So here are the details some of you have been asking for. For an inexcusably long time.
█████ and I have been seeing each other for about two and a quarter years now. It's always been exclusive; it was pretty much instant magnetism from the start, that night in December 1998 when we sat deconstructing our religious experiences until the wee hours of the morning, to the exclusion of all the vanished friends who had been sitting there in the bar with us earlier that evening.
█████'s been married before, and when we started going out she had just gotten out of a bad relationship with a fellow she had been seeing for four years and had lived with for six months or so. (They bought a beautiful East Village apartment together, and then he kicked her out, citing being in love with fucking someone else.) She understandably didn't want to see me if I were seeing anyone else at the same time. For my own part, I had recently gotten out from under a horrible two-year-plus long relationship, I was feeling pretty fragile and gunshy as well. I was seeing a German woman at the time, and I agonized about what to do. After wrestling with myself for a full night, I decided to stop seeing that German (who turned out later to have been having an affair with a married fellow at the time, and making cuts in her wrists on top of that), and it's been all █████ and me, all the time, ever since.
█████'s story at first was that she didn't ever want to get married again, but sometime late in 1999 that started to change. We'd gotten past the part where she worried that I was going to break her heart and where I worried that she was going to discover there was something wrong with me, and we started batting around the idea of cohabitation. A commitment in terms of marriage would have to precede that, she decided, much to her own surprise.
We've been batting around the idea ever since then, and I'd been unsuccessfully trying to put aside enough money to buy an engagement ring. Meanwhile, living in two different apartments had begun to be a real drag for both of us, since neither apartment was big enough or memory-free enough to house both of us, and since I was always lugging six tons of shit back and forth from one apartment to the other, and to work, and to karate class, and so forth (since I, being the one who lives in Brooklyn while both of us work in Manhattan, have the less convenient apartment).
So our plans have been getting more and more solid, little by little, and finally in January or so of this year we were starting to put together a real timetable for the wedding, the moving in, the honeymoon, and all that. We just weren't officially engaged. █████ didn't know whether or not she actually wanted an engagement ring—she thought she might want a wedding band that wouldn't exactly go well with a flashy accompanying ring—and that's pretty much the only word I was waiting for.
Well, █████ finally decided in mid-February that she didn't want an engagement ring. That meant there was no obstacle to my just proposing to her and getting ourselves engaged. I was trying to figure out what the best time and place would be to do it when, on Sunday, February 24, we stopped by our favorite Indian restaurant, Baluchi's, for some dinner. We were discussing our plans when █████ broke off and said, "You know, I don't feel like we can really be having this conversation when we aren't even engaged yet."
"So you want to wait until we're engaged to talk about this stuff?"
She sighed. "I feel a little like Lee Krasner here," she said.
We're both admirers of Jackson Pollock (she's a huge admirer), and we had just seen the Ed Harris film a few days earlier, so I knew exactly what she was talking about. She was talking about the scene where Krasner has to give Pollock an ultimatum to get him to marry her.
Hey, I only need to be hit on the head five or six times for something to get through to me. I took her hands across the table, looked into her eyes, and said, "█████ S—— C——, would you do me the extreme honor of becoming my wife?"
She said, "Yes. Yes, I would."
And we kind of raised ourselves half out of our seats and kissed across the table, and presto! we were engaged.
And you know what? I'm the happiest guy on earth! When I was a little kid, I used to lie in bed wondering if I would ever get married, and if I'd like my wife when I grew up and if she'd be smart and beautiful and fun. I was worried that none of those things would ever come to pass, but now it looks like they will. Can you believe it? Childhood dreams sometimes do come true!
Pinch me.
