July 2015
One year and six months till the wedding
Let the Games Begin...
It has been exactly one month since my boyfriend got down on one knee and asked me to marry him. We have been together for almost four years and in the straight world, that’s about the time the talk of marriage goes from being the cute pipe dream to the massive elephant in the room.
But I am a gay man and up until recently, we have had the golden hall pass of relationships. No pressure from anyone to get married and no biological clock ticking, pushing us to have kids by a certain age.
But here we are, the gay wedding doors have come bursting open and gay men and women are getting engaged left and right. The passing of marriage equality into law not only was the happiest moment in the world for us, but it also served as the unofficial notice that the glitter rainbow elephant will now be joining us for Sunday Brunch.
For many gay couples in relationships, this will put a new direction on your long term goals. For many of you dating, you now get to add the lovely question of “Do you ever want to get married?” to your arsenal of awkward first date questions.
(*PS, I hope none of you are asking questions about marriage on your first date.)
But back to being engaged.
What a wonderful feeling! It’s exactly how they describe it to you. The moment that catches you off guard, the tears, the celebration and the excitement.
The day of the engagement I must of told the story of “how it happened” a thousand times.
No, literally, a thousand times.
It actually got to a point where I found myself shortening it for a few people. You know, like the Cliff Notes version.Thankfully for me, I am a blogger and my immediate reaction was to write it all down. So I made a quick blog to fill everyone in on all the details. (click here to read)
In my opinion, women will get more excited about the story and can tell it till they are blue in the face, and I am like “read my blog post.”
Is that bad?
This reaction makes me feel like I should be shaving my non-existent beard with a switchblade while I chug a bottle of whiskey. So butch of me.
As I began to share the enagegment news I noticed a certain anxiety come over me. With every person I spoke with, came a tidal wave of questions I was not prepared for.
Questions like:
“When’s the wedding?” “What’s your theme going to be?” and “Do you have a wedding planner?”
I felt like I was having an out of body experience. How was I supposed to know all these answers to something I JUST started to plan a few days ago?
I imagine this is what a pregnant woman feels like. People getting so excited, touching your belly and then they ambush you with questions like:
“Which hospital are you giving birth at” “Are you going to breastfeed” and ‘Are you going to do natural birth or drugs”, all questions that are total bait for people to give you their opinions on what they would do.
I feel like the key to all of this is keeping a bit low key and being as straight forward as possible. I told many of my friends to check back in with me in 6 months. If my response was a tweet it would have the hashtag #StopAskingMeQuestions
But I digress.
After a few weeks of being coy about planning, the Virgo in me has now taken over and the planning and idea factory is in full motion. Ideas, colors, locations and themes are starting to flow pretty fast. It’s pretty fun to plan little things out like first dance songs, cake and food.
I’m still getting used to all the timelines, but I feel I have mapped a pretty good strategy out. In theory, I want to be the guy who plans this out all in advanced so I don’t have to worry.
We will see how that all goes.
David Cruz, III
David is the Founder and Creative Director of Finding Cupid. He has been writing about Dating & Relationships for the last five years and is a contributor to Huffington Post, Frontiers Media, Your Tango and many other publications. David can often be found in the greeting card aisle seaching for the ultimate love card, or a bakery making bad decisions for himself.