I’ve never believed that real proposals are like the ones in the movies.  Raise your hand if Billy Idol helped your significant other propose to you. See? That like hardly ever happens.

It’s all about what fits you best as a couple.  Personally, I’m on the practical side.  My fiancé and I discussed it beforehand, came to a mutual decision, and agreed that we wanted to get married.  I wasn’t caught off-guard with crowds of strangers and loud megaphones like those viral videos you see these days—knowing that the question was coming was a mixture of anticipation and excitement, culminating in a night that was sweet and relaxed and perfect for us.

When my then-boyfriend popped the question to me, it had been a while in the making. I had already known him for ten years (hel-lo, middle school), and we had been dating for five. But we were (and are) young: so how did we know? How could I be sure he was good for me? How could he know that I would want to marry him? How certain were we that we would be compatible forever?

Seventeen-year-old me thought I would never get married. My parents finally ended their unhappy marriage in an angry, years-long divorce when I was 12. In the years that followed, my significant others in high school simply reinforced my belief that committed relationships were a melange of manipulation and selfishness—the behavior that I had seen in my dad for years.  To me, “compatibility” was a temporary mode: a person could fill a place in your heart for a little over a year and, when the laughing inevitably stopped, it was time to move on.

What changed my mind? Honestly, I have no clue.  I dated Mike for three years and realized at some point that I didn’t want to ever let him go.  Gradually, we started talking what the future held for us (a somewhat inevitable conversation, considering we were in college preparing for that future).  We planned our careers, talked about how we both loved our city, dreamed about vacations and whether either of us would ever be able to afford a house in the insanely expensive Silicon Valley.  And those conversations occasionally, jokingly, included one another.

Our joking continued for over a year—laughing about how our hypothetical children would be insanely smart but with horrible unibrows (from both of us), horrible teeth (from both of us), horrible eyesight (from me), and horrible scoliosis (from him).  Those poor things.

And then, at some point, I started wondering.  Graduation inched closer, and as a forward-thinker I had to know whether or not to plan to keep him in my life.  I decided I didn’t want to ever lose him, but guys get freaked out by commitment, right?  I broached the subject a few times (with all the subtlety of a bull in a china shop): “So, uh, I love you a lot and stuff.  Do you think we could, like, be happy forever?”  Somewhat infuriatingly, I couldn’t tell if Mike was catching my hint: his adorable, easy-going nature led to the ever-so-helpful responses such as “Of course, darling, I will love you forever!”  I had no idea if he was engaging in stereotypical romantic hyperbole, or if he actually was down with this whole marriage thing.

Today, I can’t recall exactly how I first introduced the M-word, but I do remember a period of a few months where I alternated between swells of blissful happiness and deflating dread that I was “pushing him” toward an engagement because “men are afraid of commitment” so obviously he’s just saying these wonderful things to “appease me.”  (I’m obviously neurotic.)  It only took Mike reassuring me approximately fifty thousand times before I started to believe that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with me.

These now-serious conversations sweetened into sappy heart-to-hearts and continued for almost a year, until the practical side of my brain just couldn’t take it anymore.  I pulled up Google Calendar and we blocked out a general plan: my graduation in spring 2012, a summer engagement, his fall graduation, next year’s wedding, some crappy entry-level jobs, living abroad in 2014, then coming home and getting real jobs.  It was getting real, you guys.

In the end, the plan didn’t work out.  Mike’s counselors had steered him wrong and he ended up taking summer courses in order to avoid delaying graduation: this caused a very stressful summer where he was too overloaded to plan a proposal.  In the meantime, I landed an actual, real job right off the bat, thus ruining our plans of living abroad anytime soon (oops).

After Mike finished school in fall 2012, I sat him down, opened up gCal, and we tried to plan our lives again.  The year abroad was put on indefinite hiatus, and the proposal was moved to the following spring so that Mike could focus on training at his new job.  But after waiting a couple months into 2013, I got impatient and finally just picked the day for him to propose: our five-year anniversary.

It was nothing like the movies.  While that’s perfect for some, it would have been all wrong for us.  We’re of a practical ilk, and that works well for us.  When the chosen day rolled around, I knowingly let Mike drag me around to all the spots that meant so much to us: cavorting around all day at the museum we love to visit, changing into fancy clothes at the hotel where we had stayed when I got home after my semester abroad, indulging in a champagne dinner at the restaurant from our third anniversary.

And when stage fright caused him to forget everything he had planned on saying, I laughed, wiped the tears from my eyes, said yes and kissed him.

Photo by Sara Slattery