Honorable Marriage Proposal/Playing With

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• Basic Trope: A man proposes marriage to a pregnant woman to protect her reputation.
• Played Straight: Alice finds out she's pregnant, but has no idea who the father is. Bob agrees to marry her.
• Exaggerated: Bob meets Alice (six months pregnant) for the first time on the bus. He sees that she has no ring, and proposes to her right then and there.
• Downplayed: Bob is the father, and he feels that the honorable thing to do is to be there for Alice and his child, so he asks Alice to marry him.
  • Alice is in a relationship with Bob, and she is raped by a gang of thugs on her way home from work. She finds out she is pregnant, and Bob (already supportive of her) asks her to marry him, so he can be there for her all the time.
• Justified: Alice and Bob live in a world where a woman who is pregnant outside of wedlock is considered Defiled Forever.
• Inverted: Alice is pregnant, and has no idea who the father is. She asks Bob to marry her...or tricks him into doing so.
  • Bob proposes to Alice, but she is not pregnant.
  • Bob turns down Alice because she's pregnant and/or because the child is not his.
• Subverted: Bob asks Alice if she'd like to marry him, but Alice says she doesn't need a man to provide for her or the baby.
  • Bob takes notice of Alice and her conspicuously absent wedding ring, and shakes his head disapprovingly.
• Double Subverted: But Bob forms some kind of relationship with Alice, and eventually does marry her.
• Deconstructed: This has a lot of Values Dissonance; in some more traditional cultures, this is a way of protecting a woman's reputation and ensuring that someone will be able to support her and the baby (see "Justified"). In other societies where sex and babies outside of marriage are more or less accepted, this is seen as anachronistic and sexist.
• Reconstructed: Alice marries Bob because she loves him, not because she's knocked up and needs a provider.
• Parodied: See "Exaggerated"
  • It turns out Alice is already married but either doesn't have a wedding ring or had taken it off (perhaps due to pregnancy-related finger swelling), and Bob's proposal leads to awkwardness.
• Lampshaded: "You need someone to take care of you and the kid...I could be that someone."
• Averted: Alice is not pregnant.
  • Alice is pregnant, but she was already married to Bob before she got pregnant.
  • Alice is pregnant outside of wedlock, but Bob doesn't ask her hand in marriage.
• Enforced: The setting of the story demands it.
• Invoked: Alice is raped, and Bob hears about it. He's a Nice Guy, and he worries about the implications of Defiled Forever for her, so he marries her and raises the rapist's child as his own.
• Defied: Bob is afraid of what others will think of him for taking "damaged goods" as his wife, so he does nothing.
• Discussed:
• Conversed:
• Played For Laughs:
• Played For Drama: Almost always is.