“Grow old with me! The best is yet to be.”
– Robert Browning

I walked in and there were rose petals everywhere, pictures of our six years together laid out all over the room,  cards, notes, and even Post-It notes I had written to him from the beginning until recently.

According to Mom, her proposal was something along the lines of, “Are we getting married, or what?”

I thought this proposal would repeat itself in the next generation, as Fiance and I had been together for a long time.  He had brought up marriage many times over, but usually between commercial breaks.  My feet-dragging was enabled by and blamed on the lack of a decent proposal.

Fiance and I believed after our first date that there wouldn’t be a second one.  We found each other pretty unimpressive, I suppose.  Neither of us remember how we agreed on a second date.  Two months later I got my first kiss.  Let’s just say, that in the beginning we were both slow to commit, and then for a few years it was just me.

The morning of the proposal he picked me up from the airport to take me home.  It was an early flight.  I was tired and hungry, so I asked we stop by Sprouts.  He hadn’t eaten and bought toaster pastries.  He couldn’t eat them which I found odd because he was starving.  But I was too hungry to really make anything of it.

When we got home, he told me to go to the bedroom, and he looked very anxious.  Then I knew.  After my eyes had scanned the keepsakes of all of our good times, painful times, and unremarkable normalcy (I think there were notes asking him to do dishes and the like), my heart was going to burst out of my chest as I turned around.  Nothing.  He was gone.

I looked down and he was on one knee.

I don’t remember anything after that.  I must have said yes, because he hugged me and was smiling.  After all that time together, who knew I could be surprised?

A year later, it has completely sunken in.  He was the one all along.  Through all my doubts and questions, I prayed, and my prayer for guidance had been answered, it just took a long time for me to see it.  Looking back, I not only see notes and pictures, I see that God had moved everyone else out of my path, had made everything necessary for us to be together fall into place.  He also softened my heart to the idea that I could need someone so much.  Fiance is more me than I am at times, and we are inseperable.  And this is okay, this is good.

I had many proposals, but Fiance listened and took away my excuses.  What made me say yes?  It was the formal one.