But responsible decisions aren’t made in the moment. They’re the product of dialogue and careful, measured consideration. Even if a couple is already living together, marriage is a big step. There are important questions to ask: How will finances work? Would you move across the country for a job? Will we have children, and if we do, will you change the diapers? When he’s down on one knee, with friends hiding in the bushes, there is no time to get answers or air doubts. And, while most couples probably won’t admit it, facing this particular milestone, doubts are normal. They don’t mean you love your partner any less.

Because elaborate proposals inhibit conversation, they pressure the person being asked to say yes. If the subject of marriage comes outside the context of a proposal, Coontz says, a woman is free to tell her partner she isn’t ready. “But when the actual proposal comes,” she told me, “it’s still so wrapped up in the old tradition of males taking initiative and females being delighted that it’s very painful for everyone if it doesn’t go the way we expect—for the women who has to say no, for the man who feels humiliated, and for any public audience.”

Today some couples will try to have both: the conversation, and the show. They’ll make sure they’re on the same page about marriage, and then the woman will wait for the man to pick the perfect time and place. While this approach certainly helps, these conversations may be somewhat suffocated by the knowledge that a proposal is looming, and a desire to preserve some element of surprise for the big moment. (When I proposed to my boyfriend, we had already talked beforehand. The proposal was lovely, but I still wonder if it was really necessary.)

But many couples do not have these conversations, and the proposal really is when the decision gets made—sometimes poorly. A few women in Lamont’s study admitted that they said yes even though they really didn’t want to get married. Faced with an extravagant proposal, realizing how much work must have gone into it, they felt they had to choose between an engagement and a breakup. “I felt like it would be saying no to the relationship, rather than just saying no to the proposal,” one woman told Lamont. “I didn’t think we could come back from that.” As my colleague Megan Garber has written, women—more so than men—aggressively avoid awkward situations. Cultural forces, she writes, “demand that they be accommodating. That they be pleasing. That they capitulate to the feelings of others, and maintain a kind of sunny status quo.” Just go with the flow, these forces suggest. Be chill. Get married.

A marriage is, ideally, a partnership. It’s two people, playing life as a team. The proposal sets the tone for that partnership: Will you make the biggest, most important life decisions together, or will you make them apart? Talking about the kind of future you want to build, agreeing that it’s time take the next step, imagining where you’ll be, as a couple, 50 years down the road—that’s romantic. I’d take that conversation over a grand gesture, any day.

* This article initially stated that men propose in 95 percent of proposals between heterosexual couples. We regret the error.