Today is 14 years since my boyfriend took me out for a very quick lunch, and, while nervously holding my hand, asked me to become his wife <3 As proposals go, it certainly wasn't a romantic walk on the beach, or a candlelight dinner, or any one of the thousand and one ways Hollywood says True Love should be. It wasn't even a very good dinner - Arby's doesn't have anything spectacular on the menu. The ambiance - the mall parking lot, sitting in his car - wasn't the most scenic of locations, either. But his proposal - the location, the timing, the date - sums up what our marriage has been so far. See, I was working full time. I had a 30 minute lunch break on that Valentine's Day. My parents were out of town, and so when my shift at the department store was over, I had plans to pick up my baby brother from the sitters. My brand-new fiancé was working a stint as a paramedic that night, *and* we had a wedding to attend. So, he drove an hour and a half each way, into the States from Canada, for the few minutes of privacy we could have that day. Practical? yes. Romantic? absolutely - as clichéd as it may be, I'd always wanted to be proposed to on Valentine's Day...and so he made it happen. Mall parking lot, Arby's fast food, and all! I don't have a picture of the ring he got me, simply because he didn't get me one. The 'church' we planned to get married in forbade engagement or wedding rings, because they were unnecessary adornment. Had he gotten me a ring, neither of our pastors would have performed our wedding ceremony. We had our wedding date picked out more than a year prior to getting engaged - again, a 'church' rule. See, we were already flaunting convention by taking time to get to know one another before we got married. The rules said we should be married no longer than a year from when we started dating. Instead, we dated 3.5 years. Marriage is serious business, and neither of us were ready for a lifelong commitment within a year of learning of the other one's existence! So we dated, and got to know one another, and fell in love. "The Church" had a rule about engagements, as they had rules about simply everything. We weren't allowed to be engaged longer than 6 months, as someone somewhere had determined that it was physically impossible to be engaged longer than 6 months without 'giving in to temptation' (a euphemism accompanied by raised eyebrows, a somber tone, and eerie horror music in the background.) So, by the time he was allowed to propose, we'd already been planning our wedding for a year. Yes, like so much else in my past, the 'church' determined what we were allowed to do or not do. And, like so many other times in our lives, we paid lip service to the requirements while quietly living our lives doing what we felt was right, regardless of the dire warnings we incurred 😉 And so...our love story may never make a blockbuster movie. It's not funny enough to be a comedy, not tragic enough to be horror, not *quite* quirky enough to be a little indie film. But it's our love story. It's romance in the middle of every day life. It's logic and practicality even when surrounded by irrational forces. It's snatched moments in time when we connect, moments when True Love shines through, even in a mall parking lot. The Husband's proposal did indeed set the tone for our marriage. And 14 years later - and counting - I still have no regrets. <3
