I'm Engaged

This weekend, on my vacation, I proposed to my girlfriend of almost four years.  She tearfully accepted.

I cannot explain how happy I am to embark on this part of my life.  There is no doubt that the last several years of my life have been the best they have ever been and this is due in large part to her.  While it may not have happened as quickly as she would like, like all things of this magnitude, I think it is important to be absolutely sure.

While my proposal itself was relatively simple, it was months in the making.  You see, the most important thing about it was that it needed to be a surprise.  The problem was exacerbated because she picked out her own ring (shown above) and thus knew that the proposal was soon to follow.  Given the way my fiancee's mind works, she would always be expecting it given any thing special that we did.  So I have very purposefully made sure that we have gone places and NOT proposed, so she would stop expecting it.

Another tricky thing I had to do was to be sure that it seemed that everything we were doing was HER idea., not mine.  I needed her to go to a very specific place, the location of our first kiss, but I needed her to get us there.  So as we planned out our vacation I wanted her to choose to go to San Diego.  She wanted to go to all sorts of places, but I had to keep guiding her to go to San Diego.  She eventually decided that was where we should go, so I was halfway there.

The trickier part was to get her to want to recreate our first date.  I was not sure how to get her to do this, but she opened the door for me on our way down to San Diego.  She suggested that we go to restaurant On the Border, the location of our first dinner together.   From there, I just recreated our first date, taking her to where we played mini-golf and then the same bar where we had drinks afterward.  I took her to the exact spot where she dropped me off at my car that first night and where we shared our first kiss.  I had a whole speech planned out, most of it did not make it out of my mouth.  Although I'm a good speaker, it is hard to remember everything when you are nervous :)  I told her how this was the location of my happiest memory, and I hoped to make it hers too.  I pulled out the ring and proposed, and she happily accepted.

We do not have a date yet.  It will almost certainly be sometime in 2009 and it will be an event wedding.  We will of course keep people posted.