Lena Dunham Regrets Asking Jack Antonoff To Propose On Twitter

By

Published

July 12, 2015

The problem with telling the world that you’ll get married once same-sex marriage becomes legal is that you sorta have to make good on that once it does … this is something that Lena Dunham and her boyfriend Jack Antonoff recently discovered.

In late June, shortly after the United States Supreme Court ruled bans on same-sex marriage to be unconstitutional, effectively legalising it throughout America, Dunham sent the following joking-but-not-really Tweet to Antonoff.

.@jackantonoff Get on it, yo…

— Lena Dunham (@lenadunham) June 26, 2015

Girls fans wept with joy at the thought of this blessed union – imagine a tiny little marzipan Marnie getting her ass eaten on top of the wedding cake! – but a few weeks went by, and nothing more was said.

Over the weekend, Dunham published an essay in The New Yorker explaining that she immediately regretted sending the above Tweet, knowing the attention it would get, and that she probably won’t be getting married any time soon.

#NailedIt

In the essay, entitled ‘The Bride In Her Head’, Dunham explains how she has been vulnerable to the “strange power” of marriage since childhood, and has imagined her wedding, in various eccentric forms, since then.

After meeting and falling in love, she and Antonoff, both passionate about LQBTQ rights, agreed that they wouldn’t consider getting married until every American had the right to do the same.

Cue the morning of the marriage equality announcement, when she went full Carrie Bradshaw and sent a series of increasingly hectic messages to him:

What followed was a remarkable display of emotional acrobatics on my part. As soon as Jack woke up, I informed him that he “better not make a fool out of me,” followed by a quick “LOL,” and then, “But seriously. I’m going to look like a real idiot if we just sit here like losers and keep dating.” Then I tweeted, “@jackantonoff get on it’ yo,” followed by my immediate and all-consuming regret.

Jack didn’t text back, which is entirely unlike him, and it wasn’t until I got home and looked him in the eye that I realized just how little the concept of marriage had been on his mind. Partly that’s because we were busy, and the ruling caught him by surprise, and his politics were pure and not as self-interested as mine were starting to feel. But partly, I suppose, it’s because, as a man, his entire life has not been shaped by a desire for, or a rejection of, a fluffy white dress.

Dunham says she started to wonder if her “earnest moral and political stance” might have been a “stalling tactic”, and started to question whether she was actually ready to get married.

“The fact is that wanting everyone to have the right to marry and wanting to be married are two different things,” she said. “It turns out what I was waiting for was not the chance to marry but the chance to think about marriage on an even playing field.”

Ultimately, she says, she and Antonoff discussed it that weekend at a friend’s wedding, and decided to hold off on marriage talk for a little while. FWIW, he thinks her New Yorker piece is “very beautiful”: