“Hija, you have to go. You’re going to miss the wedding,” said my mom, weak but urgent. My husband and I would be hosting my niece’s wedding in our home that April afternoon. My son Michael was setting up chairs in the backyard; my husband Ian, a judge, was getting ready to perform the ceremony.

Mom and I were in the county hospital ER, where we’d been for over 24 hours since she’d fallen outside her home.

I didn’t want to leave. But then two of my tias—my 90-year-old mother’s cousins, themselves in their 70s and 80s but always in and out of her apartment to offer help and company—swept in. They turned the eerie quiet of a Saturday afternoon ER into a familial space, sitting by her bedside, handing her water she couldn’t readily reach, adjusting her pillows and blankets. Go on, they said, assuring me they’d call and put me on speakerphone should the doctor come by.

On the surface, the gathering that was about to begin in our backyard and the scene at the hospital had little in common. But maybe they’re not that different. Weddings and hospitals are both about showing up for people you love. Weddings are about standing witness to someone’s love, showing that you will be the community they can turn to in times of joy and times of sorrow. A hospital is a place of sorrow, where the people you love hopefully bring moments of joy through sharing stories, photos, comfort.

In my familia, we understand that family and true friends don’t only show up for the good times. They visit the hospital or the jail, and they don’t miss your funeral. My family is originally from the Mexican state of Nayarit, but since settling in Los Angeles they have grown into an ever-widening circle of kin—literal and fictive. My tias showed up for mom and me that day, but they also provided me solace in knowing that our community will stand by her, physically and emotionally, as she navigates the challenges of aging, sharing joy in each other’s company no matter what the occasion.

Weddings and hospitals, for our family, are also about food. When someone gets married, we eat beef, chicken, fish, or pasta dishes at the reception. But the meal we all anticipate is the posole or tamales we eat together the next day at the recalentado. In Spanish, recalentado means “reheated,” though in these cases it’s a specially prepared meal; only the gossip is a rehash from the day before as we reminisce about the good times. Others take the opportunity to nurse hangovers, a spoonful of posole at a time. When someone is sick, my aunts prepare hearty guisados—stewed meats—wrapped in flour tortillas as burritos or folded into corn tortillas as taquitos. We brought tacos to my Tia Chayo in the hospital that we ended up sharing with her roommate, too, only to discover the roommate was on a restricted diet. The contraband tacos didn’t do any harm, but the roommate’s family grilled her on where she got them while we sat mum, stuffing our bags and coolers under my tia’s hospital bed.

Hospitals, like weddings, can grow our circles and strengthen our bonds. When hospitals limit patients to two visitors at a time, the rest of us sit in the waiting room. There, where Spanish speakers can feel like outsiders, on unequal footing with doctors wielding authority, fellow Latinos bring comfort and community, and people to ask their questions to, even if they can’t get definitive medical answers. There, they compare experiences, share stories about their loved ones, discuss how the hospital staff and doctors are treating them.

When my uncle passed after a fall and a stay in the ICU this past January, we couldn’t all be with my tia, his wife of 54 years, because we were in consultation with the doctors. On our hardest day, it was the señora she met in the waiting room who sat with her, holding her hand, offering comfort as only a comadre could. Theirs was a bond forged not through sacraments like baptism or communion, but through the shared experience of life’s passages. This time, it was the sacrament of saying farewell. It was a profound connection in an unlikely place.

Two images from the day of my niece’s wedding are intertwined in my mind. Standing in the sunlight, my niece is radiant in her short white dress with a flared A-line skirt, long sleeves, and embroidered collar, her shiny waist-length black hair vivid against the bright white tulle. My mom, 90 years old, lies in a paper-thin gown under harsh fluorescent lights, her neck supported by a brace. On the surface, the scenes have little in common.

But maybe they’re not that different. The reception was in full swing when I arrived home from the hospital. I dashed upstairs to throw on a dress and as I changed, I could hear the laughter wafting up from the backyard. Just then, I got a text from my cousin Karla, younger than my tias by decades. She was at the hospital. I hadn’t asked her help, but there she was. “The whole gang is here,” she wrote. “There are five of us! We’re trying to keep the laughter down so that they don’t kick us out!” The message flooded me with gratitude, though I knew my family didn’t need it. For us, whether in a hospital, at home, or at a party, being together is reason enough for celebration.

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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 together 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 who studies marriages and engagements, I’m not so sure.

Young, heterosexual adults increasingly prefer egalitarian relationships in which both partners work for pay and contribute equitably to childcare and domestic labor—even as they struggle to realize this balance. Equalizing the proposal—a single moment in time rather than an ever-changing, lifetime negotiation of labor—should be much easier. Still, the proposal process remains overwhelmingly a male responsibility—and privilege. The stubbornness of this seemingly last acceptable bastion of male control has a lot to tell us about gender, relationships, and the division of labor in 21st-century America.

Sociologist Sharon Sassler and I interviewed a number of cohabiting couples between the ages of 18 and 34 who were considering or in the process of discussing marriage with their partners. We explicitly asked them which partner should propose. We received a fair number of responses such as “Whomever wants,” especially from college-educated men and women. But when we changed the question slightly to “Who do YOU want to propose if the two of you get married?”, the response was overwhelmingly the male partner. And this remained true even among those who otherwise viewed their relationships as equal.

When we asked why, men and women alike expressed concerns that “flopping the question” would call into question long-established gender roles. “It’s just a manly job,” explained Terrell.* “It’s just natural.”

Nathan, who was committed to sharing the housework and financial responsibilities equally with his partner, Andrea, had just proposed. Although Andrea had been the one to initiate their move-in, he said of the wedding proposal: “I think it’s the guys’ job, not to be chauvinistic and old-fashioned. But I think I would have felt kind of like a putz if she would have proposed to me.”

Many women felt the same way. Tara told us, “I said, ‘If you don’t do it by a certain time, I’m just going to do it.’ But I don’t mean that, because I don’t want to do it ’cause then I’ll feel like masculine, and I don’t want to feel masculine.” Asked to elaborate, Tara said, “I’ve definitely been the initiator in some of our other circumstances that are traditionally I think male roles. This is just a big one. And because everyone will ask, ‘How did it happen?’ And I don’t want to say, ‘Well I did it.’ I can’t. It would kill me I think.”

Female proposals were not entirely out of the question. Dawn had planned to propose to Eric, only to be dissuaded by both her mother and Eric’s wishes. She said, “I’ve threatened to propose to him a few times. He’s like, ‘No, the man does it.’ I think he would feel unmanly if he didn’t do it. Yeah, I know that sounds weird from a guy that’s really liberal, but I just feel like he wants to—he wants control of the situation.”

Eric’s explanation was simpler: “I just see it as the guy should propose—the classic way.”

All of this, for one simple question. But the power to propose is not merely picking out the right place or time to ask those four little words. It’s the ability to determine the pace of the entire relationship. It stands to reason that if the male partner is the only one who can move the couples’ union into marriage, the female partner has only two choices: wait to be asked or leave. In this way, the man’s timeline determines the seriousness of the relationship, with couples often scarcely realizing just how much control that affords him. In fact, this kind of “hidden power,” which makes certain gender roles seem natural or inevitable, can continually and insidiously reinforce patriarchal norms without ever really being questioned.

So what’s a modern straight couple to do? What might a more equal proposal look like?

Well, for one, heterosexual cis couples could certainly look to their gay and lesbian counterparts. They often leave the power of the proposal to a decision reached through discussion before the partner who most wants to advance the relationship or who prefers to stand on ceremony is the one to propose. However, such a change requires overcoming centuries of tradition and internalized sexism.

More recently, “dual proposals” have begun to make the rounds on social media. In this model, each partner proposes, and each (hopefully!) accepts. Though, of course, this is not without its own challenges: Need the proposals occur on the same day? Who goes first? And is the engagement official after the first “Yes”?

As the age of marriage has risen over time in the U.S. to just over 30 for men and 28 for women and the institution has become more economically elite, a third possibility for the “new proposal” seems apparent. Far from being the blushing bride and fresh-faced groom leaving the family home, today’s betrothed couples typically already have established their own households—most often living together and perhaps even with children of their own. The pomp and circumstance of the engagement period that were designed to help provide a young couple with the goods necessary for setting up a new household, like hope chests, engagement parties, and bridal showers, are no longer a major factor. Now, marriage is a pinnacle marker of adulthood rather than its beginning. After discussing whether they wish to marry, couples could simply decide that they are engaged, no proposal needed. In fact, rather than spending money renting out the jumbotron or hiring the skywriter, they might choose to host a party announcing their engagement and celebrating all who have supported them along the way.

Human beings have agency—and with that, the power to choose to modify or reject social norms. If our society continues to promote the proposal as a nearly unquestionable male right, we will continue to go through great lengths to reach true egalitarianism. Regardless of when our engagement became “official,” in the end, my husband and I are no less married. We have crafted a life full of mutual admiration, equal sharing, and a whole lot of fun. The question will be, is the conventional start to that life together—a male proposal—a tradition that heterosexual couples want to eschew?

Saying “yes” to an overhaul of the marriage proposal might be beneficial not only to our own relationships, but for generations to come.

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