So I was asleep and he comes in and wakes me up by saying “do you wanna get a ring?”

Luckily, we ended up not walking down the aisle.

As Giggy would say, four paws up baby!

So, just as a little intro: My sister is a Daddy’s girl. Through and through. And while she and her-now husband were dating, she frequently waxed rhapsodic about how my father had courted my mother. (And with good cause — my mother has a 3-inch binder filled with letters he wrote, poems he composed, cards he drew, dried flowers and a hundred other sweet things my dad overwhelmed her with to persuade her to marry him in their short courtship.)

So my brother-in-law thought that he could really win her over by finding out how my Dad proposed to my mom, and then replicating that.

He called my dad to ask for her hand and at the same time ask about how my dad proposed. My dad told him that he took her on a walk up to this peak in the mountains, and then pulled out his bible (we’re a religious family) and read Proverbs 10:31 to her before asking her to marry him.

Now. My dad is a very smart man with an uncanny memory, so my brother-in-law just took him at his word.

He was unaware that my father had accidentally switched the chapter and verse reference. So instead of kneeling down and saying “Who can find a virtuous woman? For her price is far above rubies”, he said, “The mouth of the just bringeth forth wisdom: but the froward tongue shall be cut out.”

And they were both SO CONFUSED.

They’d be de-facto engaged for a while — and, in fact, had set a date, booked the church and reception hall, and she’d gotten a dress. And he promised that the official proposal would happen in October, probably the week after the 21st (a significant time for him, for reasons too complex to go into).

Well, that week went by and he didn’t ask — because unbeknownst to her, there was some trouble with the ring — it needed to be resized or something like that.

So, at the end of the next week, he comes over after work, and Mejken (my roommate) is looking kind of upset. He asks why, she explains that everybody’s been getting on her case about not being engaged yet, and her mom was especially getting grumpy, and it just made her sad. So then they were just sad together for a little while.

And then he gets down on his knee, pulls out the ring, and asks her to marry him.

AND SHE SLAPPED HIM.

Because she wasn’t ready to change moods yet from sad to happy! And it was just in our ugly living room, and wasn’t in the least romantic, and one of my roommates came in just five minutes later.

But in those five minutes she’d managed to apologize for slapping him, say yes, kiss and make up and so on. But it made all of us laugh. Not a very auspicious beginning!

That goes right down there with the teeth pulling episode that was my beloved’s proposal.

We were in an all-night diner waiting for our food to arrive when he suddenly announced ‘June 13th is a sunday in 1993.’ I waited for some moments, then decided there must be more to the story than that. I said ‘aaaannnd?’ ‘oh, I know you like thirteen.’ I waited a while longer and said ‘yes, and?’ ‘Oh, I thought maybe we could get married that day.’

But a successful proposal that includes the word ‘jerkface’ definitely trumps mine! ROTFLOL!

Maybe Mr. Ducks and I should submit our proposal story to lighten the mood a bit:

He came to my place one day after work, looking kinda pale and a bit like he might be sick so I asked him if he was going to vomit and said he’d better not if he knows what’s good for him because I had just finished cleaning the floors.

He said he was fine and kept trying to get me to go to the park with him but I kept saying no because it was already midnight, I was tired and it was rainy out and we kept going back and forth like that for a good 15 minutes (we’re both rather stubborn that way) when finally he said: “Fine. I’ll do it here then. Will you marry me jerkface?”

I think (and not just because it’s our story) any propsal that includes calling each other childish insults and still ends with a marriage should so win. No if only we were American and *could* enter….