Today is the 32nd anniversary of the day I asked Bridget to marry me. It was not exactly a perfectly executed plan. Today's dip into the writing archives explains what happened. I originally posted this about 15 years ago.
Improvised Proposal
My marriage proposal to Bridget
didn’t go exactly as planned. My buddy Dave and I had an elaborate scheme
planned. We bought rings for our respective girlfriends together, and we
planned to unveil them simultaneously on New Years Eve as the clock struck
Midnight.
But I made a fatal
mistake. I told some of my friends at work about my plan, including my boss. I
don’t know why I told him–I guess I just couldn’t contain my excitement. Plus,
even though Bridget worked in the same office, I figured there was an unwritten
code about ruining a surprise of this magnitude.
I was wrong.
The boss told her all
about it.
I still have no idea why
he would do such a thing, but he did. I’m just happy he did it in front of
someone else, because that other person told me the secret had been
revealed. If not for this friendly onlooker, my once-in-a-lifetime opportunity
would have become a ho-hum-I-knew-it-was-coming moment.
I decided immediately to
scrap the plan.
The first thing I had to
do was come up with an alternate date and time. Should I wait until after New
Years Eve (which would have crushed Bridget because now she was expecting it),
or should I do it before New Years? That seemed like an easy choice, except for
one thing. I was only going to see Bridget one more time before New Years
Eve–and it was that very night.
“Very well, then.
Tonight it is.”
Without much time to
plan, and that night’s arrangements already made (dinner at a neighborhood
Chinese restaurant), I really had to get creative. My brainstorm was to propose
via fortune cookie. I typed “WILL YOU MARRY ME?” on a tiny scrap of paper about
the size of a typical fortune before I left the office, and then as soon as we
got to the restaurant, I pretended to go to the bathroom. I circled around to
the other side of the restaurant instead, found my waiter, and asked him to
insert the note inside a fortune cookie for me before he brought it out to the
table.
“I can’t do that,” he
said.
“Why not?”
“They come pre-wrapped,”
he pointed out.
Now what?
As dinner was ending I
still didn’t have a plan. I was considering scrapping the whole thing until
after News Years, but when the waiter brought us the fortune cookies, I decided
to go for it right then and there. I opened my cookie while she wasn’t paying
attention, and slyly made the switch with my little pre-typed fortune.
“What does your say?”
she asked me.
“I’m not sure what this
means,” I said. I looked at it like it was written in Chinese.
“Let me see it,” she
said.
I handed it to her and
she stared at it for about three seconds before looking up. I thought she was
going to pass out when we met eyes.
“Is this what I think it
is?” she asked.
I nodded, and put the
ring box on the table.
She started crying even
before she opened the box. It looked like happy tears, but I wasn’t 100% sure.
I do remember one thing very clearly about that moment. It took her forever to
give me an actual answer. I don’t think she ever actually said the word yes,
she just nodded through her tears.
It really was a great
moment. It ended up being even better than it would have been had I gone
through with the original plan. But while I was thinking about that original
plan, I remembered that I hadn’t yet told Dave.
When I called him, he
wasn’t pleased.
“What am I supposed to
do now?” he asked.
“You can still do it on
New Years Eve,” I said.
“No way,” he spat. He
was ticked. “Now it just looks like I’m copying you.”
“What was I supposed to
do?” I asked.
“You could have waited
until after New Years,” he said.
Before I could explain
my thought process to him, he swore at me, and hung up the phone.
Needless to say, Dave
didn’t propose on New Years Eve. Despite already having the ring, he also
didn’t propose on Valentine’s Day. He didn’t propose in March. He didn’t
propose in April, and he didn’t propose in May.
He didn’t propose until
late June, and he was still mad at me when he told me the news.
I guess he eventually
forgave me because he asked me to be his best man.
But if you ask him about
it even today, he’ll tell you that he was the first groom in history that had
to settle for an “OK man.”
