My fan after reading my Valentine’s Day post, got in contact with me and asked if i would be so kind as to shed some manosphere light on the tradition of the female’s marriage proposal on leap years. I agreed mostly because i was struggling to find a topic and, if i’m being honest, because laziness sometimes has a way of looking like generosity. It’s one of those traditions that sounds cute on paper, but the more you poke at it, the more it starts to reveal a strange little power game underneath

I must admit i don’t know much about this tradition, and i hadn’t heard anything about it until a girl came over once with a movie in hand entitled Leap Year. I watched for a whole 5 minutes until the movie only became background noise to a more pleasurable activity, which probably tells you everything you need to know about how deeply i studied the subject at the time. There’s also the old story about a Scottish queen making a law that forced a rejected man to pay a fine to the woman.

The tradition also shows up in Denmark and Finland, where similar taxes in goods were supposedly paid if the proposal was refused. In America it’s not very popular, at least not in Canada where i’ve noticed it barely gets any traction, though maybe i just don’t hang out with those circles. What matters more is what the whole thing says about social dynamics: it flips the script and gives women a chance to face rejection with a built-in safety net.

It also taps into the idea of a woman catching the prized Alpha male without giving up much which is catnip to the female psyche until reality comes along and slaps the whole fantasy out of her hands. Then there are the guys who would gladly accept such a proposal because it shows courage, but courage isn’t the same as leadership, and leadership is still the man’s job. A woman may reluctantly lead if she has to, but that usually becomes a slow poison that eats at the relationship from the inside