Stephanie Coontz, a professor at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., and director of research and public education for the Council on Contemporary Families, suggests that perhaps the issue of marriage is so charged because it is only recently that women have had choices about if and when to marry, education and work. “For thousands of years marriage was about men making the important decisions and women accommodating to these decisions,” she said. “It is only in the past 40 years that we have said, ‘No, there is not a preset hierarchy.’”

Confused by these changing norms, people “react more defensively to people who are making different decisions” in an effort to resolve ambivalence, says Dr. Coontz.

In a stage of life where you are expected, even encouraged, to be focused on yourself and your own accomplishments, my university friends and colleagues overwhelmingly act as if by choosing to marry I have surrendered my ambitions for a different cause. It’s as if, as a young woman, I am required to pick between a profession and a marriage.

I met my fiancé when we both were doing a gap year in Israel after high school. I remember him, but he doesn’t remember me. But we both attended the same college, and had a class together freshman year. During exam week, we exchanged some supportive emails. In our sophomore year, we were both involved in an internship program that instructed us to meet with the other interns. We met up at a fountain on campus and ended up talking for hours. And then we went out the next night and talked for hours again. Away for fall break, he wrote me long emails every day. After that, he sent me a card every week. (I still have all of them in a box.)

Two years later we met at the fountain again, where he gave me a card to congratulate me on the results of my medical school entrance exam. The card contained inside references to our relationship — penguins and “Downton Abbey” — that only the two of us would know. “This is a such a perfect card,” I told him. “You should have saved it for when you propose.” He said, “I am about to.” And then he did.

My desire to marry him hasn’t changed my other goals in life. This spring I’m graduating, then heading to the University of Cambridge for a nine-month fellowship and returning to attend medical school in New York. I also am getting married to someone I love because we are certain we belong together and want to experience all of the next steps in our lives together.

Since announcing in October my plan to marry, I have gotten fairly used to the intrusive questions and the raised eyebrows. I have come to realize that people who react to my engagement may just be trying to rationalize their own decisions or make sense of mine.