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knew what I had to do. The joke in the family is that the way I proposed was to say, “Oh, all right, Cokie!” There’s more than a little truth to that.
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    CR: I said this is the only time. If you want this girl, this is the time.
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    SR: I was a little resentful, but she was right. Remember this was 1966, and we were really shaped more by the late fifties than the late sixties. Getting married was the thing to do. I’ve looked up the statistics, and that year the average age for a man to get married was 22.8 years, and I was already older than that. For women it was 20.5 years, so Cokie was right, she was well on her way to spinsterhood. Of my nine roommates who lived together senior year, seven were already married. It was almost like playing musical chairs. The music stopped on the day you graduated, and you married the person you were dating at the time. That was true for most of our friends.
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    CR: We kidded that girls’ schools advertised, “A ring by spring or your money back.” I think for a lot of girls there was also an expectation that we would not have a career, even though we had equally fine educations as the men. We expected to work for a couple of years and have kids and then do something good in the community. To succeed as a young woman meant finding the right guy. Marriage became very, very important because that was pretty much it. That was your goal in life. The man you married not only determined your well-being and sense of happiness, he also determined your status. Was the person you married good enough for you? I remember my sister saying once when she was about twenty-three, “I don’t even want to be married now. I just wish I knew who I was going to marry so I could be relaxed about it.” It was such a different era. I was reading a letter recently from my roommate who moved to California, and she was writing about the Berkeley campus in October of 1963 and saying it was so intimidating, all the sorority girls were so well dressed, everybody wore pearls to class every day. A year or two later that campus was in flames. The world changed in so many ways overnight.
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    SR: So Cokie reflected the era when she insisted that it was now or never if I wanted to marry her. When I finally realized that was my choice, we planned this romantic moment—we would take a carriage ride around Central Park and I would ask her to marry me. But the words snagged in my throat, just like they had three years before when I finally broke the two-date rule. The ride was practically over before I got them out, and Cokie was not pleased! Then she announced that I had to come to Washington to ask her father for her hand before the engagement could be official. She also insisted that before I came, I had to tell my parents what wasgoing on. True to my form, I put it off and put it off. Finally, ten minutes before the plane took off, I called my mother from the airport. “Hi, how are you?” she asked, and I blurted into the phone, “Well, actually, I’m going to Washington this week and Cokie and I are getting engaged.” Mom burst into tears and I hung up the phone. The morning it came time to talk to Cokie’s dad, he had escaped to the tomato patch and I had to be pushed out the door. My future father-in-law was so nervous he handed me a watering can, and I was so nervous I started watering my shoes. I told him that Cokie and I wanted to get married and he said, “Fine.” But I didn’t take yes for an answer. I plunged ahead; I said, “Well, sir, I do know that you think Cokie and I will have problems because of religion, but we do think that we can work them out.” And he answered, “Yes, I do think you’ll have problems, but not half as many problems as I’ll have if I try to tell Cokie who to marry.”
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    CR: So you came back in. We opened some champagne. Your twin brother, Marc, was here for a