My parents are an odd pair. After 30 years together (Happy Anniversary, Folks!!!), they are still madly in love. All through elementary school and on into high school, I just didn't understand why my friends' parents were always getting dvorces, it just didn't seem plausible to me that parents could split up because mine are so gorgeously symbiotic.
Their relationship pre-marriage was a rocky one, with absurd fights (like when my mother fell asleep and my father finished her ice cream) and strange events (like a cognitive dissonance party where nothing was what it seemed), and their engagement story, since that's the point of this whole wiki, is so characteristic of that relationship and of them.
One their first vacation together, a trip to Montreal, my parents went out, on what I think was their last night, to a fancy French restaurant. My father planned to offer a traditional proposal to my mother, one knee, diamond ring, champagne, chocolate dessert. In order to do this, he ordered for her, and she flipped out. They fought throughout the dinner about how my father could disempower my mother and disrespect women enough to do something so condescending and patriarchal (actually, I don't know what she said, my father tells this story better than she does, becase he exaggerates immensely), and finally, they stormed out of the restaurant. On this dark Montreal street, my father tosses out the biggest insult: "And to think I was going to ask you to marry me!" To which my mother promptly replied "yes!"
Comments (2)
Anonymous said
at 4:50 pm on Apr 12, 2006
There are a few significant (at least to me) errors in my daughter's version of the tale:
It wasn't a fancy restaurant.
There was no ring involved at the time (my diamond was a Christmas gift after 7 years of marriage).
I can't imagine you-know-who (I don't think he's picked a code name yet) would have gone down on one knee in a restaurant, although he has no problem embarassing ME in a restaurant. (Why do you kids think we always have birthday cakes at home?)
And, most important, that's NOT what the squabble was about. It was hardly a major fight, just enough of a tiff to ruin a romantic mood, the only two people who need to know what it was about were there at the time.
Anonymous said
at 8:00 pm on Apr 13, 2006
Let me make one thing perfectly clear, I do not exaggerate arbitrarily. I exaggerate to embellish otherwise boring stories. Intimidating exaggerates with wild abandon as well as much more frequently than I.
HerMom is absolutely correct that I would not then nor now get down on one knee to propose in a restaurant or anywhere else, that is unless I felt that the embarassment level in her were so high that I couldn't resist.
As to the restaurant it was French, and therefore in my mind fancy. The fight was about whether couples should maintain individual bank accounts. She won. We kept separate checking accounts and paid "our share" of bills for the first several years of our marriage. As you might imagine it was a very complicated way to live. Once I proved able to support my self (tongue very firmly in cheek), we went to a single checking account.
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