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Oh yeah one more thing...

May 18, 2005 at 07:18 PM
Christina and I in front of Tiffanys

I conveniently left out one tidbit from my long story about our trip to New York...

Christina and I are officially engaged.

I've been writing this post since I finished that one
I planned the whole thing about a month in advance, quite an accomplishment if I do say so myself. I had been thinking about proposing for a while and once Christina and I made plans to take a vacation to New York City I figured that would be a perfect time. I'm not the most spontaneously romantic guy, so if I had made some sort of elaborate plans here in Dallas it would have been a dead give away. So I made reservations for dinner for one of the nights while in NYC and started trying to find other things to do that night.

I looked on the Internet for a ring for a while before deciding that Tiffany's made everything else look like crap. I went to the Tiffany's in the Galleria acouple of times to see what I was in for. Women are entirely too freaking expensive, I can't believe how much a tiny little rock costs. I decided she was worth it (maybe) and picked out the perfect ring for her. Now I had to hide it and keep it secret from her for almost a month. Tough to do considering how nosey Christina is. She never came close to finding the ring, but there was one scare. Since I bought it so early, Tiffany's kept sending me crap to do with the ring. First was the certificate detailing the quality and cut that came after about a week, I hid it away with the ring. Then came the financing papers, which I opened, looked through, and hid. Or so I thought. Stupid Tiffany's secured their envelope by printing Tiffany and Co. all over the inside and I accidentally left a scrap sitting on the desk. Of course she found it, but I was able to convince her it was from some junk mail they had sent.

The original plan was to propose on the observation deck of the Empire State Building after a nice dinner and a romantic walk around Rockefeller Center. But of course that didn't work out as planned. The weather was wet and dreary the entire time we were in New York, including that night. So no Empire State Building and onto Plan B. I thought about doing it at dinner, but it was so quiet and private in there I thought it would be too awkward. Plus I came up with the idea of taking a horse-drawn carriage and proposing then. Christina had no idea about my plans, so when I mentioned taking a carriage ride she was strongly against it. She's not exactly a horse person. She even made a joke about not wanting to ride one unless I was planning to propose. I had just about given up when we saw a carriage dropping off another couple, but in the five seconds it took to convince Christina another couple stepped in and started talking with the driver. It wasn't going to happen that night.

Plan C was the same as Plan A. I thought I'd try again the next day at the Empire State idea, but the weather was crappy again. I took the ring with me to dinner and the comedy club, but the opportunity never presented itself. We had a good time but it wasn't exactly romantic.

On to Plan D, the only problem was there was no Plan D. I was frustrated and out of ideas. We had a busy day of touristy stuff planned so unless I wanted to propose on a boat or in Chinatown I wasn't sure what to do. Somehow we ended up on Fifth Avenue and after going into a couple of stores stumbled onto Tiffany and Co. and of course Christina wanted to go in. As of that moment I still had no plans.

So we're inside Tiffany's and looking around at the engagement rings with diamonds as big as a fist and Christina is pointing out which one she likes and doesn't. She then decides she wants to try one one to see how it looks, but I guess we didn't look important enough because no one would help us. At this point my brain starts running through all my proposal options for the next two days to figure out whether now is the time.

The ring

Is it lame? Are there too many people around? She just saw that giant four carat sucker, will the ring I bought look too small in comparison? All this goes on within about five seconds and suddenly I get down on one knee, pull the ring out and say, Here's a ring you can try on. Then I'm pretty sure I managed to mumble something along the lines of I love you so much, will you marry me? Who knows what actually came out of my mouth.

Christina was completely speechless. She pulled me up from the ground and held me, mumbling something that was not the word Yes. She was sort of crying but more just looking at me to try to figure out if I was joking. She was pretty out of it, I think it was a good fifteen minutes or so before she said anything coherent. I did manage to get her to actually say she would marry me during that time, but I'm not sure how well it would hold up in court.

I don't know how romantic it was but I think it all ended up pretty well. All my best laid plans fell through and I actually managed to do something spontaneous and sweet. We don't really know yet too much but we're already planning things. We're probably looking at a September 2006 wedding (that won't interfere with UT's football schedule) here in Dallas, but otherwise we're not sure. I'll keep you informed.

I've been writing this for at least a week and I had to wait till we told both sets of parents in person, but Christina wrote up her side of things the day we got back over on our new website for the wedding. If you're interested in the planning of the wedding and all sorts of mushy stuff from Christina, head over to christinaand.brianbehrend.com and check it out.

Posted in Personal | 8 Comments | Add yours

Comments and TrackBacks

1 Christina said...

I sure would've liked to have that 4 carat sucker. That thing was blinging. I was against going on the horse-drawn carriage, because it smelled like horse-crap. Work is has been too stressful. I'll make a better comment later.

Posted on May 20, 2005 at 10:38 AM

2 actionBERG said...

it is a sad, sad day when you find out about such things on a blog.

Posted on May 20, 2005 at 10:57 AM

3 actionBERG said...

oh yeah, congratulations!

Posted on May 20, 2005 at 10:58 AM

4 Christina said...

I agree it's sad. You need to tell the rest of your family. They will be pissed off if you don't tell them personally.

Posted on May 20, 2005 at 01:19 PM

5 Christina said...

You're lucky I never checked the mail. Otherwise I would've seen the stuff Tiffany mailed you.

Posted on May 20, 2005 at 04:15 PM

6 Jess said...

Yay! :D
Congratulations to both of you!

Posted on May 22, 2005 at 04:26 PM

7 Anon said...

Sounds like the perfect engagement story to me... wanna marry me instead?

Posted on October 30, 2005 at 01:40 PM

8 aaronbragg said...

dork

Posted on January 24, 2006 at 04:50 PM