Weddingbee Blog

Well, I guess I wouldn’t go as far as to call it bliss. Mr. D and I have had a lot of ups and downs. Back in college we spent a lot of time together. Mr. D was a junior and was two years older than me. We often spent time talking about football and watching games. Mr. D said jokingly that he even knew the exact moment he knew he loved me. It was when we were watching a Packers game and I got upset at a bad call from a referee. He said he was impressed that I even caught that it was bad call without someone who was really into football saying something. Of course, he quickly followed that up and said he loved more about me than just my deep love of football. He said he loved the way I snort when I laugh, the way that I dryly say certain things, and that I am super sarcastic. And after planning for a college experience without relationships, I was in love and suddenly in a pretty deep relationship with someone I definitely did not think was the kind of person I would fall for.

Mr. D and me having a deep conversation in his room with some friends in 2005

Mr. D and I are more different than cats and dogs. I am a Virgo. I plan things, I write lists, and I use a crap ton of Post-It notes. I like order and plans. I was a political science and pre-law major. I liked the order that the law held, and I liked how you could to some degree predict politics and how they work. Mr. D was a history major; he liked to learn about how things were and why they were. He was also a religion and philosophy minor, which meant he would take classes that were not so much about order but instead about discovering why things were the way they were. He is one of those people who likes to make spontaneous trips and do sporadic things. It definitely has caused some tension in our relationship. Couple that with the fact that I am bi-polar and we definitely had some hard times when I was figuring out my meds. But he stayed with it, and I stayed with it, and we fought for it.

Mr. D proposed my sophomore year before he graduated with his great-grandmother’s ring. It was beautiful and it was a sweet and short proposal. Since I had two more years of school, we were planning on getting married in the summer of 2008. The time we spent apart was hard, and I was that girl. The girl who called her fiance and visited him on weekends, missing stuff on campus. Then in my senior year, in November of 2007, I suffered a miscarriage and subsequently had a nervous breakdown, which ended with me withdrawing from school and moving in with Mr. D in his hometown. Mr. D still did not want to set a date, and with my fragile mental health, I was more dramatic and hard on him. Finally, sick of waiting, I broke off the engagement in December 2008, saying that I did not want to be engaged to someone who didn’t mean it. We co-existed in our apartment until April 2009, when I decided to go stay with my parents and reevaluate our relationship. We had been together four-and-a-half years, and he still wasn’t sure when he wanted to get married. He admitted that he had felt pressured by his parents to propose and that is why he had done so.

The ring that Mr. D originally proposed with

And just when I thought our relationship was going to be over, tragedy struck, and it changed absolutely everything about our relationship.