I’m Getting Married Next Year

I’m sitting in bed, recovering from a cold, with my fiancee’s tiny dog underneath my arm like a warm loaf of bread. It’s been a couple of years but I finally have a moment to give an update on my life.

So, I got engaged in early March 2024.

Before we got engaged, we once took a spur of the moment trip to Big Sur to just disconnect from work and take in some nature. I love going to the ocean to unwind because my grandfather loved to bike to the beach to fish on the pier. And she is obsessed with plants and forests so Big Sur was a natural destination.

There was one morning on that trip where we were sitting on a bench, eating a scone together, watching the grey waves crash on the shore where we could just feel that we were it. Everything we did was better together. The scone tasted better, the wind felt crisper, the trees felt greener, and we knew we wanted to live together forever.

Very soon after that, we both decided on the ring, the location, and the date. While I can be good with surprises, we both kind of knew that it would be better if we planned it together instead of leaving important details to chance.

But, since I’m good with surprises, I also secretly plotted with one of her older sisters to secretly have her family there on the day.

This took months of planning and nail biting but her sister did an amazing job of convincing her family to make the long-ass drive. Practically her whole immediate family agreed to come up, as well as my parents, for just that one day in the middle of a work week.

This also meant months of making sure that nobody let the secret slip which, for such a close family, was a miracle. There were a number of close calls, with the closest being part of her family arriving at the elephant seal beach while we were there. The entire time I was keeping an eye out and I spotted their van coming in as we were walking towards our car.

Luckily, I was able to distract her by pointing out some funny seals and her family spotted us in time to speedwalk to their van and peel out of the parking lot. She thought that was kinda weird but from there we headed back to the hotel for a nice dinner and looked forward to getting engaged the next day.

And then it rained, torrentially.

There’s basically no cell signal so I had to arrange a very specific spot and time where the proposal had to take place. I had some communication with iMessages with a nephew with the hotel wifi but it was so slow that photos took forever to send and messages were hit or miss.

So our poor parents had to stand in the rain for about half an hour. Her mom had just recovered from a stroke, my dad was on dialysis and basically living in a clean room, and my mom’s shoes were sinking into the mud. The amount of time they had to wait increases with every retelling of the story.

At first we tried to wait and see if the rain would die down but every minute after the hard start time I had arranged meant another minute our parents and family had to spend in hurricane-like winds and rain near a cliff. I was terrified that she would just want to postpone it to the evening.

But eventually we just decided, fuck it, we’re getting engaged.

So we grabbed our umbrellas, huddled together, and started trudging through the rain to our spot.

To give some geography, we have to walk through a tiny cluster of big trees to reach a cliff that overlooks the shoreline of Big Sur. And as we approached the trees, she started to notice a mass of umbrellas looking out towards the shore. Afterwards, she told me that she was worried that a tour group or something had parked on the cliff and would get in our way.

But the closer we walked, she slowly realized that every umbrella was carried by someone from our family. They all drove for four hours, with some of them arriving the day before and booking a hotel room and others driving out at dawn to arrive on time. And they all stood in sideways-blasting shoreline rain for an hour because they loved us.

I have never felt happier in my life than watching that look of surprise grow on her face.

I cut my speech a little short but I will never forget the look on her face as I kneeled down in the mud, on a cliff over the ocean, to propose to her.

“I see more colors thanks to you, music sounds clearer, food tastes better, and the world feels so much more beautiful with you living in it.” was part of my proposal.

Now we’re seriously starting the process of scoping out venues but we’re fairly sure it’s going to be a small elopement. We’ve seen a couple of beautiful courthouses and city halls but I think we both would love to go back to Big Sur and do it all over again.