How I got engaged
Published by Lee Reamsnyder PermalinkI’m getting married in April. Since a lot of people have been asking, here’s how I ended up engaged.
While we were visiting her folks in Florida, we headed to the beach at sunset.
All right, This is obnoxious.
We brought some snacks.
An hour or so later, we had eaten a lot of cheese, drank a little wine, and had decided that we were engaged.
There were no serenades, no stunts destined to be this week’s viral video. Hell, there were no rings. It was how I think it should be: an honest conversation between two people who want to be with each other for a long time.
But here’s a free tip: to keep the romance alive, don’t end that conversation with “So, I guess we’re engaged, huh?”
What do you expect? I’m a rookie at this.
So that was May, 2010.
We didn’t tell anyone for a while. We wanted to wait until we had a ring. This was for Kristin’s benefit: after 80-odd years of diamonds-are-forever propaganda, when you’re a woman in your twenties and you tell another women in their twenties that you’re engaged, you’ll be asked about the ring within 27 seconds.
I won’t dwell on the ring except to say that we picked it out together from a seller on Etsy, and it’s quite pretty.
After the ring showed up, I wanted to do a little gesture to mark that our engagement was officially official.
I was banned from doing anything that might end up on YouTube. I settled on this:
What followed that evening after she got home was some sitcom-level shenanigans. She knew that I had the ring, and was getting annoyed that I wasn’t giving it to her. I definitely didn’t want the ring burning a hole in my pocket any longer than necessary, and I just needed her to look at the fridge. It started like this:
- Me
- Where’s the butter?
- Her
- In the fridge. Where else would it be?
- Me
- Can you come out here and show me?
- Her
-
[Opens fridge without looking at it]
Right here. Where it always is. - Me
-
Um, right. Of course.
[2 minutes later]
Kristin, where’s the milk?
This went on for a few rounds.
She said yes. … again.
That’s good, because otherwise I’d have to put the fridge magnets back to how they were before:
(Top image by Barbara Rodriguez)
Update
21 Feb 2011: For the folks that have asked, the ring looks like this.