ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, February 29, 1996 TAG: 9602290026
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ART CAREY KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE
O, ladies, will you or won't you?
There's not much time to decide. Because today is the big day, your quadrennial chance to take matters into your own hands and pop the Big Question:
``Will you marry me?''
By hallowed tradition and time-honored custom, Leap Year Day - the extra day added to February every four years to put the calendar in tune with the music of the spheres - is the occasion when women are granted permission to take charge of their matrimonial destiny by collaring their dawdling intendeds, confronting them with an explicit proposition, and taking nothing less than yes for an answer.
Most little girls still dream of becoming brides, most women still expect to get married, and most little boys grow up to become men who think it's their God-given right to do the asking, if and when (and only if and when) they're ready.
By and large, that's still the case. Except on Leap Year Day.
Legend has it that the idea began with St. Patrick as a way to deal with the fleshly urges and connubial frustrations of the more libidinous local lasses. Within a couple centuries, Leap Year was being referred to in England as ``ladies' year,'' a time when ``the natural order is overturned.''
By the 17th century, this had become codified. In 1606, English common law specified that ``as often as every leap yere doth return, ladyes have the sole privelege...of making love, either by wordes or lookes...and no man will be entitled to benefit of clergy who doth in any wise treat her proposal with slight.''
``Li'l Abner'' cartoonist Al Capp acted within the spirit of the law when he concocted Sadie Hawkins Day, in deference to the selfsame Sadie Hawkins, whose features were - how to say this nicely - decidedly less fair than those of the voluptuous Daisy Mae. This day of crisis for bachelors occurs each year on the first Saturday in November. It's a day when the maids and spinsters of Dogpatch (and elsewhere) can lawfully chase unmarried males, rassle them to the turf, hogtie their spindly limbs, and drag them to the altar or justice of the peace.
Sadie Hawkins Day is an annual event. Leap Year Day follows the same four-year cycle as the Olympics and the presidential sweepstakes. It's a day when the calendar hiccups and time catches its breath. Because of its connection to the machinery of the cosmos, Leap Year Day somehow seems more mystical, serious and binding. When a woman proposes to a guy on that day, it's no laughing matter.
Or is it? Isn't this all a joke? Don't we live in a time when the modern woman has no compunctions about asking a guy out? Isn't it OK for a woman to express her romantic and sexual desires openly and freely without being labeled a brazen hussy? In sum, does she really need the flimsy excuse of Leap Year Day to pop the question?
Hard to say. Contemporary sexual mores are aswirl in such chaos that many folks seem glad to embrace traditional rites and customs.
``Even the most liberal, progressive people are going in for these old-fashioned, nostalgic rituals,'' says Sally Green, senior staff therapist at the Penn Council for Relationships. ``They have a shower, a formal wedding and will buy $10,000 worth of gauze that winds up in the attic. There seems to be a need to fall back on that stuff, to cling to something from the past that's worked.''
The government keeps plenty of statistics on marriage - who's getting hitched, at what age, at what rate, etc. - but no one keep tabs on who's doing the asking. Idle observation suggests that things haven't changed much. But that's not enough. What's needed is a study, and hard quantifiable data.
The study took place in Philadelphia in Courtroom 475, Common Pleas Court Judge Bernard J. Goodheart presiding, the Reading Terminals jazz combo serenading. The occasion was Valentine's Day just past. The sample was totally random and unrepresentative: Seventeen smitten couples who'd signed up to be married on Cupid's holiday. Sixteen showed up, and in every couple but one, the man had done the proposing - for instance: while making whoopee (Peter McGee, 41); while listening to a favorite country song after dinner at the Ground Round (Vince Caruso, 33); in the hospital after a near-fatal asthma attack (Bill Arthur, 26); while battling a bad case of pre-proposal hives (``Hollywood'' Greg Tudisco, 35).
But there was one exception: Stephen Battle, 29. Several months ago, he and his then-girlfriend, Janice Brown, were on the couch watching the tube when she saw a female TV character propose to her boyfriend.
``That's when I turned and asked him,'' said the new Mrs. Battle, 24, a waitress.
His reaction? ``She caught me off guard, so I said OK,'' said Battle, account rep for a telecommunications company. ``I thought she was playing.''
Guess again, Stephen.
What to do? Why, regain the male initiative, strike a gallant pose, make a counterproposal. Several weeks later, while Janice was taking a nap, Stephen sneaked in, knelt down by the bed, and asked for her hand in marriage. (She said yes, of course, delighted by fresh proof of what she'd known all along: Her man is a sweetie.)
At any rate, it appears from the Goodheart Survey that men are still zealously protective of their prerogative to do the proposing. For all the changes wrought by the sexual revolution and the women's movement, men still hold all the aces - and hearts - in the dating/mating game because they retain the power of romantic and/or sexual initiation. By and large, they still do the asking (How about a movie? Would you like to see my etchings? Will you marry me?), and women still do the waiting, accepting and rejecting.
Or do they?
``Men need to feel in control, that they're macho,'' says Gerri Rothman, who teaches a course titled ``How to Flirt'' at Main Line School Night. But when it comes to affairs of the heart, ``women have always had the power. It's always been the woman's role. This leap year stuff is just a publicity gimmick.''
About 90 percent of communication is nonverbal, says Rothman, and ``the body does not lie.'' Women are more skillful at transmitting and deciphering such nonverbal signals (though ``sensitive'' younger men are catching up, she avers).
In other words, women, with their radarlike power of intuition, have a preternatural ability to decipher, outwit, outflank and outmaneuver men, and work their wily wills. Moreover, they do so with such cunning that men rarely suspect. In fact, the silly fools are convinced it was their idea all along.
Says Sally Green, the therapist: ``More and more women are assertively taking responsibility for moving the relationship along, not just toward marriage but in general. They are subtle about it, and indirection is a major way of communicating about these matters, but if you look at all the dimensions - love, sex, romance, decisions about marriage - more and more women are taking the initiative, or making sure initiation takes place, and calling some of the shots.''
Julianne Swilley, 30, a lawyer from Atlanta and the coauthor (with her boyfriend) of ``You'd Really Rather Be Single When...''says bright women are adept at lassoing reluctant partners. ``Smart women manipulate the whole thing,'' she says, ``and guys don't even know they're being manipulated. Of course, there is book smarts and smarts about getting a guy to propose in a way you'd be satisified with. What woman wants to end up with an engagement ring that's hideous? We women need to take care of that situation.''
What's a guy to do? Dave Whisnant, 27, a lawyer and Swilley's boyfriend and coauthor, suggests that if you're an available male and sense that you're under matrimonial siege, take an out-of-town business trip on Leap Year Day. Keep to yourself, lay low, and whatever you do, don't answer the phone. And remember: If you make it through today, you're technically home free until Tuesday, Feb. 29, 2000.
Another strategy: Buy the book ($5.95, plus $1 for shipping and handling; call 800-995-5115, Ext. 6323). It contains 365 sound reasons to remain unattached. (Sample: ``He screams out his own name during sex.'').
If that doesn't work, try bringing her to her senses by refreshing her grasp of the facts of life, as captured in this pithy Leap Year Day maxim offered by Swilley:
``Men are like parking spaces. All the good ones are taken, and the rest are handicapped.''
LENGTH: Long : 143 lines ILLUSTRATION: GRAPHIC: ROBERT LUNSFORD/Staff. color.by CNB