Just So Typical!

Kirk and I have been best friends since I was 19 years old. I'm 35 now. We've dated off and on since I was 20...and lived together during those 15 years. Since becoming engaged I've heard comments like "see? It pays to be patient." or "It's about time" alluding to the assumption that Kirk has been taking his time to get to the altar. I don't know why everyone assumed that he was the one who wasn't ready. Maybe it's because he's a man. They'd be wrong.

But Kirk's a gentleman in many unspoken ways. He took all the assumtions and never corrected anyone. He never wanted anyone to look at me as though I was defective or pressure me into rushing into this decision. He just waited for me...ever patient. Just like he was back in the beginning of our relationship. Back then he waited to ask me out, knowing I wasn't ready.

How did we finally come to be engaged? It's funny, really. We'd been talking about it quite a bit lately. That was his cue that I was finally ready to get serious about being married. Knowing me the way he does, he knew that although it may take time for me to come to the decision to get married, once I got there it's all full steam ahead.

So we started talking marriage and figuring out that we both wanted to go back home to Chicago to get married. We're both big family people and wanted them to be able to be a part of one of the biggest events of our lives. We started talking dates and savings even before we got engaged. We were working on calculating our finances to see what we could afford.

We looked at rings, separately and together. When he remembered that women get two rings, he cracked me up by saying that men get gypped. Where they get one ring that's usually not overly expensive, women get two! And neither one is cheap if the man is doing his job right or going by the salary to ring ratio they give you.

So I saw this pinky ring. It had playing cards on the front and it was diamond encrusted. His name was written all over it. So I thought I'd do something cool for him and buy it as an engagement gift and set it aside to give to him wheneveer he decided to propose. I hid it from him in a place I knew he wouldn't find it.But like all good plans, things went awry!

Kirk was one of those kids that caused his mom to hide his Christmas presents at the neighbor's house because he had an uncanny knack of finding them early and getting into them. I should've remembered that. So when I came home on Saturday, June 7th and found out that he'd managed to find the ring I'd bought him, I was upset.

I grabbed the ring from it's hiding space and threw the box at him (being a former athlete, he caught it) and told him that since he already knew about it, he might as well just have it. He couldn't understand why I was upset at first. I told him that he wasn't supposed to receive that ring until after I'd gotten mine. He reminded me that we'd never done anything traditionally, but it didn't change how I felt. And the more I kept thinking about it, the more disgruntled I became. I started to get upset, thinking that maybe our marriage talk was premature. Maybe he hadn't asked because he wasn't ready. Maybe I'd misread things and pushed him into telling his family that we were planning on getting married.

When I voiced it out loud, he just looked at me like I was crazy and said, "Babe, I know you can be pushy, but you know as well as I do that even you can't make me do anything I don't want to do."He was right. It's part of what I love about him. So I sat down on the couch and tried to calm down. He walked into the bedroom, then called me in there. The way my day was going, I figured that my dog had eaten or chewed through something again. So I walked into the room asking, "What did Izzy eat now?"I looked around for the damage when he dropped to his knee and asked me to marry him, ring in hand. How could I resist? I said yes.

And it was a typical "us" moment. He was waiting for the right moment. He wanted to make a grand gesture, but I blew that! He'd had the ring and was scheming to create a romantic scenario. It didn't happen that way because when he saw me get upset, he wanted me to know how much he loved me and that I wasn't pushing him at all. And to me, the bickering, the comedy....that was perfect.