We had no proposal. No engagement. No one person ever asked the other to marry them. Instead, we had several conversations about what we wanted from our relationship, how marriage fit into that picture, and how we wanted to make our future happen.
This photo is a LIE! We weren't engaged... and never have been!*
I like that it happened that way. It’s much more in keeping with our “relationship personality”. This doesn’t mean we aren’t romantic – we’re pretty sappy, mushy, overly romantic types who believe our falling in love is like every love song come true. But this is one of those things that I think snuck up on us pretty early in our relationship and it needed to be a mutual decision come to through good communication.
And yes, I realize that you can have a mutual decision come to through good communication AND have a proposal moment – but when we decided for sure that we were getting married, we were going to do it nine days later! So, getting married jumped pretty quickly to the top of the list and hainvg some kind of proposal just sort of fell of the list altogether.
Now, that’s not to say we didn’t have some sweet moments surrounding our decision to get married.
A few months into our relationship, we started to talk seriously about our future and what we wanted to be doing. We had a bit of a time-sensitive pressure situation in that we had both packed up our lives and started travelling together (with friends) and once the traveling was over neither one of us had anything to go back to: no apartments, no jobs, no home cities even. And we were in a position where I couldn’t live in Bek’s country. So of course we had to have some conversations about what we were going to try to do about being together. Once we diecided we wanted to live together once we were done traveling, I was feeling pretty comfortable about the seriousness of our relationship and was more than satisfied with how we were doing.
Then after a particularly fantastic night in Santorini, Greece, Bek asked if in a year from that day we felt the way we did at that moment would I want to get married. Kind of like a proposal, but a bit more like an inquiry into my interest in marrying. A sort of pre-proposal. Bek had a theory about needing to live with someone through four seasons in order to truly know them. Fine by me! This was the first time we’d talked about marriage, so I was thrilled! I was always the “I don’t need to get married” type, but that didn’t mean wouldn’t have liked to get married. So of course I said yes! And we talked a little more about it over the next couple of days, then kind of tucked it away as something we would revisit in a year’s time.
The night Bek gave me a marriage inquiry...
Fast forward to only three months later, and we’d moved to Canada. We were starting to make our long-term plans in my country and we run into the immigration issue. There were several options for Bek immigrating to the country, we didn’t NEED to get married. And we were very firm that we did not want to get married for immigration reasons. But it definitely got us talking about it a lot sooner than the one-year-away date we’d agreed upon. And we both had to admit to each other that… we really wanted to be married to each other! And once we got to thinking about it, we figured why wait! It was coming close to Christmas, and we were going to be spending it just the two of us with no families, so we thought what better way to spend the holidays than by getting married! We bounced the idea around for a few days, kind of unsure if we should jump in. Then we were sitting in what’s now become “our” diner, having breakfast and something just clicked. We both both just got too damn giddy about it to hold back anymore, so we had kind of a “Let’s do it!” moment! We walked the two blocks to city hall and got our marriage license right after breakfast, and booked our ceremony there for nine days later on Christmas Eve.
So that’s it. Two pretty special non-proposal moments. I love the way we did things!
I have to admit – I thought not having a proposal wasn’t that unusual, especially amongst LGBTQ couples. But in reading blogs and such when I started planning our second wedding, I started to feel like I was the only one who didn’t do or have a proposal. Anyone else out there not have a proposal involved in their engagement or wedding process? I’d love to hear about others’ experiences in non-traditional ways of initiating their engagement/marriage.
*first photo courtesy of Kelly Prizel Photography
LOVE IT! Hey? It worked for you two! What a great story! Congrats again!!
This is fantastic! I had been feeling kind of silly because my girlfriend and I have been talking about marriage for about a year and I can’t remember when we first brought it up. It just seems so natural and obvious that we belong together. It’s wonderful to see you two be so happy!
Getting married is a huge life decision.
Mandy, you are not alone on your thoughts about proposals. Sometimes, when I hear about wedding proposals, I am a bit dumb founded as to why one would wait to be asked or does the asking? For us, it was a series of conversations. Yes, the initial conversation was a bit thrilling but not “let’s do this-yes or no?”
Now i am a romantic, a soft and warm-hearted person as well as a resourceful woman who would never leave anything to chance. When my partner and i began to discuss our life plans, marriage eventually entered the conversation. We discussed it on equal footing of this is something we both wanted and then we threw in a variety of factors (immigration constraints, expenses, patriarchal institution, etc) along the way. Maybe we had so many hurdles to overcome, we never felt compelled to be apart of such traditions. Again one of the many reasons why when planning our wedding I was so thankful once again to be gay-not many people forcing ideas/traditions upon us.