“I’d rather mop the Atlantic.” “I’d rather eat a jean jacket.” “I’d rather paint my house with nail polish.” These dramatic declarations aren’t responses to any actual torture (depending on your definition) but rather to a video posted by lifestyle influencer Estella, who, in multiple TikToks, documented her experience proposing to her boyfriend of 14 years. Her most popular video (one in which she reveals that she asked her boyfriend’s dad for his blessing) has 11.5 million views and 36.5K comments, most of which have decided that her decision to take the reins and pop the question was demoralizing and humiliating.
There came a wave of “he’s just not that into you” outcries, informed by her fiancé’s apparent disinterest during the actual proposal. To be fair, it’s hard to ignore his inability to maintain eye contact with her and the absence of any visible emotional reaction to being asked to spend the rest of his life with someone. From the TikTok tribunal’s POV, if you’re proposing to a man you’ve been with for well over a decade, the very least he could offer is a hint of enthusiasm. The surrounding context doesn’t really help her case: the couple already has four kids together, and he has yet to defend her against this onslaught of online criticism. But at least Estella seems unbothered. She’s been liking snarky comments and even appeared on TMZ to address speculation about the proposal.
The outrage around Estella’s video is simply a more inflated version of the backlash actress Bella Thorne received when she announced that she’d proposed to her partner this past summer (even after sharing that he’d proposed a year earlier). It also echoes the criticism aimed at actor Joshua Jackson when he revealed that his now-ex-wife Jodie Turner-Smith had asked him to marry her. The image, or even the mere concept, of a woman getting down on one knee and asking for a man’s hand in marriage seems to trigger a specific, gender-norm-driven brand of disgust.
The man-on-one-knee ritual dates back to the Victorian era, when it was customary for that same man to ask his future bride’s father for permission. At a time when women had virtually no legal identity, marriage effectively meant the transfer of property (that property being her) from one man to another. That history alone should make the possibility of a woman proposing to a man feel like a hopeful marker of progress. In theory, it’s a grand feminist act! One that seizes the decision-making power around marriage from the patriarchy and allows women to decide exactly when and how they want to enter a legally binding partnership.
And yet, in reality, it’s often labeled desperate. Because reality is where Western media, relationship “experts,” and TikTok tutorials on “how to get him to pop the question” have cemented the stereotype that in heterosexual relationships, men are the more commitment-phobic party who must be gently coaxed toward marriage, God forbid they feel trapped or like they’re losing their freedom. That uneven narrative dictates that a couple’s marriage timeline should align with the man’s preferred pacing, lest he be forced into a proposal he wasn’t fully ready for. And you don’t want any early doubt to jeopardize a union’s success.
But despite being painted as more reluctant to marry, research consistently shows that men benefit from marriage emotionally, materially, and physically more than women. If you’re entering a long-term business deal (which marriage is) where you’ll see less return than your co-signer, he could, at the very least, be obsessed with every part of you. That’s not to say men who are proposed to don’t feel that way about their partners. But the casual TikTok viewer only understands the structural conditions that shape most women’s lives, not the inner workings of one specific relationship. That being said, some of the Estella dogpiling could be interpreted as an aggressive form of tough love. Beneath the performative outrage in the pursuit of highly liked comments, there may be a deeper exhaustion with watching yet another woman beg for a setup she barely benefits from.
There is a dream world in which a woman proposing to a man is widely accepted as a powerful, subversive step toward equality. But that dream requires an equally balanced division of marital benefits once he says yes. And we’re not there yet. Until we are, women who follow Estella’s lead should brace themselves for plenty of “couldn’t be me” comments when they decide to hard-launch those betrothals.
