Not Quite According to Plan

It was a very simple plan. Six weeks after Cheryl and I started seeing each other we figured that it was inevitable that we were going to marry each other; but we also figured that our friends and family members would think that we were absolutely out of our minds to announce that so soon. So the plan was that we would officially announce our engagement in July, on the first anniversary of our first date, and plan to get married a year later, as close to our second anniversary as possible.

That was the plan. But I was a little impatient. I knew she was going to marry me…actually, she had brought up the idea first…but I couldn’t tell anyone outside of a few trusted very close friends. I had to wait until July before I could announce to the world that I was going to marry this wonderful person…and that seemed like waiting forever.

Every now and then I’d look at her and say, “So…will you marry me?” and she’d smile and say “Not yet,” or “Yes, but you can’t tell anyone yet.” Both of those answers made me absolutely crazy. Like I said before, I knew what the deal was, but I wanted everyone else to know the deal too.

The months seemed to go by very slowly. December to January, January to February, February to March, and it was the same thing each time. I’d ask her, and she’d tell me that she couldn’t give me an official answer until July.

And then April came, and one evening, after watching TV together, I turned to Cheryl and said, “Marry me already.”

To my surprise, she said, “OK.”

“Really? Officially? You mean like this counts, and we can tell people?”

She smiled and said “Yes.”

Why am I telling you this? Because this week is the 25th anniversary of the day that Cheryl finally said that we could officially tell everyone what a lot of our friends had already figured out…that we had decided to get married.

What about the rest of the plan? Well that went just as we had laid it out in the first place; we got married on July 16th, 1988, just three days shy of our second anniversary.

And quite frankly, I think things have worked out just fine. And I’m still as thrilled to tell people about Cheryl now as I was then.