Guess what? He did! So, I present to you, Mr. Goodlaff:
When Miss Goodlaff and I talked about me doing a “guest blog”, I thought it would be easy. After all, I’m an educated guy, I have made presentations to the highest levels of management at every organization I’ve been at, and the reason this blog exists is because I asked her to marry me almost a year ago. However, when it came time to think of a topic to blog about, I drew a blank; not a blank because there’s nothing to talk about, but rather that there is so much to talk about. So I decided to make this like a free-form poem, I can ramble and do some stream of consciousness writing, and if people don’t like it, I can just tell them it’s because they don’t “get it”.
How We Met:
Miss Goodlaff has spelled this out in the post titled “The Lunch”, but there was one part that she forgot that still makes me laugh. After I had emailed her asking her out, and she had replied, hinting that we were being setup that day, let’s just say I was less than pleased but kept that to myself. As Houdini and I were walking out to the car to go to lunch, I turned to him and said “Do you want to drive over with Tally and Miss Goodlaff, or do you want to just meet them there?” The look on his face was priceless, he had no idea I knew we were being setup, and the tap dancing he did was magical.
My memories of that day are sparse but along the same lines as Miss Goodlaff. As she said, our first “date” after that was a lot easier as we had plenty to talk about – mostly how embarrassing our previous encounter was. Obviously everything ended up in a wonderful place, and it’s impossible to know if we would be here without the setup (I like to think we would), but it still was a pretty miserable day.
The Ring:
I believe Miss Goodlaff has posted about the ring and will soon post about how we got engaged, so I won’t add much to that. One of the best things we did relatively early on was talk about what she wanted in a ring, if that ever became a possibility. We sat down and looked through some Internet sites, including the place I eventually bought the ring, and she laid out what she was looking for. The purpose wasn’t to give me an exact ring, but more about general design/styles/etc. That way, when it did come time to propose, I didn’t have to guess what type or ring she wanted, or have to bring it up at a conspicuous time. I still have the drawing in my notebook of what her ring should look like, and I’ll probably hold onto it forever. The look of surprise on her face when I asked her to marry me more than made up for the awkward conversation and sneaking around I had to do to keep her from finding out.
The Wedding:
After we got engaged, I had a weird experience, but maybe it’s not really that different than from what other people go through. When I gave her the ring, I was asking her to marry me, and when she accepted, it meant we were engaged. For some reason, it took my brain a while to connect “engaged” to “getting married”, not because I didn’t understand, but more because they seem like two different states of mind. You can be engaged forever, but the logical conclusion of that is getting married.
We started our wedding planning very early on, something which was harder for me as a “spur of the moment” type of guy, and harder for her to understand my lack of urgency with her being such a planner. Within a few weeks of having proposed, we had a date picked, a venue booked and some of our vendors selected. In hindsight, it is very nice now not having to scramble to get these things at the last minute, but I recall, more than once, saying “we have more than a year to go, do we really need to do this now?” The dichotomy between our planning schedules is something that we will be dealing with for the rest of our lives; this was just the first manifestation of it.
I have never planned such a large event, so understanding the ins and outs of it has been enlightening. Number one, did you know that feeding 150 people is really expensive? I knew it would be expensive, but the number we got from the caterer was quite shocking. I offered an alternate plan that involved buckets of wings from KFC with some coleslaw, but that idea proved to be not well received. We have been very lucky with some of our vendors – a longtime friend of mine does beautiful wedding photography so we were able to work out a deal with her, but the overall cost of a wedding is sometimes hard to wrap my mind around. For the price of our wedding day, we could pay cash on a new car, and we’re having a fairly simple wedding.
Throughout all of the craziness that is going on, and all of the challenges that planning a wedding brings to light, what I keep reminding myself is that it is ultimately about us. I have found the girl that I want to spend the rest of my life with, the girl that I love going to sleep next to every night, the girl that has changed my life in so many ways that it’s impossible to put into words. I never thought I’d love someone as much as I love her, and I know that, no matter what issues we have on our wedding day – and there will be issues – the fact that we get to walk out of that hall as husband and wife is all that matters.
And there you have it--a small sample of Mr. Goodlaff's take on this whole wedding business. You can see why I'm marrying him, right?
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