Weddingbee Blog

I’ve never been one to wear jewelry very often, so I never expected to say this. But I love my engagement ring. Really, truly, madly, deeply. However you want to say it.

There’s the emotional part—it symbolizes my relationship with Mr. Dew Drop, what it is now and what it will be. There’s the ooh, it’s so pretty part. There’s the it’s exactly what I would have picked out myself part.

Oh, wait. I did pick it out. Or, rather, Mr. DD and I picked it out together.

Is that really nontraditional of us?

People seem to just assume that Mr. DD picked it out himself. They also seem to assume that I had no idea I would be proposed to.

Am I just talking to the wrong people? Because I don’t think I would have even accepted Mr. DD’s proposal if I had been left out of the decision-making process.

Let me backtrack for a second.

Although it took five years for him to ask me out, Mr. DD and I knew really early on in our relationship that this was it, that we were going to get married.

This was completely shocking to me. I was 29 when we started dating. I had a demanding job, I owned my own home, and, well, sometimes I felt like I didn’t really want to settle down. Oh, I figured I would get married eventually. But, as I got older, eventually seemed to get further and further away.

And then one day I accepted a random dinner invitation and, bam, everything I thought that I thought about marriage all went out the window. I somehow felt more complete with Mr. DD than without him. This is a feeling I’m still getting used to.

What all this means, of course, is that Mr. DD and I definitely had to talk about marriage before the engagement could happen. It had more to do with my feelings about myself than about our relationship. I needed to know I was still going to be myself even if I needed someone else. After much discussion (um, okay, so it’s possible that I’ve been known to debate things to death), we decided to go ring shopping.

This brought about a whole new series of discussions about what sort of ring to get. Would we get a diamond or not? Would we get gold or platinum? How big would the stone be? What would the color, cut, and clarity of the stone be? How much were we comfortable spending on this ring? Did we want to buy something smaller now and upgrade later, or go with something a little larger now and never upgrade? And, really, did either of us have any idea why my fingers were so freakishly small?

Having these discussions made me feel like we were starting off our marriage, our partnership, on the right foot.

Besides, it’s a good thing we both really liked the ring. Because we seem to have gotten engaged twice.

{Cue the melodramatic old-timey movie music…}

Was picking out your engagement ring a joint decision?