This is old news, but I don't really get tired of announcing it: GR and I got engaged over the holidays(!). At the time, it was both a surprise and not-a-surprise. Romantics that we are, GR and I have been talking about marriage for a long while, and over the course of several discussions, we'd developed a rough timeline for when we wanted to spiritually and legally unite our lives. For various reasons, though, we abided tradition and left the proposal to him, leaving me in the dark as to when our official engagement would begin. A few days before Christmas I was still under the impression that we wouldn't be engaged for another several months, and so I was almost comically surprised by GR's proposal, which he had planned with a level of detail and subterfuge that I will never not find impressive.
I tend towards the cynical when it comes to the silly, expensive, gendered norms associated with weddings. This has become doubly apparent to me now that I'm skimming through bridal magazines and wedding websites and my dominant emotion is a sort of vague hostility. (Uplighting? Make-up trials? What is a trumpet-style dress? All of this is nonsense.) Even within the context of engagements -- a time when you shouldn't be mired in wedding drama, when you're really just kicking the whole thing off -- there are a lot of things I find frustrating or flawed: the obsession with diamonds despite their bloody mining history and artificial scarcity, the convention that men have the be the ones to propose, the expectation that proposals be surprising, etc.
That said, I've always loved engagement stories. They're fun. Any time there's a proposal, underneath all the silly trappings, there's a sweet narrative that doesn't change: two people agree to get married. I love the infinite variations of how that agreement is reached. Public or private, planned or spontaneous, spoken or written, alone or with family, extravagant or simple, practical or whimsical -- the story of a proposal can't avoid being adorable. Plus, engagement stories give you some insight into relationships; accumulated stories encourage you to keep broadening your understanding of how people choose to love and express their love to each other.
Engagements appeal to me, too, because they're sort of weird events. It's obvious why proposals are important to the couple at the center of it, but for your friends, family, and anyone else in the general public, all you're really doing when you announce an engagement is letting people know that you're planning on doing something in the future, which under normal circumstances should produce nothing more in the way of a response than a mildly interested, "Neat." (You don't, for example, throw a huge party or expect friends to gather in ecstatic anticipation or learn a choreographed dance routine to celebrate your intention to buy a house within a year or so.) At the same time, it's precisely that notion of intention that makes engagements special, equal to or perhaps surpassing the specialness of the wedding itself. A marriage, after all, is a lived agreement. The wedding is where everyone watches you make the promises binding you to that agreement. But the engagement is the moment when you first, freely and happily, make the agreement.
It's a sweet thing, and it's a sweet notion to hold on to as you move forward into planning a wedding and preparing for a marriage. You've already said yes; everything that comes next is living it out.
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