Happy Valentine’s day. It’s the biggest engagement day of the year, and I look so forward to hearing all my future couples’ stories of how the big question was popped! (Engagement stories are one of my favorite things ever!)
So to celebrate, I’m going to tell you a little of mine. It’s nothing spectacular; it was simple and heartfelt (kinda like us.)
We met at the end of April – on my sister’s birthday to be exact. I fought the idea of dating him tooth and nail. I wanted to, but then again I didn’t. It was a blind date, set into motion by my mother and some mutual friends. And I resisted.
But I went anyway. And I went out with him again. And again. By mid-June, he was my “boyfriend.” By mid-July, things got a little more serious. We had those deep conversations that lasted hours, the ones where we talked of children and a future. The conversations that simultaneously scared me and made me excited.
That summer I went on vacation with my family for an excruciating week apart from him. My sister got absolutely sick of hearing me talk about my boyfriend. This was 15 years ago – when our cell phones had 100 text messages for an entire month and there was no such thing as nationwide roaming. So a week, and I only got to call him a couple times. So yes, my sister got sick of hearing about him.
When we came back from vacation, he took me out to the house he was building (at this point it was HIS house. Not mine.) Nothing fancy, a good little starter home. The frame was up, the roof was up, and they were getting ready to drywall. Big sheets of it sat in big stacks all around the house, like randomly placed twin sized mattresses made of dust. We walked around for a bit, admiring at the progress.
When we got back to the little galley kitchen with the little eating nook, he dropped to his knee and told me that this was where he wanted to start his life with me. He wanted this to be the place WE began. He showed me the ring (a modestly sized princess cut diamond – not this one, although this one was my “something blue” at my wedding.)
I said yes, and the rest was history.
In keeping with our whirlwind romance, we had a 2 month engagement. To make things even faster, two weeks into it, we decided that we wanted to move up the wedding date and get married on the first day we could find an open venue. So September it was! 4 months and 29 days from the day we met till the day we said I do. And I wouldn’t change it for anything.
