Learning to Forget the Plan: The story of my engagement
This is Ryan, my fiancé. Two weeks ago, he proposed. It was perfect (well, not really, but we'll get to that). This story starts three years ago.
Rewind to when I was a sophomore in college and still working at Amstar, a local movie theater. The setting: outdoor box office, the enclosed glass box where two people were trapped for an eight hour shift selling tickets. The characters: me, a socially awkward young adult who is incapable of making new friends, and Ryan, a reserved guy who had never spoken a word to me in the months I'd worked at the theater—and, trust me, you had an opportunity to talk to just about everyone if you wanted to.
First impressions were not so kind to Ryan. He thought I was younger than my friend Mary, despite me having been in his sister's grade out of a class of only 100 people at the same high school he went to. He was also supposed to be training a new worker, whom we called Ferguson, and asked about when he was going to come in about every 2.5 seconds. So basically, I thought that Ryan desperately wanted to have another person in the room so he wouldn't have to talk to me.
But friendship with Ryan was easy. He's not very good at hiding how weird he is, so as we worked more shifts together and he was forced to talk to me, we became really comfortable around each other. We had inside jokes within weeks (including spending a whole box office shift asking people if they wanted tickets for made up movies where we replaced the name with what the movie was about [Fast and Furious became Cars and Guns, eg.), and we somehow became fake married while making a family tree for the theater. And as my friend Kayla once said, "You don't fake marry someone you don't like."
I noticed that Ryan would try to sit by me when we went as a group to see free movies, and he (okay, we) started switching shifts to work together. Once, while we were working concessions and totally not flirting, an old man looked Ryan in the eye and said, "Just ask her out already!" It was super awkward.
But Ryan, as always, took his sweet time, and spring turned into summer with no advances. We went on a canoeing trip with a group of Amstar friends, and for the first time, I admitted to my friend Mary that I really liked Ryan (sorry, Mary, for not listening to your sage advice to give it a few more months of being friends, but I promise he's not a rebound). Egged on by two of his best friends, Ryan finally took his chance by suggesting that we make up for a group game of tennis that he missed by us playing alone together, and nervously, I accepted.
I distinctly remember telling my mom that I was going to play tennis with Ryan and her saying, "Don't get your hopes up. He probably wants to be friends." (And Ryan's dad famously asked later when Ryan told him he had a girlfriend, "Are you sure she likes you that way?" Parental confidence took awhile to be established.)
That lunch at Smashburger was the most nervous I'd been in years. Neither of my previous relationships had ended particularly well for either party, and the only other date I'd been on had been accidental (it's a long story). Not to mention, it complicated things when hanging out alone with the guy you've liked for awhile wasn't even classified as a date.
But I survived, and by some miracle, the two of us socially awkward people managed to schedule another tennis (not a) date. That (not a) date ended with me being brave enough to use Ryan's stomach as a pillow while we looked at the stars because the court's lights kept going out, and even more inside jokes were born.
I don't remember it ever being a question that we were going to hang out at every free opportunity. I made excuses to see a movie I'd already seen twice with him. We went to brunch. We watched Tangled at his apartment, and his roommate took a picture of me and talked about us in the group chat. We took ridiculous pictures together even though I hate taking pictures of myself. It felt like I was hanging out with my best friend, not a guy I'd recently started an "office romance" with.
I had always pictured finding a soul mate like it is in the movies: two people hate each other, but secretly love each other, and must overcome two hours' worth of hardships before he finally proposes in the end. I expected it to be purposeful and driven. To take planning and difficulty. I did not expect it to be a go with the flow situation, where you find each other and click—and that's it. But there I was at midnight the night before Ryan was supposed to leave on a week long trip to move his sister to NYC, and some part of me knew even then that this easiness, this calm, was how it should be.
And that was the beginning of letting go of the plan: at 4 a.m. on August 4, 2015, in a parking lot, Ryan asked me officially to be his girlfriend. Even though we were both slap happy. Even though he was about to leave for a week the next morning. And it was perfectly imperfect.
It wasn't according to plan at all that I get a boyfriend the fall of my junior year of college. It had always been my dream to study abroad in England that year, and I wasn't about to give that up—but I also wasn't about to give up Ryan either. This is the period where Ryan's life motto revealed itself: "It'll all just work out. Don't worry." I cannot count the number of times he said that to me and the number of times I told him it wouldn't—that life didn't work that way, that you needed a clear cut plan in order to accomplish anything.
Here you go, Ryan: you were right (don't get ahead of yourself—you're right just this time).
Even though it wasn't my plan to tell my boyfriend of four or five months that I loved him (or be the first one to say the big three words either), I did, and I'm glad it happened that way. Even though it wasn't my plan to spend our six month anniversary or first Valentine's Day an ocean apart, it proved that we could survive time apart and make the most of it.
The next part of this tale is like the second book in a trilogy, where everything falls apart and everyone dies and you just want the third book to come already so the hero/heroine can save the day. My mom and stepdad got divorced, I had to move to Hamburg (no offense to anyone who lives in Hamburg), and I thought for a long time that I was going to lose my puppies in the process. It was a time of change, and I flat out hate change. I'm the type of person who has ordered the same meal at every restaurant in Lexington for the past twelve years. I. Hate. Change.
But in the midst of life-flipping-upside-down events, Ryan was my constant, and I will forever be grateful for that. There were times that I would knock on his apartment door and burst into tears without explanation, and he didn't even blink before stepping forward and wrapping me in a hug. There were definitely frustrating moments where he didn't understand what I was feeling and I couldn't express it well enough for him to empathize, but this was a period of learning and growth for everyone—and for anyone else who has experienced divorce or just had an unstable childhood, know that it takes work on both sides for effective communication about your baggage.
But that time also passed, and soon I had more good days than bad. Ryan and I fell into a rhythm, and I don't remember ever being so consistently happy in my life. I'd always been classified as a serious person, someone who didn't like joking around or playing pranks or skipping out on studying to do literally anything else (and my Asbury friends call the few years before I met Ryan "The Dark Times" because I was especially a joy to be around with my constant melancholy and dead man's humor), but Ryan has brought out that joyful part of me—the part that revels in telling bad puns, the part that laughs until my cheeks hurt, the part that foregoes studying to stay up late playing board games.
We then come to my favorite part of this story, the part that you knew was coming: the engagement. By the time this past fall rolled around, we knew this was it for us: we wanted to start our lives together as soon as possible. The only problem is that I wanted to go to grad school—and so did Ryan. We've always been each other's biggest supporters, so I knew neither of us were going to let the other give up on our dreams. Which meant we decided on a course of action that I never in my entire life planned on taking: a three-year long-distance engagement. I let go of the juvenile dreams I had of a year engagement spent immersed in wedding planning with friends and family in exchange for Skype calls and dress shopping over holidays. (Spoiler alert: It doesn't make a difference to me.)
Not only that, but Ryan had two months to buy the ring and propose before I leave for grad school in Minnesota, *and* I would be gone for three weeks of that already short time on a trip to Europe.
No part of this was going according to plan (sense a theme here?). At the end of my trip to Europe (t-minus three weeks to the last possible day he could propose), I got a text from my friend telling me that Ryan was freaking out because the ring wasn't going to be here on time. There were a lot of "I told you so's" to Ryan about proper planning and allowing time for unexpected obstacles, but he was confident it was all going to work out.
Fast forward to about a week after landing back in the USA, and Ryan asked me if I wanted to go hiking in Red River Gorge as one last hurrah before I move to the frigid north. As an intuitive person (and a girl), I knew. I also knew that if he hadn't proposed that day, I would have been very *upset.* But I played along with his plans, letting him choose the trail we would go on and pretending we would work on his PA applications that night.
The morning of Tuesday, July 11, Ryan picked me up to get my bridesmaid's dress for my friend Caroline's wedding altered, then we swung by his apartment to grab lunch before going hiking. As we pulled into the parking lot, Ryan zipped the car into a parking space, then bolted out of the door towards an idling FedEx truck, saying, "I think I have a package." In his hands was a large white shipping box. He said that he'd ordered some stuff, and there might also be a present in there for our two year anniversary, so I couldn't look at it.
Internal monologue: There is no way he would be so lackadaisical that he would have the ring delivered the afternoon he's going to propose. Plus, that box is way too big for a ring. And he does have a history of buying me random gifts.
Later, I discovered how lucky Ryan was: that FedEx box had contained my ring, and if we hadn't pulled into his apartment's parking lot at that moment (or earlier, I guess), he would have missed it entirely, as the delivery woman was in the truck, about to pull out, when we arrived.
As if the universe was giving me a sign, the episodes of How I Met Your Mother, my favorite tv show, where Ted gets married and Marshall and Lily get engaged were playing while we were eating lunch, and then we were off to the Gorge. He took me to the spot where we had our first official date, and despite us both being out of breath and pouring sweat, he still managed to get down on one knee. I didn't "black out"—I remember pretty much everything that he said (and most of it was joking/funny)—but I won't repeat it for one reason.
My entire life, I've been a fan of rom coms. I always thought that, like in the arc of those movies, the proposal was the pinnacle of life and the ultimate goal for a couple. I'd always thought I needed the perfectly orchestrated, planned-out-to-the-letter proposal with a hidden camera and heartfelt speech that would make me sob happy tears as the music swells. But the truth I realized as Ryan knelt on the dirt, saying a totally unprepared speech, with a ring that had arrived just a couple of hours before, was that it didn't matter to me. Ryan could have proposed to me on the couch while we watched Doctor Who, and I would have said yes just the same. Because no matter how unplanned and insane our lives have been, all I know is that in however many years at whatever venue in whatever dress, I want to say, "I do," and start the rest of our crazy, unplanned lives together.
If you want to read Ryan's side of the story (and you should because it's hilarious and his pictures are way more mean than mine), go here.
