My best friend got engaged on Sunday... and... uhh... guys still do that? [View all]

She has been my best friend since we were in Grade 11, which was a very long time ago. We traveled the world together, we lived together, we started and lost a business together, we chose one another over and over again when faced with boyfriends and girlfriends suspicious of the so-called "best friend" and on Sunday night she texted me a picture from New York of an engagement ring on her finger, I couldn't be happier for her. Indeed I will be a bride's maid.

But talking today she mentioned that before her and her now fiance flew to New York for a party he made a mostly unexplained "business trip" to Phoenix, which happens to be where her parents retired to. He went to ask her father's permission first and that seems 19th Century archaic to me. I asked my very elderly father if he had done that and he said of-course not. It never would have crossed his mind to. As the dirtbag living in sin with his daughter he would have been afraid to be alone with the man.

If I went to my girlfriend's father and asked for his daughters hand in marriage he would probably think I was drunk and laugh at me. I just can't imagine having that conversation with a straight face. I asked a few married guys I work with and two said they had not and one said he had because his dad told him to.

Sorry for the ramble, but did you guys do actually do that?