A Modest Proposal

Why do we cling to the idea that a man should pop the question? Dan Schwerin considers the alternative.

- Dan Schwerin

I HAD MADE MY PEACE WITH NEVER being able to propose to my girlfriend. We loved each other. We had lived together happily for years. We were planning our future. But YJ had made it clear that under no circumstances was I ever to ask her to marry me. “Don’t you dare,” she said.

Growing up as the daughter of a right-wing rabbi in an Orthodox Jewish community in Southern California, YJ (short for Yael Julie) had chafed at the expectation that a woman’s highest ambition should be to get married as soon as possible and immediately start having babies. When her high school friends found husbands at age seventeen and applied to small Jewish colleges, she charted a different path. Her resistance never faded. In her mid-30s, a fully secular Ivy League–educated lawyer and State Department diplomat, she still felt a fierce need to assert her independence. She even hated going to weddings. The idea of having her own was out of the question.

YJ insisted that if we ever did get married, she’d like me to take her last name. It didn’t matter that we had no relationship with her father, who didn’t approve of our secular lifestyle, or that her forcing me to change my name was as absurd and unfair as me forcing her to change hers. She would explain that to make a crooked plant grow straight, you have to bend it back the opposite way. She wanted to do the same thing with our sexist society. It wasn’t enough for women to keep their own names. Men should have to change theirs for a few hundred years to make up for past injustice. Although I had made a career of learning from the wisdom of strong, opinionated women— I was Hillary Clinton’s chief speechwriter and book collaborator—I still wasn’t quite buying it. There were times when I wished YJ would change her mind, but I respected her choice.