Weddingbee Blog

Equality is an important and abiding ideal in my life, and one that significantly affects my relationship with Mr. FW. See, as excited as I was about “getting engaged,” I harbored a lot of guilt about how traditionally one sided the whole process is. Even for couples who plan together for an engagement, the situation I’ve most frequently encountered is where one partner (for heterosexual couples, typically the man) sustains the entire cost of the engagement ring.

That just wasn’t going to work for us, so a big part of our engagement discussions revolved around fairness of costs. Eventually we were able to arrive at an arragement that felt financially equitable for both of us. Mr. FW had no interest in blingy jewelry, but he did want something else that was rather expensive—specifics to be revealed later, but semi-related to this picture:

{Name blurred to protect the innocent}

I gave him his engagement gift several months before I received my ring. But that still didn’t feel quite equitable enough to me. So I planned my own proposal to him! Without Mr. FW’s knowledge, I bought him a super cool “engagement” ring on Etsy…

Ring by MinterandRichterDes {Ordered in green}

…with the plan to carry it around with me at all times to ensure I’d have it on me when he proposed to me. Then I would casually whip out his ring and return the proposal. I arranged to have the ring delivered a full two months before the time I knew he would propose to me—plenty of time! Oh, what a lovely plan!

Unfortunately, because he surprised me so completely with my proposal, his ring arrived five days too late for me to propose to him on the same day. Boo…but I don’t think it mattered all that much because Mr. FW was surprised anyway. Five days after he proposed, he took the dogs down to the backyard for their last outing of the night.

{Not actually our yard, and taken several years ago—but you get the idea}

When he came upstairs, he found me waiting in the dark (scared him to death, I think!), on one knee and holding his ring. I expressed a bunch of heartfelt and meaningful sentiments with tears in my eyes. I’m pretty sure he promptly forgot all of it, but no matter. We hugged (again) and kissed (again) and felt all giddy (again) about being so “official.”

Here’s where I’d normally show you a picture of Mr. FW and me with his ring, but silly me ordered the wrong size and it wasn’t a good fit. After my proposal, Mr. FW got excited about the prospects of choosing his own engagement ring, so back to Etsy he went. The seller, Minter and Richter Designs, allowed us to exchange the ring and pay for the difference in cost between the old one and new one. Yay!

{He preferred blue.}

These rings take a LONG time to ship (longer than it took to custom design my ring—more on that later), and we didn’t receive it until eight weeks after the exchange. After such a long wait, there was finally a ring for each of us!

{Perched on Mr. FW’s Giants cap}

{Atop our lovingly hand-painted dog-treat jar}

{The “f*ck up jar,” into which we make frequent contributions}

{Elegant finial +lovely rings = breathtaking}

Would you ever consider a double proposal? Why or why not? Discuss…