PROPOSALS

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXVI, Issue 3444, 12 November 1932, Page 6

PROPOSALS

IS ROMANCE DEAD? INFORMAL, BUT SINCERE. Letters from men and women readers of all ages have reached the "Daily Mail," London, on the subject of "Modern Proposals" discussed in the newspaper. Most of the letters described personal experience of proposals. Men wrote of how they put the romantic question, women of how they received it. Some of the writers reI vealed the manner of very recent proposals, and each letter showed the intense interest which the matter has aroused. One reader summed it up as follows : gj rj —i agree with Miss Evelyn Bewick, that proposals these days may lack the old romantic trimmings. But this does not mean that romance is dead. On the contrary, I believe the apparent casualness of many young people to-day hides a very true and tender devotion, which is the basis of all real romance. I believe, too, that the knee-bend-ing and hand-kissing and resounding phrases of our grandfathers were in many cases meaningless conventions. Romance as too many of them knew it was an imposing facade; behind which lay the sad and sometimes sordid reality of matrimonial lath-and-plaster. Ecstasy Not Enough. After all, a marriage, if it is to survive, should surely be based on something more substantial than an emotional ecstasy introduced by Viennese waltzes, warm champagne, and a certain decorous propinquity in a conservatory? Yet who can doubt that a large percentage of Victorian proposals were due to just such stimuli? For these reasons I am all in favour of proposals in the supposedly prosaic fashion of to-day—the more prosaic it is, the more likelihood of the emotion being genuine. Given a languorous waltz and a good dinner, almost any presentable young person of the opposite sex seems possible. Study the same person in the cold light of reason on the top of an omnibus, watch hjs or her temper during the hold-up on the tenth tee. You are then in a better position to decide whether this is the face you want to see, not once and again at the cinema or ballroom, but over an interminable series of drab breakfasts, in sickness and in health, sleeping and waking, in rapturous

joy and irritation and gloom, for the term of your natural life. "Will You?" at Theatre. Here are some more views and experiences:— A Woman Fashion Artist.—l began to sense what was imminent weeks before he found the courage to ask me to marry him. I was not prepared, however, for the manner in which he did it. We were at a rather moving love drama one night, when suddenly he passed the programme to me with these words scribbled on it: "If you think that you could possibly put up with me, will you mary me next month?" I looked at him, but he was watching the stage with a crimson face, so- I searched my bag for a pencil and wrote my answer on the same programme. It was "Yes." She was 10 and He was 12. Another Business Woman. —He proposed to me when I was 10 and he was 12. He did not propose again, but about nine years afterwards he came to me and said: "I have made all the arrangements for our wedding. You know we agreed to marry some day." This statement was made quite casually, and in a most unembai'rassed way, but I had not changed my mind, and so we were married.