Thank you for starting this interesting thread. I think a surprise engagement may be wonderful for some couples and not so healthy for others.
What I'm thinking of, in the not-so-healthy category, is my first engagement. It was a total surprise when my BF asked me to marry him . . . which he did by asking "What do you think about our future?" I said, "Um, I dunno" and he said, "Well, I think we should get married." Totally out of the blue. Of course I said yes, I liked him well enough, we went to the same church, our parents approved of us dating, I was 19 and thought getting married was like going to heaven.
However, he didn't present me with a ring and didn't give me any clues as to when I was going to get one. This developed into kind of a control issue, and control became a recurring theme in our relationship. Eventually, about 6 mos after he proposed, he gave me my e-ring, again as a surprise. I had not been given any chance to help choose it, and truthfully I didn't like it, it wasn't my style. So that's my example of a surprise engagement in a relationship that really wasn't a good one.
Why did I go through with marrying him? There was no good reason not to. He was a nice guy and a solid citizen, our parents approved, and even if I wasn't head over heels in love with him, he certainly hadn't done anything horrible enough to deserve breaking the engagement. Well, except that he made me go to premarital counseling by myself, LOL. The sessions were at a certain time in the evenings, and he "had to work" (i.e., got his boss to assign him to work those nights so that he couldn't go). I'll never quite forgive our pastor for letting him get away with that, LOL.
Unfortunately, it got worse. We really didn't have much in common, and once we were married our values and priorities clashed more and more. I'd been brought up to believe that divorce was out of the question, but guess what, I was surprised again. The marriage only lasted a couple of years, and the heartache of that divorce was unspeakable.
Looking at that surprise engagement and comparing it with the other times I've been engaged, I guess the key difference is that I was deeply committed and sure that I wanted to be proposed to in the other cases. With that first engagement, I decided to be happy with him and make the commitment because he asked me, not because I felt that way about him on my own.
"When Women Vote, We All Win!"
EveT
