Give Me A Ring Sometime

A. called me from Los Angeles to talk to me recently about her possible pending engagement; he’s about 15 years older than she is. He brought up a pre-nuptial agreement and said to her that if their marriage didn’t work out, he in no way wanted her to profit from it. She was horrified;

I have a different opinion…but I’ll get there.

He said to her that she was irresponsible. I asked her what happened. She lives in Los Angeles and her father had had a medical emergency, so she drove the car that her boyfriend had leased for her to the San Francisco area.

The problem was that they had agreed that if they weren’t engaged by a certain date, he would return the car. She agreed to the date—which happened to be the weekend that she drove the car to Northern California. He’s held this over her head since. They decided to part last August but he had tried to stay in contact. She’s told him repeatedly that *IF* he wasn’t going to show up at her place with a ring and a date in mind, that no, she wouldn’t be comfortable being in his company. Just before Thanksgiving, she agreed to see him. He gave her a bag, and in it was a ring from Cartier. She called me upset that she didn’t get the proposal that she had dreamed of and wasn’t sure of what to do.

My advice to her was that she didn’t want to hear what I was going to say, but he was absolutely correct. That she had negotiated the return of the car; that it was irresponsible to take it to San Francisco without asking.

I told her that *IF* he were her husband, she would have had a conversation with him asking to take the new car because it was safer to drive and that she needed immediately to be in San Francisco. I told her to apologize to him; that she had thought about it and he was right. If she is planning on spending the rest of her life with him, this is not a battle that she should be fighting-- and hopefully with the apology and acknowledgement, that would be the end of him calling her ‘irresponsible’ forever.  

I also told her that should he give her the ring again, that she should be telling him that it is more beautiful than she could have ever imagined.

No, she didn’t get a man on bended knee humbled and honored to ask for her hand, but the story of her engagement will always be ‘the story’ and did it really matter?

The third bit of advice that I gave to her is to accept a prenuptial agreement—but carefully. A man in his 50’s has had more of his work life behind him than in front of him, and no man would ever give up his security, for hers. Right now, when he is at his most loving, most protective and wanting to take care of her, she has much better chance of his being generous than during a divorce proceeding. This is especially important for second or latter marriages. You should expect that a man would want to protect and provide a legacy for his children over and above a successive wife.