'He Said Yes!'

[bluewater]

Last edited Sat Jul 20, 2019, 06:01 PM - Edit history (1)

‘He Said Yes!’ Despite changing norms, it’s still exceedingly rare for women to propose in a heterosexual couple.
by Ashley Fetters

As public figures have often been known to do in the age of social media, Elizabeth Warren commemorated her wedding anniversary this past weekend by expressing her appreciation for her partner on Twitter. Warren shared a story that also appears in her 2014 memoir A Fighting Chance, about the day she realized she’d be with Bruce Mann, now her husband of 39 years, for the rest of their lives. “One day at the grocery store soon after we first met, I saw Bruce gazing at the strawberry display. I said, ‘We can get some if you want!’ He smiled, picked up a carton, and told me he was thinking about his family. ‘We didn’t eat things like fresh strawberries,’ he explained,” Warren’s tweet read. “It made me think about my family, too, how my mother would work her grocery list to squeeze out every last nickel. In that moment, I knew Bruce and I would be bound to each other forever.”

Pretty standard fare for a politician’s earnest anniversary tweet, all told, except for the next line: “When I proposed to him, he said yes.”
Warren has gone further into detail on her proposal to Mann elsewhere on her social media pages; in the summer of 2016, she celebrated their 36th wedding anniversary by sharing the whole story on Facebook. “I proposed to Bruce in a classroom. It was the first time I’d seen him teach, and I was already in love with him, but watching him teach let me see one more thing about him — and that was it,” she wrote. “When class was over and the students had cleared out, he came up to me and asked, somewhat hesitantly, ‘Uh, what did you think?’” Warren responded by asking Mann to marry her.

Warren, who had two children with her first husband before they divorced, got remarried to Mann in 1980. As a remarried divorcee and a candidate for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, Warren finds herself in a field of presidential hopefuls whose family lives reflect the diversity of Americans’. Warren and Mann’s married life, however, kicked off in a way that was both unusual at the time and unusual now, in that Warren proposed to Mann and not the other way around. The rarity of women proposing to men is something of a curious anomaly to people who have studied marriage and its evolution: While marriage itself has grown to be a more gender-flexible and egalitarian institution, the proposal ritual has remained stubbornly, stagnantly male-driven. This may be, counterintuitively, partly a result of women’s economic and educational empowerment and marriage’s subsequent trend toward equal partnership.
[snip]

Still, a woman proposing to a man remains an incredibly rare occurrence, as it was when Warren proposed to Mann. In 1980, when the pair married, marriage rituals had certainly been undergoing some changes, most of which were aimed at making married partnerships more egalitarian. “In the 1970s, a slightly larger percentage of women kept their own [last] names than in the 1990s, probably because the discovery of just how sexist the marriage laws and customs of the day were had only recently come home to them,” Stephanie Coontz, the director of research and public education for the Council on Contemporary Families and the author of Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage, told me in an email. (The 1970s had also seen the rise of measures like “marriage contracts,” pre-matrimonial agreements popularized by feminists that laid out the terms and conditions of a marriage in an attempt to ensure better treatment for wives than wives had historically enjoyed.) Despite all those changes, proposals remained stubbornly male territory. Warren and Mann, Coontz wrote, are “a couple who’d be ahead of their time today and were already ahead of their time (AND our time) then.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2019/07/women-proposing-to-men/594214/