ring
The Little Red Haired Girl now has a ring. I keep protesting that we’re not “getting married,” we’re just having a wedding. If you think of marriage as some sort of governmentally or religiously sanctioned institution, that’s not what we’re doing. If you think of it as a commitment, we’ve been doing that for a while now. And plus, there’s still something heteronormative about calling it a marriage that makes me uncomfortable. Apparently though, buying a diamond ring and presenting it the night before Thanksgiving is not too heteronormative for me. Because I did it.
The weekend before Thanksgiving I was back in New England for some old college shenanigans, and while there Lady E. and I went ring shopping. I had always meant to go with Fierce n’ Fiery, but that’s just the way things shook out. I sort of decided a few days before going, Lady E. did some research on where to go, and we went. The weekend was so crazy that we pretty much squeezed ring shopping into the 3 hours we had between my landing at BOS and our driving to New Haven that night. Luckily we found exactly the right thing pretty much right away, and after shopping around some more to be sure, we went back and sealed the deal. The diamond was going to be set in a plain white gold band over the weekend, then mailed overnight to The Little Red Haired Girl’s dad’s office on Tuesday (the next day they were open).
On Wednesday The Little Red Haired Girl and I drove to her parents house, and I sat on my hands in a sweat until her dad came home with the package. I don’t know why I was nervous about it, it’s not like she was going to say “no;” we’ve already set a date and reserved a venue. At any rate, I was nervous, and didn’t wait very long after her dad arrived to drag her upstairs on some false pretense and present it to her. I don’t really remember what we said, except that she was really surprised and felt guilty that I’d bought it. (I think she’s over that now). There were tears and hugging, then she had to pee. Seriously. So finally her mom yells up, “What’s going on up there?!?!” and I had to answer that The Little Red Haired Girl was peeing. Very romantic. Then we went down, everyone oohed and aahed, we popped some bubbly, made some weepy toasts (ok, that might have just been me), and that was that.
It actually went way better than I’d hoped, and it was really sweet how helpful and supportive her parents were in the whole process. It felt weird to play it like it was some sort of engagement, when really it was just that I’d given her a gift. But it was nice to have everyone so happy for us, even though I already knew that they were because her mom was throwing us an engagement party on Saturday for all her hometown people. But that’s a whole other story.
