The Proposal: Nerds in Love

I'm engaged! I proposed to my girlfriend tonight. Let me lay out the story:

It's Thursday, May 28, 2009, my Mom and step-dad's 16th wedding anniversary (1993 was 16 years ago? Wow!). I head into work with Helen tonight to keep her company because she has instrument time around midnight. She's a chemistry post-doc, which means that she's tethered to her lab like I am to my laptop, only my laptop is a helluva lot more portable.

My Mom sent me my grandmother's engagement and wedding rings, and I had been trying to think of a nice romantic proposal. One idea I scrapped involved slipping the ring into the DVD box set of the Lord of the Rings, which I'm going to buy for Helen at some point anyway (you know, it's the lord of the rings so it would be clever!). Never mind that I would need to get the box shrink-wrapped after opening it (which my friend Brian figured out is totally doable if you can get your hands onto a shrink-wrap machine), but it didn't seem romantic enough.

Another plan I scuppered was to acquire a girl teddy bear for Ranger Bear (Ranger Bear is my teddy bear that I've had since I can remember and who has amassed quite a collection of pictures of himself in various exotic locales around the world), and present the girl teddy to Helen with a story about how Ranger Bear couldn't live his whole life alone, and neither could I, at which point she would notice that the girl teddy was holding a ring. Honestly, the main reason I scrapped this idea was that I'm afraid of commitment. Not to Helen, of course, because I can't imagine living without her at this point... I was afraid of the commitment for Ranger Bear! It's not like you can just pop into Walmart and find the perfect soulmate for your childhood teddy bear, and so far as I can tell there's no e-harmony for teddy bears. So that plan was out.

I finally decided to slip the ring into the rubber gloves to her glovebox and then have her put her hands in there to find it. So after she was done with whatever it is she was doing, I headed into the lab and stuck the ring into the glove. Then when she came back in I asked her if she could show me how to use the glovebox again. Puzzled, she put her hands in there and... Nothing. I shoved the ring too far into the finger of the glovebox. Damn. So to be smooth, I said something like "This isn't working... Can you do it again?" The elusive ring was still too far for her dainty little fingers to find... So finally I resorted to "Um, just, like, feel around in there..."

Then she found it, and now we're engaged! Yay us! She thought it was romantic and sweet, and I've scored a lot of points with the chemists that I know for originality and nerdiness. And it was a surprise because she didn't know it was coming. I mean, she knew something was coming because we've been talking about a July 2010 wedding for a while now, but the actual proposal was a total surprise. Go me!

Our relationship is based entirely on the desire to watch DVDs and have babies, which means that it's a very strong relationship. Seriously, we can watch DVDs together until we're, like, 100 years old, and having babies will be awesome because I can't think of anything more challenging for us to take on at this point in our lives. We've both done graduate school, figured out we're not going to be famous scientists, and we need something important to sink our energies into. Plus, what better way for me to watch kids' movies and read kids' books in a socially acceptable fashion?

Anyway, so Helen, you said yes and I couldn't be happier!