It’s been a decade
A few weeks ago, we celebrated the ten year anniversary of my proposal to Deanna. (Yup, that’s something I track and celebrate… at least for big numbers like TEN)
Anyways, it was a great day. Naturally, we rewatched the video of the event a couple times. I managed to recruit friends and family from all kinds of corners of our life and turn a pier in Santa Barbara into a blitz restaurant.
Here are some notes & observations of the proposal, ten years after the moment…
1) To make a moment meaningful, make it FOR the person you’re celebrating
Sometimes it can get a little too tempting to create a moment around my own sense of what would be romantic or fun. I’ve made this mistake on dates more than once, but there was no way I was going to do that on our proposal.
It seems obvious, but make sure whatever you’re planning actually lines up with what your person finds meaningful!
For Deanna, I already knew that a proposal needed to have her family around. Maybe a few of her closest friends
The summer leading up to the proposal was actually full of fake-outs, most deliberately to throw her off my trail and keep the element of surprise alive for the real thing! We spent that summer in the Philippines, Thailand, Japan, Montana, and Lake Tahoe, so there was no shortage of opportunity for a proposal in any of those settings that would’ve been romantic… but it wouldn’t have been as meaningful for her, especially since I couldn’t get her people all out to those spots.
The reminder to make things FOR the person you’re celebrating continues to be important, as I’ve had more opportunities to celebrate different people… including three kids each with their own distinct tastes and personalities.
2) Build that Village
One of my favorite parts of rewatching the videos of that day is seeing the faces of so many people we love cast into different roles in that mock restaurant.
Her cousin was the greeter who seated us. My cousin and another friend took our order. One friend was the floral arranger who was really hiding cameras in the centerpieces. A couple other friends from school and church came to serenade us.
It was a remainder of the people we were fortunate to have in our lives in 2014, and the way community has always mattered to us.
At that point, we were only a couple years removed from college. It was where we met and the bulk of our friendships came from there. It was a really easy season in our life for making friends. In the ten years that have followed? It’s gotten much harder. Schedules busier. People’s lives whisking them in all sorts of directions.
But the importance of having community, of building that village, remains.
I’m thankful that the past 2-3 years have been more plentiful in that department. Sometimes you’ve gotta keep going until you find more people who also recognize the importance of having other people around, switching things up as needed to make it a priority.
3) Set yourself up to be proud of your younger self
I’m not going to lie, rewatching the video makes me proud of that moment. I’m proud of how everything came together for the whole experience. There were at least a handful of things that I did really, really right in my mid-twenties and so many of them came together on that pier.
I once had a friend say that he wanted to keep growing and getting wiser in life, so much so that in five years he’d only look back at his present-day self and laugh at the foolishness.
I love the growth mindset, but if it means drifting so far away from your present day self you have nothing left to do but to discard it, I dunno. Something about that seems off. Might as well get Jason Bourne’d every few years.
I prefer to think of growth as building on top of the foundational blocks you put down today. Of course you grow and evolve and change in many ways. But thinking that I’m building on-top-of today is a better motivator to doing my very best with it.
4) Crafting an experience is one way to show love
And I think it might be my favorite way.
I love taking my kids out on 1:1 mini-adventures with dad.
I’ve loved taking several friends on trips in recent years.
One of the things I love about improv, speaking, and performing is the aspect of creating an experience for the audience.
I think I place an extra strong emphasis on creating moments because in the end, it’s what we’re left with. Most gifts come apart with age, but our actual lives are a string of moments, and to be able to add an exceptionally good one, a memorable one, on someone else’s string seems like one of the best gifts.
Plus, I’m a big believer that life is a little too big of a gift to not want to free it from repetition and routine to remind us all of how incredible it is to even be here.
5) The Crappy Parts Fade
So there’s another part to the proposal, one that kind of sucks, and one that I often forget about. And I bet almost everyone else who was there doesn’t remember it until I bring it up.
I bought Deanna’s engagement ring as a set with a wedding band, and just after she said yes, I took out the box to show her the other part. Opening the box had the effect of thrusting the ring upwards and out of the box.
It fell onto the pier, spun around a few times, and right into a crack between planks.
There’s at least one gold ring down somewhere in the Pacific Ocean if anyone wants it.
When that happened, it felt like the easiest thing to shrug off. There was no way I was letting that bring down how good of a day it was. What’s a ring when held up against an entire future together? I thought of the spinning ring as comical, then shrugged it off for the rest of the day.
Of course I’m not thrilled about losing something that valuable to the ocean. But what can you do? Making the choice to not feed the disappointment with any oxygen was the right choice.
Also, we ended up getting a matching set from a quirky jeweler at an Oregon farmers’ market that we’ve been wearing the past decade. Seems more ‘us’ in the long run, anyhow.
I love having moments in the past that I can look back on and simply say, “yeah, wow. I’m really glad I did that.” And since my early-to-mid 20s were such an eventful time in my life, it feels like I’ve been commemorating a lot of those lately.
But the way you get there is to simply make the choice in the present to make the moment. Give your future self some gold to look back on. (Just not literal gold. That’s for the ocean.)