Giuliette Pfeiffer kept wondering if Will Aftring would ever propose.
“Does he not want to marry me anymore?” she asked a friend in September 2024, a year after she and Aftring began talking seriously about marriage. Her friend’s advice: “Just ask him.”
As soon as Pfeiffer, 29, an outpatient therapist at a mental health center in Appalachia, who was fighting a cold and wearing sweats, got off the phone, she made a beeline for Aftrig in their kitchen in Asheville, N.C., where he was fixing lunch.
“Hey, I need to ask you something insane,” she said, and after a beat added: “Why haven’t you proposed to me yet?”
Aftring, 30, a software developer, knew he wanted to marry her from the first year they met, in 2017, but got stuck on a technicality.
“I wanted to make sure the ring was perfect,” he told her, to which she replied, “I wouldn’t care if you propose to me with a piece of twine.”
After spotting a ball of beige cotton yarn that Pfeiffer, a crafter, planned to use to crochet a beach cover up, he snipped off a piece.
“That man put a hole in the floor, dropping to his knee so fast,” she said with a laugh, and then tied the yarn in a half bow around her finger. They cried and hugged. She soon popped the half-bow into a frame, which now holds a special place on their bookcase.
In November, they married in a civil ceremony at Buncombe County Courthouse in Asheville, N.C.
Although a ring accompanied 96 percent of proposals, according to The Knot’s 2026 wedding study, some couples took a more unconventional, creative approach to getting engaged. In some cases, a traditional ring came later.
For Evelyn Ivey, 56, words alone were enough. She did some quick thinking one rainy evening in March 2022 as Tom Rotelli, 60, revisited a sensitive issue as he sat on the couch and she filled an electric teakettle.
“Why are we doing this?” he asked, questioning if she was ever serious about him.
Rotelli, a life coach and a faculty member in the department of applied positive psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, has a 20- and 22-year-old son. His previous marriage ended in divorce, as did hers.
To get her feelings across once and for all, Ivey, a veterinarian, marched over to him.
“Thomas Rotelli, will you marry me?” she said, putting her hands on his shoulders. (She’s 5-foot-4; he’s 6-foot-2.)
Without hesitating, he said yes.
“She folded into my lap,” he said. “And, oh, we kissed.”
On May 30, they are to be married at Flower Farm Inn, in Loomis, Calif.
Molly Gaebe, 41, also wasted no time once she made up her mind to propose to Leila Bozorg, 43, in August 2021, right after Hurricane Henri hit Cherry Grove on Fire Island in New York.
“We were hunkered down in our favorite place,” said Gaebe, who picked up two rainbow fabric rings the next day amid feather boas and modified chaps at a local souvenir shop.
That evening, Gaebe, a comedian and a writer in New York, got down on one knee with one of the rings during a drag show after one of their favorite performers, Boudoir LeFleur, called Bozorg to the stage.
“It was unexpected, and quintessentially Gaebe, full of dramatic flair,” said Bozorg, the New York City deputy mayor for housing and planning. “We’re not a traditional couple. We did it our own way.”
The two rings usually sit in a fluted champagne glass on a bookshelf in their living room. On June 24, 2023, they were married in Big Indian, N.Y.
“Basically, the standard engagement proposal is supposed to produce two pieces of evidence that the couple is engaged: a story and a ring,” said David Schweingruber, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Iowa, who has co-written three papers on proposals.
“There are people who do not follow the standard script,” he said.
Like Katie Leonard, 49, who proposed to Rob Sparks, 43, in January 2021 outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art by Fairmont Waterworks when it was 10 degrees.
She handed him quite a rock — literally.
It was a heart-shaped reddish granite stone that she had found on the beach in Encinitas, Calif., and had given him two years earlier, and secretly took back.
“I picked you up intending to throw you back,” said Leonard, a massage therapist whose previous marriage ended in divorce, and who has two young sons. “But you took my heart in your big warm hands and held onto it. I want to hold you for the rest of my life.”
The couple, who live in Wilmington, were married in October 2022, before 21 guests, outside the historic Hill-Physick House in Philadelphia.
He keeps the rock on his desk.
“It was incredibly sentimental,” said Sparks, a technical risk manager at Capital One. “I hold it in my hand and remind myself what the rock represents.”
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