Commentary: Does it matter if a man or a woman proposes?

Over 20 years ago, I covered my face with my hands and shyly told my (now) husband, “I’m moving away for graduate school and I’d love you to go with me, but I want us to be married first.”

After he agreed that it seemed like a great idea, we shopped for an engagement ring before he chose one of the two I had liked best. He offered it to me from one knee a couple of months later in a “surprise” engagement. As a wife, I tell others he proposed. But as a social scientist