I Do. I Don't. I Might?

Part 1: An Unraveling Proposal

The silence was somehow sending a shockwave. The glistening of the ring was radiating through both of them, their eyes both locked on it.

“So, what do you say? Will you marry me?” he asked.

She continued to stare. Idiotically dumbfounded. A decade together—a decade undeniably full of love, adventure, fun—and somehow she was struck immobile and mute.

He was down on one knee, a knee about to quiver if this moment endured.

“Becky?”

“James . . .”

“Becky . . .”

She took his hands and knelt as well, but quickly collapsed to the floor, sitting cross-legged across from him. He followed.

“I didn’t expect this, but I don’t know why I’m surprised. I just, I don’t know, I don’t know why I’m surprised,” she said, weakly, stuttering almost.

“Is it the ring? You hate gold, so I went for silver. And I didn’t pick diamonds because, well . . .”

“Diamond mining,” they said in unison.

“Is it the pitch? You always joked to never do it in a crowd, never do it in a restaurant, never ever in a dessert, and nowhere too offensive because you’d have to tell the story the rest of our lives,” he said.

“Never during intercourse, you remembered,” she said. “I also appreciate not having to fork through a tiramisu or lose a tooth,” she said.

“So . . . is it . . . me?” he asked, equally as weak and humbled.

She was still holding his hands, all clasped around the ring, and she looked at his face. So sweet, so familiar.

“James, it’s just . . . us.”

Part 2: Pushing Pause

He pulled his hands and the ring back. Both slipped into a slow-speed, internal montage of “them.”

Ten years of love, adventure, and fun were also ten years of two people who found each other young and hit the road to adulthood together. That is a pocket of life filled with (unwelcome?) change, (uncontrollable?) unknowns, and inevitable (unsurmountable?) growth.

He sped through the years—the first time he saw her. Her hair long, her tank top striped, her jeans rolled up to the calf because those were the times. She had sassed him at a coffee shop at college, critiquing the band on his shirt, and rightly so.

“Nice shirt. Last time I saw that name was . . . in a dumpster after that show at the Neptune. Those shirts work well for mopping up smudged eyeliner, tears, and broken dreams,” she snarked.

There were repeated encounters at that coffee shop. She got a sociopath’s drink, a black americano. She said he had a sociopath’s beard and too many old men’s patterned, pocketed shirts he should have donated to Goodwill (or a dumpster) after high school.

Flash forward through the togetherness. The years in between college to “reality” were a rush. Then everyone settles into adulthood. Jobs, rent, responsibilities. But they rode the wave together, he thought.

In this flash-pan moment, he couldn’t tell where their timelines twisted. There were jobs lost, but jobs found. Bills shared, and bills never too far in the hole. There were health woes and recoveries. There were family struggles and loved ones’ recoveries. There were vacations, adventures, and gut-busting moments of laughter.

But even two souls so in tandem still struggle. Looking at her now, hands around a ring he hadn’t faltered in buying and having asked a question he wanted to ask, he couldn’t tell where he lost her in this ride.

In this quiet moment that felt like forever, she, too, went on high-speed cycling through ten years.

Those first few months, even years, were a cast of characters fraught with moments of rhetorical sparring—the sixth love language—and a gravitational pull mistaken for coincidence.

But no time in anyone’s lives comes without change and, inevitably, struggle. And their struggles were distinct and carried differently. Rarely a struggle with or from each other but struggles from external forces that show up in every storyline. From places of chaos, internalization, guilt, uncertainty—every emotion and every space that everyone goes through on the journey to the present.

And now, here they were. In silence. Staring awkwardly at two clasped hands around a ring box. Two inches square and clad in velvet—who knew it would cause this much chaos?

Part 3: The Out Loud Part

Someone had to speak up. Someone had to interrupt the quiet. History suggested the other would go first.

“It’s the proposal, isn’t it?” he asked. He paused, inhaling deeply as he tried to figure out where he had made the mistake.

She shook her head, eyes still locked on his hands.

“I know we never really talked about it, but I assumed you wanted something simple but thoughtful. No cliches, no drama, no pomp and circumstance,” he said.

“We never talked about it . . . because we never talk about anything,” she said. “Ten years and what do we really talk about that has to do with us?”

“We talk all the time,” he said.

“We talk but we don’t talk about anything,” she said.

“You talk about my trash taste in fashion,” he said, shifting uncomfortably in his jacket.

“It’s the single thing that endured this relationship, for better or worse,” she said.

The two visibly relaxed.

“But why now? Why like this? Why? We’re not those people—what mid-life crisis is making you do this?”

“I had other plans. Bigger, better, bolder plans. But, I wanted to make this moment for you,” he said.

“ . . . and this felt right for me?”

“No, but it felt less about me so I went with it.”

“Well, what if you went with what you wanted?”

He shuffled uncomfortably again, then put down the ring box and reached for the zipper of his jacket.

He hung his head a bit, slowly unzipping his jacket and unveiling a black-and-white tee. The etched lettering read, “Marry me? Wipe future-wife tears here,” with an arrow pointing to the corner.

She rolled her eyes but genuinely laughed. They laughed. And the moment had at least progressed from a no to a maybe.