The Sweetest Stories

You know I don’t particularly want one of my own, but I do like to collect proposal stories. The ways in which men, that wonderful gender not known for the ability to express themselves, choose to express love fascinates me. Some of course are better than others. For instance take my little brother. He found out my SIL was pregnant and pretty much said “So we should get married, huh?” It’s not really a great story. But then there are the good ones…

• A young man whose girlfriend’s friend told him his girlfriend’s “dream” proposal (it involved a long walk in Chicago and a visit to a small church garden). So he took her for that walk, but it was raining and she had a cold and she just wanted to go home. Then they got to the church garden and as they stood at the banister he told her loved (for the first time) and proposed.
• A friend who proposed to his girlfriend on HIS birthday, because she was all the gift he could ever want.
• A young man who wrote a poem, proposing to his girlfriend, split it into stanzas and wrote a clue to the next stanza on the back of each piece, and then hid them all savenger hunt style, with the last clue leading to him, on one knee, ring in hand.
• A young man who slipped the ring on his girlfriend’s hand during the fireworks and waited for her to notice so he could say it. Only to realize she hadn’t noticed at all because the fireworks completely distracted her.
• A friend who went on his evening constitutional with his girlfriend, a walk they had taken many times before, only to fake a loose shoelace in front of a bench. She sat down to wait for him, he knelt to tie his shoe and proposed instead.

I like these stories. You don’t need a lot of details. You don’t need to know what the people in the stories wore, or the exact words that were exchanged. All you need to know, is that here is a couple of people so in love that they’ve decided to spend the rest of their lives together. Maybe it’s because I can’t even imagine loving someone THAT much, that I don’t feel any need to ever have my own story, but it’s nice to know that people do still love each other. Every single one of the marriages that came about from those proposal stories has lasted to this day. With two exceptions- the first one is the story of a dear friend of mine who passed away a few years ago, married to the man who loved her enough to make her take a long, rainy walk when she had a cold, and the last one, the story of my friends who are getting married this summer. That last story, by the way, was shared with me not by my friend the bride-to-be, but by her husband-to-be as he and I walked by that very bench.
If you read this, and you have a story to share, I’d love it if you left your proposal story in my comments for my “collection”.