single morning makes some women homicidal, they could always try ignoring their significant other altogether. Salon’s Tracy Clark-Flory braved the “waiting” section of wedding forums to find other ways women extract commitments and jewelry from their partners. She discovered that the silent treatment — every 12-year-old girl’s first social weapon — still works.
Soon2BeMrsC writes that she and her boyfriend of three years were getting nowhere with the engagement talk. “We’d end up fighting and not getting any closer to what I wanted,” she said. So, without telling him, she set a deadline for him to propose and decided to play hard-to-get. She started focusing on studying, work and friends. “I just moved on with my life with no consideration for whether he was going to be a part of it,” she writes. She began the “plan” in March and got her proposal in May. “I think once he realized that I was perfectly capable of carrying on without him, he decided he better hurry up and figure out whether he was coming along with me or not,” she says.
There are weekly support threads for marriage-obsessed women who make “shut-it-up pacts,” vowing not to say anything ring-related to their boyfriends. (Women’s answer to the Reddit groups for men who quit masturbating?) “I’m up to day 31 on my personal SIU pact, so I need to keep with it and keep my mouth shut,” wrote kandykane1. “He’s been a lot more sweet and a bit mushier recently, so maybe keeping my mouth shut is working. Fingers crossed!” Kandykane1 just needs a little of Glamour’s famous “engagement chicken” — prepared and served in total silence — to get her past the finish line.
