The Smack Heard Round the World

Blog Challenge - Day 3 
This post of part of a 13 day "half marathon" blog challenge" in which I am chronicling our marriage, the best advice we have received thus far, as well as lessons learned over the past 9 years.

Continuing the story from yesterday...

We were friends, we enjoyed each other's company, we were attracted to each other, but there was a huge problem.  We were not on the same page spiritually and many of our values did not line up.  I refused to date him until he got his life on track, but I didn't hold out long enough.  

He moved to Boston when he graduated in December, and while I finished up my last semester of student teaching, we had a sort-of-long-distance-relationship, which eventually ended a month before graduation.  We reconnected on graduation weekend, started talking again, then started dating when he moved back to Virginia after the Boston job didn't work out.  Two months later, he broke up with me because he wanted to get his life back on track with God without the distraction of a relationship.  That break-up lasted approximately two months, when we began "talking" again after I moved to the Philadelphia area for my first teaching job.  

After a month of "talking", we still weren't dating, but there was this one marathon evening of back and forth phone conversations between my parents and I, my parents and Dave, and Dave and I.  I was under the impression that Dave was trying to ask my parents' permission to date me again and didn't really understand the huge drama.  Apparently, at one point during that conversation, my parents realized that their attempts to convince us not to be in a relationship were futile after I told them I loved him.  

The next day, Dave drove three hours from Virginia to spend the weekend with me (I lived with one of the older school secretaries, so don't worry, it was chaperoned).  He took me to the Christmas lights show at Longwood Gardens and we spent a long time walking around.  At one point, I was freezing cold and asked him if he wanted to go get some dinner.  "No.  Let's keep walking" was the reply.  Ok, I thought, I guess he really wants to spend time with me.  Then he asked me to go check out a secluded path that had absolutely no Christmas lights.  Ummm, ok...whatever.  While standing next to me staring at a big pine tree, he asked me if I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him.  I thought it was a rhetorical question so I muttered something profound like sure.  And then suddenly he was down on one knee...in the mud...staring up at me...asking me to marry him...and holding up a ring.  But wait....what the heck was this ring?  This isn't an engagement ring!!  What is he talking about???  

"That's not funny...don't joke about something like that."  SMACK!!  Right across the face.  Yes, I really smacked him.  And I wasn't kidding.  

But he stayed down on one knee...in the mud...holding up the non-engagement-engagement-ring.  And I realized he was serious.  

"Can I think about it?"

"No, you can't think about it!!" 

"Ok...yes?"

That non-engagement-engagement ring was his mom's original wedding band.  When Dave told his family he was going to propose, but didn't have a ring, his mom let him use her ring, which just happened to be in my tiny size.  I picked out a new ring several months later (which coincidentally turned out to be exactly the same as my grandmother's ring and my great-grand-mother's ring).

  

When my long-term sub job ended in June, I moved down to Virginia into the apartment we would live in after the wedding in October.  We were engaged for 10 months.  We probably should have been engaged for much, much longer, but you'll hear about that in the next few weeks...

So what's your engagement story?  Care to share?

Sharing with: Deep Roots at Home, Women Living Well, Wifey Wednesday, We Are THAT Family, NOBH