A Pretty Great Week
Real life romance-y stuff under the cut. Read at your own risk: the cute is a bit thick at times. :)
So, this is my boy:
His name is Chase, and we've been dating for a little more than three years now.
And it’s not that I’m a particularly competitive person, but oftentimes, situations of which I am a part tend to become competitions.
Case in point, the Gift Giving Competition. It has become tradition in my relationship to try and “win” gift-giving opportunities such as Christmas, birthdays, anniversaries. The Boy won Birthday 2010 by driving down to welcome me home from a long trip; I won Christmas 2012 with a handmade 2x4 of Proof (long story). It’s an ongoing thing that occasionally bleeds into other friendships as well, but mainly, it’s a constant between the two of us. Sometimes it’s obvious. But other times, it’s up for debate.
Consider Anniversary 2013. He found a rare volume of Norwegian folktales. I made an 8x10 Firefly/Serenity cross-stitch. Pretty much tied, in other words, but we both had a part two, waiting to be given until we could see each other in person for the first time in three months. On my end, it was a handmade 2x4 of Bear Fighting (same long story, different section). On his . . . well.
Our friend Meghan and I drove from Ohio to New York last Sunday. The Boy currently lives in the middle of the Catskills, and while it’s gorgeous, the end of the drive was horrendous. Unclear directions, snow, pitch-black removed from civilization mountainous roads to navigate, what should have been an eight-and-a-half hour drive turned into ten pretty quickly, and the last 90 minutes was spent literally covering about 15 miles, if that. It was awful and stressful and all I wanted to do was see my boy.
We finally got in at about 10:30 at night. I’d told him nine, and he’d been waiting by the gate of the camp where he works for a solid hour and a half. We followed him up the steep dirt roads of the path to his cabin, where Meghan would be staying, and I got out of the car and just clung to him for a long time, despite the fact that he was damp and cold from the rain/sleet. Didn’t matter, not one bit.
Now, I learned later that the plan for the evening, back when I was going to be getting in at 8:30 and it wasn’t going to be snowing, was to take a trip to the camp’s observatory. A stunning view of the night sky (I saw it later; it’s incredible out there) and champagne were to accompany his Anniversary Part 2. But the weather had screwed up both the arrival time and our ability to see the stars, and I was exhausted, so we just went to the camp’s lodge where we would be staying.
He told me he needed 90 seconds to get the room ready, which I thought was a little odd. So I sat in an armchair in the hallway, listening to him move around behind the door, hearing the unmistakeable sound of matches being lit.
And I thought, Don’t get your hopes up.
And I thought, Candles don’t mean anything.
And I thought, You and Meghan talked about this less than a week ago, and she said he refused to commit one way or the other.
But I also thought, He was really certain about winning Anniversary. As certain as he was about winning Christmas. And he was wrong about Christmas, but you did say that there was one surefire way he could win…Also, Meghan would totally have lied to your face about this if he’d asked her to.
When he let me into the room, there were candles everywhere, and a bottle of champagne on the table, and he was standing there, my thoroughly unmusical boyfriend, with a ukelele he had spent the last three months learning to play, just for me. And I knew what was coming.
He knelt before me, tried and failed to get the box out of his pocket in a way that was awkward and endearing and so thoroughly him and us, and asked me to marry him. He used my grandmother’s ring, and I barely let him get the question out before I said yes.
Firefly cross-stitch and the 2x4 of Bear Fighting go a long way. But ukelele playing and dried mango and a proposal? Yeah, I admitted defeat pretty quickly. He won.
… this time …
