A Year Ago Today

September 28, 2011

I was working at a job that I HATED, feeling sorry for myself.  I had been dating the most amazing guy in the world for almost 7 years and we still weren't married.  At the age 24, I felt like my life should have been going very different from how it was actually happening.  I expected great things to just fall into my lap when I got home from my 18 month church mission just a few months earlier.  No such luck!  Since I still lived with my parents, when they moved almost an hour away, I had to go with them.  That meant that I would be that much further from my boyfriend.  I felt like our relationship was falling apart because I was ready to tie the knot and he still had his concerns.

So, it was a Wednesday, not my favorite day of the week, and he asked me to come over to his Mom's house (where he lived) and have dinner with him and spend the evening.  I really didn't feel like going all the way down there but he begged me to go.  So after work, I headed down to his house and this is what happened.

He brought dinner from Applebees (where we went on our first date 6 ½ years ago) and we ate it outside on the deck.  I got upset with him while we were eating dinner because I was asking him if we were ever going to get engaged.  I was getting impatient with waiting for him to ask me and all he kept telling me was "soon".  Not what I wanted to hear but he did his best to make me feel better about it and told me he had a surprise for me outside.

It was a beautiful evening so he had a hammock set up in the backyard with his laptop so we could watch a movie.  He had even set up tiki torches around the hammock.  It was really pretty.  Once the sun went down, we started watching“The Notebook”.

A funny thing about us watching "The Notebook" is that I always considered it like our life story.  We started dating when I was 17.  There was a long period of time where we couldn't be together when I was away on my mission.  Anyways, he had suggested that we watch "The Notebook" but I didn't feel like a chick flick because I was just feeling very depressed that day about us.  He also made the same "presentation" that I describe next with "Lord of the Rings" just in case.

About 5 minutes into the movie, the laptop screen went blank. He said that he must have forgotten to charge the laptop so he went over to the case and was rummaging around in it. I thought maybe he had a battery pack or something but I wasn’t sure. Then a slideshow of pictures of us and music came on the screen. I immediately knew what was going on because he had this huge smile on his face. He came over to me, knelt down, told me he loved me and asked me to marry him.

I burst into tears, not even really looking at the ring, and jumped up and hugged him. Of course, I said yes! Absolutely the best day of my life.