Girls, Here’s How to Prompose
We’re all prom queens. (Photo: Pamela Hanson/Trunk Archive)
As girls and young women, we are fed this narrative that we must wait for the guys to rescue us from our dateless damsel-in-distress situation when it comes to dances, but asking guys—or other girls—out on a date is not just empowering, it’s also a necessary exercise in learning how to handle the possibility of rejection.
You never know unless you try. (Photo: A Cinderella Story)
The first time I ever asked a guy to dance was in seventh grade at Winter Ball. After getting a sugar high on a few sips of Fanta, I finally got the nerve to ask my preteen crush-of-the-moment to slow dance with me—a monumental moment in middle school history, considering that most of the time, the girls stood at one side of the room and the boys stood at the other side. My crush rejected me, saying, “You’re not very cute,” and my 12-year-old heart imploded on itself. While other mildly traumatic school dances followed, I was asked to prom in high school—and I asked others to prom, too. I even had fun.
Amanda, please. (Photo: The Amanda Show)
School dances are awkward, fun, underwhelming at times, overwhelming at times, and definitely not the most important nights of your life. You’ll probably have the most fun getting dolled up and dancing to top 40s with your friends, but you might feel the pressure or desire to have a date.
Dancing by yourself is actually fun, too. (Photo: Mean Girls)
I polled a bunch of 20-something gals and high school students about how they’ve asked and plan to ask their dates to prom. If you’re planning to ask someone, take heed of these stories and tips:
Be respectful of the other person’s decision. “Don’t go overboard with asking to make someone feel obligated to say yes,” says 21-year-old Orange County college senior Daisy Mohrman. “That happened to me and I didn’t enjoy it, which is why when I [asked a guy friend to prom], I made sure it was low-key.” She made a simple playlist of songs—the last track being the promposal. 27-year-old New York-based designer Anna Huang agrees: “Assuming you are single, and the person you want to ask is someone you actually have romantic feelings for, making the prom your first date might be putting a lot of pressure on yourself and him or her,” she says. “Even if they say yes, there’s bound to be really high expectations of the whole event being a perfect, romantic evening. It’s a lot easier to let loose and focus on having fun if it’s with someone you are not hung up on impressing.”
Don’t spend too much money on the promposal. (Save your cash for your dress, makeup, dinner, awkwardly-posed studio portraits, and overpriced dance tickets.) 17-year-old California high school senior Jessica Chang is having a competition with her boyfriend to see who can outdo each other with the most extravagant promposal. “We’re not competing on money,” she tells Yahoo Beauty. “We want to see who can embarrass each other the most, since we already know we’re going with each other.” Huang agrees that the promposal should be affordable: “When he said yes, I was just happy that it was one less thing to coordinate and plan, and I could move on to shopping for the dress.”
It’s OK to be nervous, even if you’re just asking your boyfriend or a close friend. “Even though we were friends, I was pretty nervous about asking because he could still say no,” says 23-year-old New York investment banker Nafeesa Laiwalla. She thinks it’s worth the butterflies in your stomach: “Tons of my friends ended up not going with a date because they were too scared to ask a friend, and they actually were a bit bummed out. It’s honestly much nicer to go with someone.” 25-year-old Deepa Ramakrishnan from Chicago tells Yahoo Beauty that she didn’t even have time to be nervous; her date responded so quickly that she didn’t have time to consider her own feelings.
Avoid the he-says-she-says game and ask directly. “There’s so much prom drama going on right now,” says Chang, with her senior prom less than a month away. You may think you’re covering your bases by asking your friend to ask his friend to ask him whether he’d go to prom with you (confused yet?), but it’ll only make you nervous while you play the waiting game. 25-year-old Jessica Guo from Phoenix simply picked up the phone and asked her date, even though they didn’t hang out together regularly and attended different schools. “He was a complete gentleman—borrowed a nice car, paid for dinner, bought me a corsage, matched his tie to my dress, met my parents,” Guo tells Yahoo Beauty. “We went as friends, but I definitely had a crush on him after prom.” Huang and Laiwalla also asked their dates directly to great success. Ramakrishnan adds, “Some of these promposals nowadays are more elaborate than my fiancé’s actual marriage proposal.”
Understand that he or she may say “no.” When 26-year-old Isobel Laing from England asked her then-boyfriend to prom, he declined. (Yes, we repeat—her boyfriend declined.) “I was a bit nervous, as I wasn’t sure he’d get on with my lovely friends, but I also wanted him to come to kind of ‘show off’ that I had a boyfriend,” says Laing. “I ended up going to the prom with my friends instead—only one of whom had a date with her—and had a fantastic time.”
Contrary to what the movies tell you, prom will probably not be the most important night of your life, or even your high school career. “I didn’t go to junior prom. I was always nervous and I felt like I was the nerdy girl in the long frizzy ponytail,” says 23-year-old Berkeley-based writer Andrea Garcia-Vargas. “Almost everyone feels nerdy and unattractive in high school, but if I could go back to 17 or 18, I would tell myself that that prom would not define me.” She asked her crush—a friend from another school—to her senior prom and had an amazing time. And if at first you don’t succeed, who cares? “Asking out someone else to prom doesn’t mean you’re a desperate woman,” says Garcia-Vargas. “In a few years, you’ll be in a different college.”
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