Let me ease into our proposal story. Jen and I had spent months having veiled/semi-conversations about if and when we would get married. And I mean months (we’re talking close to a year). At first I wasn’t ready. Don’t get me wrong I knew I wanted to marry her; I knew it the night we went to see the Star Trek Movie two summers ago. But we waited patiently until I was ready. I don’t clearly remember the moment that we decided we were ready (according to Jen it happened at the end of March). In my mind we were just suddenly looking at rings. We spent weeks looking at rings, trying to decide what we wanted. I’ll go over our whole ring selection process at a later date, but this is getting very long and I should at least try and get to the point. So we picked out rings from Jared’s (yes, she got it at Jared’s!{the first time I made that joke I thought Jen was going to kill me}).
On the Monday before Memorial Day 2010 I actually had some free time so I drove up to Jared’s. I had received the go ahead from Jen the week before. So I did it. I bought her a ring. At this point I had no idea if she had purchased mine or not. Although I would be lying if I said that I didn’t look for the ring I wanted in the case and discovered that it was no longer there. So Jared called me up a couple days later to say that the sizing was done and since my director (I was working on Cyrano de Bergerac at the time) so kindly canceled rehearsal for that Thursday night I went and picked it up. Here it is!
(Tahdah!)*
Now for the plan: Jen was actually in charge of the official proposal, which drove me bleeping insane. But my plan was that once she proposed in the manner of her choosing and we got back to which ever abode we are going to afterward, I would give her a scrapbook that I had made for her. The scrapbook starts with a sonnet and then pairs pictures of her and me from the beginning of our relationship to the present with 7 other sonnets. On the last two pages I placed sonnet 116 (my favorite) and her ring hanging on a piece of ribbon. My hope was that when I first gave it to her she would be disappointed enough that it was not a ring that she would be thoroughly surprised when she found the ring in the back. She’d either think it’s wonderful or terribly cheesy.
Now I just needed to get her to pop the question. This is from my blog in the days before she proposed:
“I’m dying for her to do it this weekend! But we have no plans. She’s going to spend all day Saturday at work. Then we’re going over to a friend’s BBQ and then she is going out with other friends. Sunday we have nothing planned and then we spend Monday cleaning her apartment and I have rehearsal in the afternoon. Grrrr. And the next three weekends are booked. So it’s not going to happen before she starts school again. So now I’m probably looking at July. Double Grrrrr! If only I knew someone I could bribe into telling me when it’s going to happen.”
Now hold on one second there! I want to know what happened at the Star Trek movie that made you decide you wanted to marry me! Do I know this story? If not, how do I not know this story?!