Wedding Wednesday: A Long Engagement

You saw the engagement announcement that Jon and I posted last month, and I admitted that he had actually proposed a week earlier, but unofficially we'd been talking about getting married for a few months.  As Jon's father explained in his champagne toast over Easter weekend, we had an "understanding."

In the lead-up to Christmas, my employer in London offered to sponsor me for my Tier 2 visa, which would have been necessary for me to stay in the UK past mid-June.  After some serious thought, I decided that it was not in my best personal or professional interest to recommit to my job past my then-current contract, which ended when my Tier 1 visa expired.  Jon and I had not taken the proper steps to prepare us to apply for an unmarried partners visa and we were not yet ready to get married, so we knew that I'd have to leave the UK in early summer.  We started discussing the logistical practicalities as well as the emotional nuances of being in a long-distance relationship, and that's when the possibility of eventually getting married was first mentioned.

When I formally gave notice at work in mid-February, my departure from London stopped being an abstract concept and became a concrete reality.  Our conversations about potentially taking our relationship to the next level, too, went from hypothetical to confirmed, and in early March we told our parents that we were going to be getting engaged.

Jon wanted to surprise me with a romantic proposal at the right moment - which, he promised, would happen before I flew back to DC.  For some reason I convinced myself that he would pop the question during my last weekend in the UK, while we were in Wales, so I didn't suspect a thing when he took me out for a lovely impromptu dinner at an upscale restaurant in Soho in early-May.  I didn't even blink when he refused to give his bag to the coat check girl - he told me later that he had been afraid that the ring might have fallen out without him noticing!

Happily, because I would have made a total fool of myself in public, he didn't propose at the restaurant.  After dinner, although I suggested we head to a nearby bar for drinks, he angled me towards home saying that he wanted some time to be just the two of us.  Still, I was clueless.  An hour or so later, as we were cuddling in bed, he turned away from me.  "I have a question to ask you," he said very seriously.  We had had a fight earlier in the week, so my first and only thought was "Oh, God, I hope I'm not about to be yelled at!"  He faced me again and said, "I love you very much, and - " but by then I had seen the little black box and I didn't hear anything else.  I screamed and cried and laughed and probably made a total mess of my face, and then I said yes and he slipped the ring over my finger.

We called our parents immediately to tell them the (now official) news, but held off on telling anyone else until the next day - we just wanted to be in our own bubble for that first night.  But here we are,  a month later, and the whole of the interweb knows!