Ask the Flying Monkey: My Boyfriend is Pressuring Me to Marry Him! Plus, How Do You Trim “Down There”?

Have a question about gay male entertainment or life? Contact me here (and be sure and include your city and state and/or country!)

Q: I’m 21 years old, and my boyfriend is 23. We’ve known each other three years, and I moved in with him early this year. He proposed to me yesterday. I was stunned. I said I wasn't ready, but now he seems to be avoiding me. I didn't say no, just that I need more time. He seem doesn't understand that. I love him, but I’m too young to get married. Help me make him understand! – Ash, Las Vegas, NV

A: Try to look at this from his point-of-view. There’s nothing that involves a greater degree of personal risk than proposing to someone – except maybe alligator wrestling or criticizing Bill O’Reilly. And naturally, when your boyfriend proposed to you, he expected you to go all Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl: “When? Here? Tonight? When? The captain looks like a rabbi!”

When that’s not the reaction he got, he was understandably hurt and disappointed.

That said, a wedding proposal isn’t about the proposer – it’s about the proposee. That’s the whole thing about marriage: you’re vowing to put the needs and wants of the other person above, or at least on par with, your own.

Marriage is great – having been in one for more than a decade, I highly recommend them. But there’s so much marriage-related bulls**t out there, about people magically “completing” each other, and about living happily ever after, as if the mere act of marriage somehow solves all your problems and makes all your insecurities go away.

It doesn’t. It can actually have the opposite effect. Marriage is a complicated balancing act that requires somehow interweaving the agendas of two different people.

In my experience, marriage is a bit of a paradox. The more you commit to putting the other person before yourself, the more he commits to doing the same thing. When all is going right, it creates this weird, positive feedback loop, where you both end up much happier than you would’ve been. The more you give, the more you get.

But this is radical break from the way most of us live our lives and think about the world. To make it work, I think you both need a measure of maturity, and a really strong sense of self.

In a way, your experience with your boyfriend is a bit of a test. It’s absolutely okay for him to be hurt that you didn’t react the way he thought you would, at least for a little while. But no one can make him understand where you’re coming from: either he will or he won’t.

And if he doesn’t, then he also doesn’t understand that marriage isn’t about him – it’s about the two of you together, even when you’re feeling very different things. And if he doesn’t understand that, he definitely isn’t ready to be thinking about marriage.

Next Page! Is there a secret to shaving “down there”?