I'm With the Band

Alternative title: He Went to New York, and She Went to Jared

We've been searching for our wedding bands for a couple months, and a few weeks ago, each of us finally decided on the rings we were going to with, ordered them, and finally have them in hand!

You may remember my engagement ring: it's a vintage replica of a 1930's ring with a ton of personality and the little details that I just love (milgrain! scrolling! art deco!).  It was and still is the perfect ring for me, but when we started the hunt for a wedding band, I began to despair of ever finding a band to go with the contours of my ring.  I was looking for something that matched the style of my ring without overwhelming it; I was looking for a delicate wedding band. 

We looked everywhere: from local jewelers to national chains like Kay and Ben Bridge Jewelers, no one had what I was looking for. Pretty early on, I figured out that my band would need to be contoured to accommodate the curve of the center stone, so we focused our efforts only on bands that would fit, and struck out at nearly every store. 

On one hand, shopping for my band was easy.  "Do you have something like this?"  I would ask the sales people. "No," they replied.  Then we'd walk out.  Pressure to buy was just about zero.  But after being discouraged so many times, ring shopping wasn't fun anymore, and Mr. Goodlaff and I began to consider the custom ring route, going so far as to get a ballpark estimate for the ring I wanted.  It was a big ballpark: anywhere from $500 to $3000, depending on details and diamonds and whatnot.  There had to be a better way. 

"Snoop Bloggy Blog": Mr. Goodlaff Speaks Up

 A few weeks ago I was sitting on our couch, blogging my little heart out, when I had a crazy idea. "Mr. Goodlaff," I said. " You should write a guest blog post to share your point of view on this whole wedding business."

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 Starting Bell (Riiiiiing!)

All the planning, all the craziness, the spreadsheets of guest names and timelines and to-do’s, the color palettes, the dress hunting, the shoes(!), the menus and linens and so much more—it all started with a ring.

A few months before we got engaged, Mr. Goodlaff asked me to show him what I liked in the way of engagement rings.  He said that if “sometime way, way, way, way, way in the future" he decided to propose, he wanted it to be a surprise, which meant that he would be ring shopping all on his own and could use a little guidance.  Now, I, like most girls have given this a thought a time or two and I had definite ideas on what the ring should look like.

So, I showed him “the one”:

Source

*sigh* It still makes me go all gooey inside.