Engagement {it happened on a sunday} Day 12

Friendly's Date

I'd been dating a boy for almost four years.  What began as a desire to have fun and spend time with someone whose company I really enjoyed had shifted.  It was as though I had been walking along, and over time I gradually turned from the plans up ahead to take his hand and ask, "Where should we go together?"  A fun diversion became a serious commitment, so it only made sense that we make it official.

Valentine's Day fell on a Saturday that year, and he came to visit me and take me out to a fancy dinner.  The restaurant had a long wait time, so we went next door to the bookstore and browsed together.  I had an idea about what might happen during the evening, so we had both dressed up for the occasion.  I was having a good time, being silly and feeling happy, while he was acting weird and nervous.  When we finally got a table, I ate and chatted while he moved food around his plate.  Finally, when the dessert came, he got down on one knee, babbled a bunch of stuff about how important I was to him and I made him so happy, and I was all set to say YES...once he eventually got around to asking me to marry him.

Prom Date

He slipped a ring on my finger, a lady sitting at the table next to us clapped, much to her children's embarrassment, and for that night, the news was just ours.  I forget sometimes what we have lost in our era of social media, how quickly a life-changing event becomes public news.  Back when we got engaged, Mark Zuckerberg was still an unknown nerd at Harvard ranking girls' pictures online, and we were able to share our news personally as we saw people.

So it happened on Sunday that we saw my parents, my friends, probably some other people that I can't remember, and passed along the good news.  We were getting married!

I had already seen, over the course of four years, how this other person was able to challenge my thoughts and beliefs, how we came together from different sides and found common ground, how I was turning into a more compassionate person.  I like to think of those dating years as the time when we grew together, both in maturity and also in becoming two people who wanted to unite as one.  Our engagement also signaled to me that I was ready to leave the fast-paced life of air travel and turn our long-distance relationship into a short distance.  At the airline, we liked to half-jokingly call ourselves rock stars.  A frequent refrain was, "At least I'm not working at a bank."  It was the most opposite career that we could think of, and it sounded boring as crap.  Until I became engaged, when working at a bank sounded awesome.

He's not sleeping, he's super excited
that I just agreed to marry him!

So I left the airline, I moved back home to be in the same city as my fiancé, and I started working at a bank.  Suddenly, I had a regular schedule, with weekends off and paid holidays.  And I would soon find a way to fill those empty Sundays.