I was waiting in line to order a burrito when I sent my family a text message announcing my engagement. My sisters still find this bizarrely informal (they must’ve expected herald trumpets), but we were hungry and Crankenstein’s acceptance of the proposal had been a foregone conclusion. When we first discussed marriage, she made it clear she was a woman on a schedule and that she wanted me to be the one to propose. I was operating under a deadline.
My ex had called dibs on proposing in my previous long-term relationship; the only problem had been those pesky gay marriage bans, which prevented me from being a scandalous Norma Shearer-style divorcee by 2015, the year the Supreme Court narrowly decided to magnanimously extend gay people the same basic human rights as anyone else. Still, in premarital counseling I wasn’t sure how to respond when asked if this would be my first marriage. “Sort of” would’ve raised more questions than it answered, but I most certainly felt divorced.
The ring and its custom box had been procured months before the proposal, which would occur at one of Crankenstein’s favorite outdoor spots. Her legs are very long, while mine are nearly as short as a newborn baby’s, so I’m usually the one asking her to slow down in public. The morning of the proposal, it was the other way around. I was “booking it,” in her words, to our destination, while she wanted to stop and smell the flowers. If we weren’t quick, I knew my desired location would be claimed by someone else, and naturally that happened right as The Place came into view.
“What’s the hurry?” Crankenstein asked. Now there was a change of plans — I didn’t want to stray too far from The Place, on the off-chance the heterosexual couple who’d claimed it left. It seemed unlikely, based on the way the gangly man-half of the couple had made himself at home there, and our roles were finally reversed and it was Crankenstein who wanted to move along, so I began scouting a backup spot. It needed to be sufficiently private; neither of us wanted a public proposal. But every time the moment almost seemed right, I could hear another loud group approaching, and foot traffic would only pick up later in the day.
As Crankenstein snapped photos of the waterfalls and bridges in her favorite Japanese garden, I reached into my purse and retrieved the ring, opening its box and extending it toward her. When she turned around and saw it she began crying, staggering backwards in surprise and fanning her face with her hands for what seemed like five minutes. I hadn’t planned a soliloquy but intended to get down on one knee and string together a few coherent sentences before asking “Will you marry me?” Basic, no-frills stuff. Yet I hadn’t expected her to get so emotional — she’d put me on a schedule; hadn’t she known it was coming?! — and all that flew out the window as my mind went blank.
What came out instead was a dazed and slightly tortured “Do you want to do the thing?” And she did. Despite the lameness of the proposal, we left the garden engaged. “So that’s why you were walking so fast,” Crankenstein laughed afterward. After enjoying our burritos, we called her parents to tell them the news. “That’s nice,” her mother said tersely, still uncertain their religious authority would allow them to attend a same-sex wedding. (An engagement was already on their radar; we had announced our intentions during a visit months earlier.) The non-reaction left Crankenstein upset, but it was nothing new. We called the surrogate parents she’d acquired in medical school and they supplied what her birth parents couldn’t, cheering and crying and arranging a celebratory dinner.
In the weeks leading up to that day, I’d listened a lot to one song in particular: Raúl Esparza’s “Marry Me a Little,” from Stephen Sondheim’s Company. It is gorgeous, yes, but also very funny — Bobby’s ambivalent series of unrealistic, self-indulgent proposals betray a childish view of how life and relationships work. He wants the good, not the bad; the pleasure without the pain. Sondheim, of course, was rather fond of pain, and Bobby later movingly catalogs the risks of exposing your vulnerabilities and joining your life to another in “Being Alive.” (No matter how many times I hear it, I’m overcome when Esparza spits out “Mock me with praise.”) These two songs that exist independently of each other take on a deeper resonance together, which seemed more meaningful than ever as Crankenstein and I prepared “to do the thing.”