I found these on my Home Page today…
So how did YOUR sweetie propose???
Food in the Nude
My fiance cooked me a wonderful Italian dinner while he was completely naked! He placed all the food on the table and I sat down to dig in. He then took my hands in his and proposed – in the nude! How could I say no?
– Raven, Ontario, CA
Burnin’ Up for Your Love
We went back to Zach’s place, and when he opened the door there was a trail of Hershey’s Kisses with lit votive candles on either side leading to the bathroom. Inside the shower were four dozen red roses, and a sign that read, ‘If I kiss the ground you walk on, and shower you with roses, will you marry me?’. Totally shocked, I turned around and he got down on one knee, pulled out the ring, and asked me to marry him. I said “yes!” and was all light-headed from the excitement. I leaned up against the counter to steady myself and caught on fire! One of the votive candles on the bathroom counter lit my skirt on fire! I kept the skirt with the huge burn-hole and we will remember that moment forever.
– Erin, Omaha, NE
Nothing quite so romantic in my case. My wife and I met at the age of 19, and immediately knew we were married. Not we should think about getting married…it was just sort of already in place. We just happened not to know about it until we met!
So, we rented a place, I finished school, and it went from there. Now it’s 33 years later, and better than ever. God I’m glad to have missed the dating thing!
We were in Ireland when my reasonable boyfriend was overcome with tears and unreasonable emotions. Over the course of a few days, we went from a difficult impasse to a glorious union. He was spooning me (that means we were lying down, with my back to his front, in an innocent embrace) in the honeymoon suite at Delphi (a hidden spa that we had discovered at exactly the right moment, completely by accident, somewhere in Connemara), when he asked quietly. After I said yes, he asked a few more times and laughed out loud with glee when the answer was the same each time. A few days later, back in America, he’d insisted on buying a ring, so we’d gone into NYC to the Diamond District and picked one out together. He asked me again in a cab, with dollar bills between his teeth, waiting to pay the driver. I think the first was much more romantic.
Here’s old time fiddler Tommy Jarrell’s proposal to his future wife.
‘Nina, we’ll get married if you want to, but,’ I says, ‘I’ll tell you right now, I make whiskey, I play poker, an’ I go to dances, I make music,’ an’ I says, ‘I don’t know whether I’ll ever quit that. But,’ I says ‘if you think we can get along, now, we’ll get married, an’ if you don’t think we can, right now’s the time to say somethin’ '. ‘Well,’ she says, ‘I believe we can get along all right’.
Well … the whole ‘how we met’ thing is a great and very romantic story overall, but he tells it much better …
… as for the proposal, it went something like this…
While camping on the banks of the Mississippi, we dined on Chicken Picata cooked over the campfire, drank a bottle of Rhubarb Wine, and after some deep talk and some amorous activity, we were cuddled together in the back of my truck… he says, in a calm but serious voice, “If I believed in the institution of marriage, I’d probably ask you…”… I replied, in similar tone, "If I believed in the institution of marriage, I’d probably say ‘yes’… " We both did a sort of slow double-take, and that was that … we were married as nearly immediately as the legal system allows, in the Judge’s chambers at the courthouse. 25th Anniversary this year, and still going strong.
Well, I was the kid across the street who played with his younger brothers. He was one of the rarely seen college age brothers. We met as adults when I was in college, at a neighbor’s Christmas Eve party. He spent the next year thinking “I can’t ask her out, I’m too old.” (35/21 at the time…)
Next year, Christmas Eve, same party, he was brave enough to talk to me for more than 5 minutes, but it took him until the end of January to ask me out. We went to a movie on Superbowl Sunday, 1983, and have been best friends ever since. Oh, proposals…? Not exactly. More of a negotiation over a casual bar food dinner. We picked the ring together, and he gave it to me in his pickup truck in the hardware store parking lot near the dumpster. We’ve done some more generally aesthetically pleasing things as well, (which would include our 4 children,) but that’s not the thread topic.
Now we’ve hit a chapter most folks don’t factor into the plan. His “expiration date” as he puts it, has been moved up, and I understand that the admonition to live one day at a time is much worth more than the dumb platitude status I used to give it.
My wife and I did (didn’t) do the same. We have been married 32 years. No rings involved either, with the exception of our sterling silver wedding rings that were made for us by a German/Hatian jeweler in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. They cost us 20 (1975) US dollars.
Mike
emm, you’re so subtle, I almost missed that. I don’t know what to
say, except that I hope y’all are indeed able to squeeze every drop
of living out of each day together.
Good stories but I’m partial to Em’s. It’s beautiful.
I didn’t ask I just sort of said we might as well. I was drunk and knew she’d be pissed so I figured throwing marriage in the mix would keep her off my case. Man was that ever dumb.
As for my proposal story, I don’t have one. 19 years ago yesterday, I made my then boyfriend chocolate chip cookies, put them into a shoebox, wrapped them up with a pretty bow, and gave them to him as his Valentine’s present. From that moment forward, it was assumed that I was going to marry him. Who else was going to keep him in chocolate chip cookies?
I was proposed to once, but it was illegal for us to get married anyway (anti-gay laws), so I didn’t say yes or no. I replied with something like “You know we can’t get married.” Not exactly romantic, but realistic.
I was only 18 so I doubt I would have said yes even if it were legal in our country.
My current situation is too crazy to even go into…
