Engaged To Be Married?
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I assume quite a few of you must be paddling in the same boat as me at the moment. I hope it’s not just me anyway, we could all do with some help on the oars. I’ve had a realisation; I’ve found that somehow it slipped my mind that getting engaged means getting married. I was so caught up in engineering a perfect proposal that I sort of forgot that little detail. Just me?
I spent the months and weeks leading up to popping the question in a whirlpool of plans and quandaries. Where to do it? What exactly to ask? How to lead in to it? What ring to buy? What is the contingency if she says ‘no?’ I had all those answers worked out (just in case you were wondering, Table mountain/‘I love you, and want you to be mine forever, will you marry me?/I gave her a little article I wrote about how amazing she looked while watching her nude modelling/I was going to throw myself off of the mountain.) These immediate romantic whimsies obscured the bigger picture; I couldn’t see the jungle of wedding pitfalls for the pretty little engagement trees.
It was only in the moments after I popped it, that I realised that one little question had a million others following it. We hadn’t even walked down the mountain before Hannah was planning her wedding. I suppose technically, that started when she was six years old, but the monster had lain dormant for some time. I woke a sleeping wedding monster. I assume all of us on here have done it, are doing it now, or want to do it at some point in the near future, so anshaallah, you can all empathise.
The bridesmaids were picked by the time we reached the cable car, dresses were floating in her head as we floated down the mountain, venues and marquees parked themselves on the grass as we landed, and walking down to our bike, she was already mentally walking down the aisle. I was ready for a rest, I had done my bit, I could sit back, smoke a cigarette, have a beer and stop worrying. Surely the wedding was waaay in the future? I hadn’t given one thought to all these details.
As it happens, another realisation I’ve come to is that this doesn’t really matter. Part of getting engaged means I have a fiancé. She’s been looking forward to this day since she was four foot high (although she is still only five foot, you get my drift.) She knows what she wants, her mum knows what she wants, my sisters (her bridesmaids) know what they want. I know that if she is happy, I’m happy. And it seems that planning a wedding makes her very happy, so I’m quite content to sit back, smoke that cigarette, drink that beer, and watch my busy little wedding monster cut up bridal magazines, browse dress websites, create colour scheme scrapbooks and fantasise about her day as a princess. I’ll be there when opinions are needed, I was there to ask for her hand, and I’ll be there to take her hand at the altar, but in between those two dates I think the back seat is where I am happiest, and probably where I belong. I’m still paddling, but the ship is out of my control now.
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ahhh beer yes, the cause of and solution to all of lifes problems.
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