Dear Abby: Old Custom of Asking Permission to Marry Is Fading Away

[cereta]

DEAR ABBY: The husbands of both my two daughters asked for my blessing prior to asking my girls to marry them. I felt what they did was respectful and it was very much appreciated. My wife felt the same way when I relayed the good news to her.

I believe this courtesy replaced what in the "olden days" was a request for permission from the father rather than a blessing and, in my opinion, is more appropriate. If I am correct in my assumption that "permission" has evolved to "blessing," I wonder if it would have been more appropriate for them to have asked my wife and me together for our blessing. Your thoughts? -- PROUD PAPA

DEAR PROUD PAPA: Men asked permission of fathers to marry their daughters in "olden days" because the daughters were considered property. They could not marry without their father's consent. Thankfully, those customs are long gone -- in western society, at least. Please stop second-guessing your sons-in-law, who both seem like gems to me. Many couples today forgo the courtesy altogether.

Comments

Val Stone does not approve

[cereta]

Many of us forgo it because we don't see it as a "courtesy" but as a one-sided holdover, and as long as it's one man asking another man for permission/blessing/whatever to marry a woman, that's what it will be. Want to keep it? Darn skippy your wife should have been asked, and your daughters should have asked their prospective in-laws, if the custom was going to be observed at all.. Kudos for at least thinking critically about it.

(This was one thing my spouse and I eventually had to agree to disagree on. He insisted 20 years ago that if my father had still been alive, he would have asked permission before proposing. I insisted that I would have had a serious, serious problem with that. The only thing that finally got him to even question it was when I asked him why, then, did he dot ask my mother, the actualfax, sole head of our household who raised 4 kids mostly by herself? If it's just about "courtesy" and not about patriarchy, then there was no reason not to afford her that "courtesy.)

[juniperphoenix]

Ask A Manager has a letter today about a guy asking his girlfriend's boss for permission to marry her. O_o

[neotoma]

Oh, I just saw that and boy howdy was that out there! I'm glad the manager in question was just baffled and slightly repelled.

[cereta]

WOW. Just...WOW.

[fleurrochard]

If a guy actually asked my father (or my mother) for permission to marry me, I could promise him that I would NOT marry him. (Ok, if one would ask my mother she would probably tell him very clearly that that's NOT ok.)

Asking for a blessing is a bit better, but frankly, if he asked for that before he asked me, we would have a problem. Asking after the proposal would still be a bit cringy for me.

(But frankly if a guy would be together with me for long enough that we'd consider marrying and he still did that, there'd be something wrong anyway.)

[elialshadowpine]

Exactly. I've been handfasted once, married once, and engaged currently, and each time not only did Mom find out first -- because my sperm donor is an abusive ass that I try to have as little contact with as possible -- it was a matter of me telling her, "Hey, so, X and I are..."

If at the point of making that kind of commitment, anyone thought they should ask my sperm donor for his "blessing", the relationship would be kaput instantly. Because TBH everybody else, even FRIENDS who only know 1/1000th of the details, wants to kill my sperm donor. If my PARTNER thought that his BLESSING was worth anything more than the pile of nuclear waste it actually is, that would be a GTFO red flag like WHOA.

[rosefox]

My cousin's husband asked her father for permission to marry her. From how my uncle described it, it was mostly an opportunity for them to sit down and have a Guy Talk about becoming family and what it meant to be so important in someone's life and all of that.

I didn't even ask my partner's wife for permission to marry him (though we did inform her as soon as we realized we wanted to go in that direction) so I'm going to come down pretty hard on the side of autonomy here.