The Proposal
OK, so let me set the picture for you…
It’s a beautiful warm summer’s day in rural Staffordshire, Liz and I are on our first weekend off together for 6 weeks and we’re sat in the garden of a spa retreat with a couple of ice cold beers waiting for lunch to arrive, and then it happened, 2 simple sentences that would ensure that the next 12 months were going to be some of the most complicated of my life…
After over 14 years together I never thought I’d hear the words “I can see us having our Wedding Reception here” coming from Liz’s lips, especially out of the blue like this, but there they were all the same. I admit that it took a few seconds for me to register what she’d just said and the romantic “eh?” I replied with may not have been the response she’d expected. “I can see us having our Wedding Reception here” she repeated (probably looking for a bit more from me by way of a response this time) “shall we go and have a look around the venue?” was as much as I could muster, so after lunch off we went to have a look at the separate venue. I admit it was absolutely stunning and everything we were both looking for, so after a brief enquiry about the dates that were available the following year we pencilled in a date with the Wedding Coordinator and went shopping to look for an engagement ring.
So that was it, done, no huge romantic gestures, no white doves, no ring on the top of the Empire State Building (that in hindsight may have been an option since we were there in January 2011)… we were engaged to be married, and just 2 questions remained:
- How do we tell Liz’s parents?
- How do we tell my parents?
The Ring
I cannot be the first fella to be confused by the amount of jewellery that is out there that looks the same but is very different in costs! Over the following weekend I learnt words that I never imagined that I’d need relating to precious stones and metals, and in true style the ring Liz picked out was one we saw in the 2nd shop we visited that Saturday! So there it was, the date had been set, the venue agreed on and the ring had been bought, we just had to wait for a week until Liz’s parents were back from their holidays before we could tell anyone…
The Reactions
It had been a week since Liz and I had “officially” got engaged and the only other person that knew was Ruby (our dog)! So here we were in our dining room on a Saturday evening, we’d invited Liz’s parents and brother round for dinner with an ulterior motive… The reaction from both sets of parents was great, after us being together for so long it was pretty clear that nobody was expecting us to get round to actually getting married and certainly not getting engaged on a random Saturday afternoon just because it was a good time to do it.
