The truth, though, is that the male proposal is showing no signs of disappearing. Last year, a survey — of students at notoriously liberal University of California, Santa Cruz, no less — found that the vast majority of heterosexual respondents said that they would “definitely” want the man to do the proposing in their relationship. Not a single student, male or female, expressed a clear-cut interest in the woman proposing. Some weirdos like myself may toy with engagement tradition — be it through female-led proposals or non-proposal proposals — but most of us still expect to see a man on bended knee.
Stephanie Coontz, author of “Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage,” tells me that it’s unsurprising that this particular tradition has remained despite radical changes in the meaning and definition of marriage. “It’s the symbolic areas that seem to be the most resistant to change,” she said. “One of the reasons it’s so slow to change is that we have so many of these old takes about women talking about their feelings perhaps more than they should” and men not talking about their feelings enough, she explained. “As we’ve gotten to have much higher expectations of real communication and back and forth and intimacy and fairness, that’s an anxiety that both partners bring to it.” [...]
Coontz suggests that the proposal might also be a ceremonial end to the pressure a man experiences to be the romantic initiator — whether it’s asking a woman to dance or for her phone number. “There’s a certain sense in which both males and females unconsciously are saying, ‘Go ahead and do this one more time, but you’re doing it in a safe environment because you know I’ll say ‘yes,’” she says.
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