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32 JULY 2018 VOGUE.COM``````Why do we cling to the idea that a man should pop the question?Dan Schwerin considers the alternative.``````I HAD MADE MY PEACE WITH NEVER being able to proposeto my girlfriend. We loved each other. We had lived togetherhappily for years. We were planning our future. But YJ hadmade it clear that under no circumstances was I ever to askher to marry me. “Don’t you dare,” she said.Growing up as the daughter of a right-wing rabbi in anOrthodox Jewish community in Southern California, YJ(short for Yael Julie) had chafed at the expectation that awoman’s highest ambition should be to get married as soonas possible and immediately start having babies. When herhigh school friends found husbands at age seventeen andapplied to small Jewish colleges, she charted a different path.Her resistance never faded. In her mid-30s, a fully secular IvyLeague–educated lawyer and State Department diplomat,she still felt a fierce need to assert her independence. She even``````hated going to weddings. The idea of having her own wasout of the question.YJ insisted that if we ever did get married, she’d like me totake her last name. It didn’t matter that we had no relationshipwith her father, who didn’t approve of our secular lifestyle, orthat her forcing me to change my name was as absurd and un-fair as me forcing her to change hers. She would explain that tomake a crooked plant grow straight, you have to bend it backthe opposite way. She wanted to do the same thing with oursexist society. It wasn’t enough for women to keep their ownnames. Men should have to change theirs for a few hundredyears to make up for past injustice. AlthoughI had made a career of learning from thewisdom of strong, opinionated women—I was Hillary Clinton’s chief``````STEP UPKATE DILLON LEVIN,PHOTOGRAPHED BYHELMUT NEWTONUP FRONT>34 FOR VOGUE, 2002.A Modest ProposalUp Front