Growing up, I was always the nerd, the hefty Plain Jane, the undesirable. Up until I was in high school, I wore nothing but straight legged, elastic-wasted K-Mart jeans and plain unisex t-shirts. No make-up, didn’t mess with my hair aside from combing it and wearing it back in a ponytail, and I was 200+ pounds. Needless to say, even when I started wearing slightly more feminine clothes, dabbing some make up on and fixing my hair different in high school, the boys were not beating down my door. In fact, it wasn’t until I was a sophomore in high school that I even got asked out on a date. Josh was a senior at the time, who was so incredibly shy that he rarely talked to anyone, let alone ask girls out. I was the first person he ever got up the guts to ask. We started dating, and were getting along just great.
Pretty soon, we reached the one year mark. Then two years. Pretty soon it had been three years since we had been together and I was wondering if we would ever get married. I had always dreamed that a man would get down on one knee and asked me to marry him when I least expected it. But Josh still wasn’t making any moves. When I brought up the idea of marriage, he assured me that “He intended to get married one day.” I was like, “GREAT! You just confirmed that you want to get married someday without the romantic, spontaneous proposal I had been dreaming of!” He said he’d still propose one day, and I said it wouldn’t be the same because I wouldn’t be as surprised knowing ahead of time that he intended on doing it.
More time passed. We had been together for over three and a half years when he invited me to go with him and his family on their cruise vacation. I gladly accepted the invitation, but I expected it to be just fun. I wasn’t expecting it to be a romantic trip for the two of us, considering there were 10 other people going besides us and we wouldn’t even have our own cabin or anything like that. I didn’t even know if we’d get any time alone, figuring that his family would want us all to stay together as a group most of the time. As it turns out, we were able to be alone some of the time, both at the ports and wandering about the ship. One night, we were even able to skip the nightly rotational dining, where we ate with everyone else in our group. We made reservations at the specialty restaurant for just the two of us.
Halfway through dinner, the waiter comes over and puts this big, wrapped box and a plastic light up rose in front of me. Then Josh gets up, gets down on one knee and asks me to marry him in front of everyone! Of course I said yes, and then I opened the box. We were on the Disney cruise, and he had bought me a statue of Minnie kissing Mickey Mouse that said “Cruisemates”. He didn’t have a ring but said he’d get it after we got back, which he did. The chef in the restaurant made us a special “Congratulations” cake, and the waiter came back with these metal buttons that said “I’m Celebrating on Disney Cruise Lines”, LOL. When we returned to our rotational dining schedule with everyone else the following night, our regular server (the one who followed the group from night to night) brought us another cake after everyone at the table told him about our engagement. The whole trip, people on the ship who were in the restaurant at the time Josh proposed recognized us and kept telling us “Congratulations”. I never saw it coming!
Proposal Story By:
Andrea Brown
Albuquerque, NM
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