From romantic movies to jewelry store ads, it's clear that we, as a society, are pretty set on the idea that a man has to ask a woman to marry him. But when it comes to relationships, traditional gender roles are becoming blurred, and more and more guys are finding themselves on the receiving end of a proposal.

It's a beautiful thing! Whatever your partner's gender is, nothing compares to the rush of having someone love you so much, they ask you to spend your life with them. To prove it to you, we asked three men what it felt like to be proposed to, and how people reacted to it.

She Beat Him to It

“We met while I was backpacking in Europe. I was in France and we were introduced through mutual friends. It didn't take us very long before we knew we wanted to spend our lives together and we talked about it a lot. I went to Paris for the holidays. It had been four months since I'd seen her and I was planning on us going out to dinner at the restaurant where we had our first date and I was gonna propose there on the second day.

"I get to Paris on the first day and at our Airbnb she came out with this cute little white mug with painted blue waves on it. I could tell it was kind of unique but my first thought was just that it was a unique mug that was in the Airbnb. Then I took a sip from it and at the bottom I see something drawn in it. I looked at it another second and I saw that it was two little penguins, which were a call back to something in our relationship, and written above the penguins she hand-painted into the mu: 'Will you marry me?' I looked up to her in shock and disbelief, like, is this real? I was just blown away and happy with it and overjoyed. It just made me so happy.

"Most of the time when I tell girls about it they're like, wow she's so cool, what a badass. Honestly, the funniest reactions are from the guys because I get so many guys who are much more traditional, alpha-male, masculine, types of guys who I tell and they're concerned for me. They say things like, 'How did you feel about that? I haven't met any other guys who've been proposed to by a girl.'” - Aaron, 23