The Proposal
Marijean here. I want to tell you MY version of the story as the proposal recipient! It starts by explaining that when we started to date in our very small town, we weren’t eager to run into people we knew. Our first dates were in off-the-beaten-path places. A pretty lake north of town. T.G.I.Fridays for mudslides. Bonefish Grill. The Melting Pot. The Dell on grounds at UVa.
But once we started dating, we went out on a date nearly every single Tuesday for three years.
So it was a Tuesday, and we went on a multi-location date, revisiting some of those old haunts and landing, at the end of the evening, at the Dell at UVa. For those of you who don’t know it, the Dell is the tiny park with the reflecting pond next to the basketball courts on Emmet, across from the main parking garage. It’s just tucked right in there and is a sweet little romantic spot.
The previous time we’d been to the Dell must have been earlier in the year and almost earlier in the night, because THAT night, when we got to the Dell, it was DARK.
We walked around the pond anyway, and settled on a park bench which is where Seth beautifully and touchingly proposed and I said yes. (I believe it was more like, “yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!”)
And he handed me . . . something metal and circular . . . in the dark.
And said, “I know you can’t see it, but it’s awesome. You’re going to love it.”
I do, indeed love my ring and the fact that Seth and Allison conspired to pick out just the right style! Sneaky kid!
The proposal was a surprise, but something I’d been hoping for and am happily looking forward to being married to Seth.
Now for Seth’s story.
It didn’t take me long to realize that I wanted to spend my life with Marijean, but I wasn’t real hot on marriage when we started to date. I told her early on that I loved her with all my heart but that I didn’t figure on getting married for another 20 years or so. I think that sounded about right to her too so we carried on like smitten kids without giving that a lot more thought.
After a while though we wanted to spend more time together, and eventually Marijean moved down to the farm. It was fantastic! Defying the Law of Cohabitation and Ubiquity, we enjoyed our time together even more when there was more of it, so it started to seem a little silly that we wouldn’t do it as husband and wife.
Within a few short weeks that summer I got three or four serendipitous messages from the cosmic post office that sends such things out saying that it was time to ask MJ to marry me. One of those messages came from a gay friend of mine saying, after he had some of her pie, that he’d marry her if I didn’t.
I think MJ was feeling the same way, but we both wanted to have the proposal be a special surprise so we didn’t talk about it. It was fun for me to have the secret knowledge that it was coming, but I didn’t want her to worry that I was still on track for a combo wedding/retirement party. That’s why it was sort of fantastic when we were talking one night about what we thought might be our first fight, or source of conflict, and although I was drawing a blank, she said she had an idea. I peppered her with guesses but they were all off the mark. Then I got it. She didn’t know that I wanted to marry her! She didn’t need to tell me, and I didn’t say those words out loud, but I was sure that I had figured it out so I got a big smile and held her hand and told her she didn’t need to worry about that.
I think it was only a week or two after that when I was shopping for a ring. I knew I’d need some guidance, and luckily I got some great help from Allison. She sent me a photo of a ring that her mom liked from Pinterest and I passed it on to the jeweler. Well, I tried to pass it on to the jeweler. Given my limited practice with Pinterest, and social media in general, I wasn’t clear on the function of the various buttons, so didn’t understand that the one that I thought might mean “Start the process of emailing this picture to the jeweler” meant “Tell the person who has this picture on their board that you are trolling her.” Fortunately I could leverage my ineptitude with, well, all of the internet really, into some plausible deniability, and we were back on track for a surprise.
So on the Tuesday closest to the three-year anniversary of our first date (note: there is not consensus on whether or not it was a date, but I got a kiss, and my insides were all aflutter, so I say it was a date) I lined up the evening that MJ described above. I was so eager and excited, but also more nervous than I had been in a very long time. The days leading up to it took forever, and that Tuesday at work lasted for two forevers. There’s probably a physics thing about how having a diamond ring in your pocket, and a plan to ask the most amazing woman you’ve ever met to spend her life with you, that bends space time in weird ways. In any case, even though we didn’t get to have mudslides, as the good people of Charlottesville didn’t give TGIFriday’s the love and patronage needed to keep it here, we had a magical (that’s for you Brooke Jenkins) evening and she said yes.