He Said...

Despite Hillary Clinton shattering glass ceilings, sheryl sandberg’s lean in movement, and beyoncé telling us that girls run the world, why, in 2016, is it so hard for women to ask, “will you marry me?”

- Sarah Z. Wexler

In the weeks after Tony and I talked about getting engaged and picked out the ring, I spent all of my idle time brainstorming adorable ways he could propose to me. He could write “Will you marry me?” on a wall of our new house, which we spent every night painting; he could place the ring in a dresser drawer at one of the vintage furniture stores we visited on weekends; he could attach it to the leash of one of our dogs, Ginsberg and Sunny, and ask if I felt like going for a walk. When I rattled off my list to a friend, she said, “If you have so many great ideas, why don’t you just propose?”

Until that point, the thought had never crossed my mind. True, I was an empowered woman who wasn’t afraid to make the first move: After we had chatted online for only a few days, I was the one who asked Tony to meet. After he hadn’t spent a night at his own place for months, I was the one who suggested that we move in together. By the time we cosigned on a 30-year mortgage for a home in Portland, Oregon, I knew I was ready to marry Tony. But I worried that if I proposed, I might never know for sure if we’d gotten engaged before he was ready. Although I knew he would say yes if I asked, I didn’t want to make him feel rushed or pressured. There was something that made me want to be 100 percent sure that go-with-the-flow, people-pleasing Tony wouldn’t just be agreeing to something he was only 95 percent sure he wanted. (It’s more than coincidence that his name backward spells “y not.”)

I also worried what some of our friends and family might think. I could practically hear what people might whisper if I proposed—that at 34, maybe I was rushing into it because my fertility window was closing. I felt conflicted: I’m a feminist, I don’t live my life based on what other people think, and I knew he would say yes—yet still something was holding me back.