Talk Nerdy To Me: Saying “I Do”

 
As many of you who are regular Geek Life readers are likely aware, I have been dating Dan, our lead staff writer, for the past eight months. Three of those months were long distance, wherein we both got up early and stayed up late to work around the 16 hour time difference while he was teaching English in South Korea.

Dan moved back to the States — and in with me — in July, and I won’t lie: the first few days were kind of awkward. We’d talked a lot on Skype, in text, but to actually be in person was a little daunting. The first week or so involved getting to know each other a lot better, and getting used to not living alone anymore, as both of us have been relatively solitary people in the past. The first month or so of living together was more adjusting, more finding out what works for us and what makes us both happy. I cook, he washes the dishes; I sing songs to the cats where I replace words with “meow” and he creates elaborate backstories about my oldest cat and what he’s doing when he goes outside at night. Overall, what we have is nigh on perfect.

Dan’s parents came out to visit us at the beginning of November, largely prompted by a conversation that he had with them in which he expressed that I was “the One” (not to be confused with “the One Ring” or “the Chosen One). We talked about it before he called his parents, about our future plans, what we both wanted, how we want to spend our lives together. We decided that we want to get married. We bought a ring the week before Dan’s parents came out to visit, and waited as the ring is custom made and took some time (which was totally worth it) to complete.

Even though we made this decision mutually, Dan still wanted to propose in a traditional-ish manner, and I — being the secret watcher of movies like P.S. I Love You and The Notebook — was perfectly fine with this. I knew he was going to propose, I just wasn’t sure how. It’s okay, I think, to know some of the details. Wasn’t there a study by Harvard recently that said that knowing the end of a story didn’t spoil the rest of it? So, I knew that he wanted to take me to dinner and that he wanted to propose, but I didn’t know what exactly he would say or how it would come about.

Last week, a box from Think Geek arrived, and Dan said it had to do with his proposal. I couldn’t even imagine — but much to his chagrin, there was a shipping error, and what he had actually ordered wasn’t sent; instead, they sent him a foam Minecraft pickaxe. After a veeeeeery long conversation that weekend with the Think Geek people, he told me that they made a shipping error and that what he had actually ordered was out of stock. Thankfully, he wasn’t deterred; on this past Tuesday, I got a call from the jeweler that my ring was finished, and that night he asked if I’d like to go out to dinner the next day.

We went to dinner Wednesday to a fancy restaurant after he was done with work. He wound up bringing his “man purse” inside with him — the tote bag he carries to work. I could only imagine what was inside (other than the ring, obviously).

He pulled this hand mirror, on which he had written the words, “Erised stra ehru oyt ube cafru oyt on wohsi.” He said it was his Mirror of Erised. For the three of you that have not read the Harry Potter books or seen the movies, the Mirror of Erised is a magical mirror where the person looking into it sees not themselves but what they most desire. In his mirror of Erised, Dan told me, he saw me. He saw the person he loves that he knows loves him, the person he wants to spend the rest of his life with. He gave me the mirror, telling me he wanted me to keep it so that I could always see what he sees when I look into it.

With that, he slid out of his side of our booth, got down on one knee, and asked me to marry him.

Naturally, I said yes, of course!

Funnily enough, when we got home that night, there was another package from Think Geek; the actually Mirror of Erised had arrived. It’s now in our bedroom (and, may I add, very awesome).

There is no right or wrong answer to questions like, “Is it too soon for us to get married?” “How long should I wait before proposing?” and so on. It depends on you and your significant other, and how you both feel. As the saying goes, “When you know, you know,” and for Dan and I, we know.

Now, that doesn’t mean that we’re going to rush into a wedding. We’ll be taking time to plan and prepare — and, of course, we have to make sure that there’s enough time for our Brit of Honor, Rob, who introduced us to be able to save up and come to the wedding [Editor's Note: And time for me to practice the Time-Lord-dancefloor-arm-flail --R]. So, over the next months, look for the Wedding Edition of Talk Nerdy To Me as I share my trials, tribulations, and triumphs as we prepare for our wedding. So far, all we know is that there needs to be a TARDIS on top of our wedding cake. We’ll figure out the rest as we go.
 

About Tiarra

Tiarra Wantz is a comic book and sci-fi geek girl who enjoys reading, playing video games, creating typography art, and comparing everything to “that one episode of TNG where…” Tiarra lives in Las Vegas with the love of her life, Dan, where they live together with two cuddly kittens named Panda Face and Ser Pounce-a-lot and a precocious pup named Pippin.

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