Probably the most common advice that comes to anyone considering whether to pop the question is "When you know, you know." That's either brilliant or really unhelpful. For me, there was no "moment" when I just knew. When I look back it feels like I always knew. I tried to give the decision its due, but it was really more about checking myself and making sure I was sure, because I already felt sure, which was strange to me - to be so sure without having really thought about it as much as I thought I should have.
I tend to overthink things. Sometimes that's a good thing and sometimes not. I figure, it's probably zero sum so why fight it? So even though I felt sure, given that this was going to be the biggest decision of my life, I still wanted to put a lot more thought into it. First, I removed emotion from the equation. I tried to think critically and analytically. I made a pros and cons list. What I found was that I actually had to try pretty hard to find things to put on the cons side. That told me something. I talked to my brothers and close friends about it. Universally they were in favor; they all liked Audra and thought she was really good for me.
Most importantly, I talked directly to Audra about marriage and as many issues with it as I could think of. We also had conversations about some of our hot-button issues. (Me: "You know that opinion you have on X topic that really annoys me? Well, how do you think that would work out if, say, we got married.") Those conversations weren't always fun. I'm sure to Audra it felt like some kind of inquisition. It gave her a chance to raise questions too, though I have FAR, FAR fewer annoying opinions to discuss. In the end I was satisfied that even though we still had differences of opinion, we could reconcile them and live with it. Plus, I really thought that she got the hint that THE QUESTION is coming, but that I had managed to keep the element of surprise alive.
I laughed at myself sometimes when I was actually writing down notes on paper because it was pretty much the exact same way that I went about buying a car. I would put down the pencil in a moment of realization and think, "I'm not buying a fucking automobile here, I'm deciding on a life mate!" That didn't stop me from continuing with the lists.
I also tried thinking about it only in emotional terms, just to change it up and round it out. The main question I asked myself to get the emotional answer was, "How would I feel if Audra wasn't in my life anymore?" The answer kept coming back the same: REALLY SHITTY.
Eventually my mind was made up and I felt really good about it, maybe better than I'd ever felt about any decision I'd ever made, which was exactly how I thought I should feel.
I was going to ask Audra to
marry me and that was that.
Another issue was that I had to assure myself that she was going to say yes. I think one of the nightmares that every guy has is asking a girl to marry him and she says no. I didn't want to set myself up for that. So it took some time and probing (without giving away what I was doing too much). I tried creative ways of asking Audra about it (without really asking her - Me: "Hypothetically, if we got married, now this is purely hypothetical, what would you do if..." ). Again, this was me trying to preserve the element of surprise, while still getting the information that I needed to take the next step.
The next question was, "How?"
I think the amount of pressure on guys to get "popping the question" right is waaaaay underreported. You've got to set up the scene; it's got to be romantic and spontaneous. It's got to be at a memorable place. You can't be drunk. ALL THESE RULES!! I thought that the spontaneity/surprise element was really, really important. It turns out that this was my biggest mistake - the surprise factor. I overestimated its value, or maybe I just confused spontaneity with surprise. Too many movies, I think.
But let me tell you, making it perfect is hard. How are you supposed to find out what kind of engagement ring she wants (you don't want to get something without her input; no fucking way) and plan the date and all of that and still make it spontaneous? You would think it would be a pretty big tipoff when you go shopping for engagement rings together. We did all that. So my thought was, we'll shop for rings and I'll get a really good idea of what she wants and then I'll put it to bed for a couple of months and talk a lot about how broke I am, etc. to make her think that I wasn't going to ask her anytime soon. Then, when she least expected it, BAM!
Well, here's how that worked out for me:
We went shopping for rings together in the late summer. This was an incredibly annoying process because the salespeople at these places would say shit like, "You've just got to go with your heart" and "If it feels right, it is right." They would also do this divide and conquer shit where they'd try to sell the bride-to-be on the diamond with zero regard to the cost so that the guy would look like a fucking cheap chump if he balked at getting her what she "deserved." I showed an incredible amount of restraint not to respond to that STUPID. FUCKING. SHIT. I mean, if there is one wrong way to go about spending several thousand dollars it is to "go with your heart" or "what feels right" or, worse, to get bullied into it by some cheesy salesperson with a corporate training line. It was incredibly insulting, but at least we got to see lots of diamonds and settings (and prices). Audra also looked through bridal magazines and jewelry websites. She bought a couple of costume pieces that looked similar to what she wanted (but not exactly). I would question her extensively on details. Once I had a good picture in my mind of what she wanted I went to work.
Quick aside on engagement rings: I've had many conversations over the years about this subject. A lot of guys think the practice of spending a ton of money on an engagement ring is stupid. There are two prevailing reasons: 1. the whole "tradition" was cooked up by the jewelry industry and if you take part in it you are just a pawn in their manipulation, and 2. that the whole act is a ridiculous testament to the worst of American materialism and one-upmanship in our hierarchical class society. Both are probably true. But what are you going to do, really? When you tell someone that you are engaged what is the first thing they ask? "Let me see the ring!!" And if they don't ask directly, their eyes immediately dart toward her left ring finger. Then what? Do you say, "Yeah, no ring. Fuck you. We're above all that."? And would there be just the slightest little doubt in everyone's mind, including your fiancee's, that you were trading on this whole "social conscience" deal just to avoid spending several thousand dollars? Personally, I don't want the questions, the accusing eyes and the hassle. Besides, the fact is that there are tons of social constructs that we have to live with whether we like it or not. It's either that or be an outlier and an outcast. Since I'm a person who feels the need to explain myself, being a visible or obvious outlier doesn't work for me.
There is another side to this, of course, other than the cynical side. And that is that the ring really is an expression of your love for your future wife. Gifts in other contexts aren't looked down on for their extravagance, most of the time, so why should this be? In a sense, it is what you make of it. So I poured myself into it and set about giving the best and most important gift that I would ever give in my life to the person that I cared about most in the world.
When it came to buying the ring, let's just say that I did my homework. That process is a whole story itself. Suffice to say, in the end, I had what I thought was the perfect engagement ring and exactly what Audra wanted.
Next was actually setting it up and popping the question. I really struggled with this. I wanted it to be perfect, but I just couldn't come up with anything that I thought was worthy of this event. It was late Fall by this point, coming up on the holidays. I was still intent on it being a surprise so going somewhere romantic right before Christmas was out because I thought it would have been a total tipoff. I'm sure to most people the solution is obvious - do it at Christmas. That's a natural gift giving time and I could camoflage me efforts with the other gift-giving activities, Christmas is romantic, etc. etc. etc. I really didn't want to do the Christmas thing. I hate doing what's obvious or, for that matter, easy. I always think there's a better solution that the easy and obvious, but I'm slowly divesting myself of that belief. I thought about it and thought about it. Nothing. What I really wanted to do was ask her on Matagorda Island during the Summer. We've got history there and I once gave her a sand dollar necklace when we were beachcombing that I told her I "found" on the beach. I had this vision of us walking together on the beach and me putting the ring in a pretty shell and calling her over to see it, just like I'd done with the necklace. Then I'd get down on one knee and propose, right there on the beach. I had envisioned setting it up so that some of our family and friends would have been on that beach trip with us and they would have been in on it. I'd have had a couple of bottles of champagne on ice so that when we walked back to the boat with everyone there it would have been a sort of engagement party. I could just see the joy in my mind. I think that would have been awesome, but I couldn't wait for Summer to come back around. That was six months away and I wanted to get married in the Summer, so that meant we'd have to be engaged for at least a year before the wedding and I wanted to get on with it. I figured that we'd been together for a long time already and there was no reason to delay. So part of the issue was timing. That meant that I had to do it now, and Christmas was really the only logical backdrop.
Once I decided on the Christmas engagement I kept trying to come up with the perfect way to do it. Do it before Christmas, on some random night? Do it on Christmas day? As part of our own gift exchange under our tree? None of it felt perfect, but I decided to do it when we exchanged gifts because I knew that it would be just us and that she wasn't expecting it.
We were going to do our gift exchange on a Sunday night, December 23rd. It worked out like that because of all of the other family plans and whatnot. I was all ready to go when a few days before Audra told me about a Christmas party that we'd been invited to that Sunday night. "SHIT!" I thought to myself. That blows the whole setup. She was talking about doing our gifts and then going to this party. That would have been okay, but there were a few problems. First of all, I didn't want to be rushed - I wanted to take our time opening our gifts with nowhere to be afterward. I envisioned doing the deed and then we'd call all of our friends and family and tell them the wonderful news (after a lot of kissing and hugging). That's what I had envisioned. The kicker was that at this party was going to be an ex-boyfriend of Audra's - it was at his house, in fact - and there had been some weirdness with him, so I didn't want to bust into this guy's party and the big story to be that we had just gotten engaged. Talk about weirdness. Audra couldn't really understand why I didn't want to go to the party. I was sure she thought it had something to do with the ex-boyfriend. I tried to salvage things by telling her that maybe we could still go to the party after we opened gifts, if it wasn't too late, figuring that once it happened there was no way that she'd want to go. After Audra broke it to her friends that she probably wasn't going to the party, one of them, who had been the one who was trying to get Audra to go to the party in the first place, told her, "Well he probably doesn't want to go because he intends to propose." I found that out later and how close my big surprise, that I'd been planning for over a month, was to being ruined. Audra had been shocked at her friend's suggestion.
Most of my family and friends knew what I was planning. Some of her family knew because I had arranged a meeting, in secret, with her parents at their house, to announce my intentions and to ask their permission to marry their daughter. Word spread from there, but not too widely because I'd asked them to keep a lid on it to preserve the surprise.
I got through all of that and the day finally arrived. We got a bit of a late start opening gifts because we were making Christmas cookies. I kept trying to hurry things up and Audra knew something was off. I was anxious and a bit nervous, mostly because I hoped that "the moment" would be perfect. I didn't feel right. Things were tense. More than once I thought about aborting the mission to search for a better time and place. I decided to wait and see and if things didn't feel right I'd push the eject button at the last minute if I had to.
We finally sat down in the living room to open gifts. It was hard to get excited about the Christmas gifts. I watched the piles of gifts dwindle and felt the moment coming closer. Finally, there were no more gifts. It was now or...not now. The gift-giving had softened things up, I thought, there was some Christmas spirit in the air, so I told her, "I've got one more gift for you but I have to go get it because it was too big to put under the tree." I went to my super secret engagement ring hiding place and dug it out, making as much noise as I could to make it seem like I was dragging some big box around. I called out to her from the other room, "Close your eyes and don't open them until I tell you to." "Okay," she said. While her eyes were closed I got down on one knee in front of her with the box open so that it would be the first thing she saw when she opened her eyes. "Okay, open 'em," I told her.
When she opened her eyes she made a noise that was sort of a stifled squeal. I tried to start in on the words that I had rehearsed many times, "Audra..." *whimpering, squealing* "Audra..." *more noises* She was freaking out a little and had started shaking. "Audra, look at me." I said as calmly as I could as I took the ring out of the box and put it on her finger. She looked from her hand to my eyes and then I started freaking out a little bit. My voice didn't work so well, but I managed to get out, "Audra, you are the best thing that has ever happened to me and I want to spend the rest of my life with you." "Will you marry me?"
I'm sure the answer was immediate, but to me those few nanoseconds felt like eons. Audra's voice wasn't working so well either, but she croaked out a "Yes." I grabbed her and hugged her as tight as I could. A great weight had been lifted.
After a few moments, I pulled back and held her shoulders and asked her, "Are you allright?" I had felt her shaking and tears were streaming down her face and she looked like she had just gotten the shock of her life, and not in a good way. This was not exactly the reaction that I had been hoping for.
Turns out she had indeed gotten the shock of her life. I had done such a good job of not talking about rings or proposals or weddings or any of that for so long that she thought I had just put it off. Whereas I thought that the surprise factor was so important, I overshot the mark and nearly scared her to death, literally. She was hyperventilating at one point, I'm pretty sure. I became legitimately concerned was telling her to "Just breathe. Just breathe." I got her a glass of water. I stroked her hair and tried reassuring her that everything was okay. I wondered to myself if everything was okay. Of course, I'm thinking, "Oh shit, she REALLY wasn't expecting this and hasn't thought it through and only said yes because she didn't want to hurt me." Of course, that wasn't the way it was. She really did want to marry me; I had really just shocked the hell out of her.
By the time she calmed down it was too late to call anybody. She looked like she'd just come off an incredible adrenaline high, which, of course, she had. She was sort of withdrawn and looked very tired.
We slowly stacked the Christmas presents out of the way and got ready for bed. She kept staring at the diamond ring on her finger in disbelief. I asked her if she liked it and she said, "It's perfect."
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