Perfect Moments: Martine McCuthcheon Can Keep Em

I don't know why, but I only ever seem to hear proposal stories that are perfect, fireworks in the sky, hearts in the sand gorgeousness.

Today I am going to tell you one that isn't.

Allow me to introduce you to Boy. Boy has been with Girl for about 12 months, and they are in love. So much so that Boy has developed an endearing habit of getting drunk and telling Girl how much he wants to marry her. Cute.

"I am going to marry you, little pretty yellow one!"

Fast foward to a year later. Boy has graduated to including all his friends and family in his boozy monologues about how much he wants to marry Girl. Now everybody knows. How sweet, says everyone! And sweet it is. Boy and Girl clearly adore each other. They are more in love than ever.

Zoom forward in time again. Three years of blissfully happy togetherness for Boy and Girl. Apart from one thing. Her best friend, his own family, NOBODY will shut up about the fact that they are going to get married. People are telling her exactly how he is going to propose, when he has going to do it... but the dates come and go, and the cirumstances pass with a ring-shaped hole. Girl wasn't even too bothered about weddings at all, until Boy brought it up.

But now she has become a teeny bit obsessed.  

Another 6 months go by. What should Girl do? It's been two and a half years of this. She can't even bear to hear the word wedding any more. She wants to punch Boy on the nose every time he mentions it. "Go forth and talk to him!" says Best Friend. "for he is just being a buffoon!"

So Girl sets up a romantic meal for two on New Years Day, the day after Boy's latest self-imposed proposal deadline. New Years Eve comes and goes, and yet again no bended knee, no question mark. They trudge all the way to the restaurant, tired, hungry and hung over, to find the whole building shut down and their booking cancelled. How do you like my luck? Thinks Girl, full of cold and gloom. So they go back home and, with a very dodgy takeaway curry on their knee, she says that if they really are going to get married, they'd better think about doing it soon.

Boy produces ring from his pocket. He had been walking round with it all week looking for the right moment.

And, at last, they are engaged. And although it wasn't a perfect, fireworks-in-the-sky, heart-in-the-sand proposal (in fact, it wasn't technically a proposal at all- a fact the very bratty Girl strops about for the next 24 hours until he makes her a ring out of garden wire and actually gets down on one knee) it still invokes the same rush of giddy euphoria, still ties their stomachs in knots with happiness, still makes them dizzy with excitement at spending the rest of their lives together in just the same way. And once they are married, they laugh about how silly they both were, and are, and how happy they are now. How a proposal story in which Boy worries himself into a hole about trying to make it perfect, while Girl gets her knickers in a twist waiting for him to get it together, is just how they are, and how they will still be even when they are old and grey.