Are you kidding? I barely asked her. We’d known each other six weeks, were having a conversation about a piece of jewelry I said I wanted to buy her, and all of a sudden she said, “Was that a marriage proposal?” and I had to think “Wait, what did I just say? Oh, right, ‘…and I want to spend the rest of my life with you’.” My uber-articulate response was something like “Um, I guess so?”
We’re 38.5 years in, so we’re thinking it might work out.
We did call her parents afterward, woke her mother up, gave her the news; her bleary response is a family legend: “Well, that’s nice, dear. You kids have fun and we’ll see you in a couple of weeks.” Then after she hung up she realized what we and she had said. No cellphones yet and we weren’t home, so she couldn’t call back; she wound up calling my wife’s sister and saying “I think I did a bad thing”. Of course it was so obvious to us that she wasn’t awake that we were just laughing, not upset.