Engagement
It’s official, Shayna and I are engaged! Yee-haw. Aww Yeah. Hurray. We decided over thanksgiving in Athens, Georgia, to get married. At that time I was not ready to be publicly engaged, but now I am. Last week we told parents and friends, and now I’m here to share some more info on this major life decision.
We’ve been dating since the fall of 2004 in San Francisco. We met each other a few times at parties, but the first time I spent some time with shayna was when Tim Lang and I helped her move some art. She was in school at the time, was looking for help to move some big pieces, so I offered my help and Tim’s van. After that day I knew I liked her and soon we went on our first dinner date at Axum Cafe, an ethiopian restaurant. When she graduated from school the following June, our relationship changed from dating to sorta-dating for the next year or so, since she moved away from SF and I stayed in SF. I did visit her in New York, where she worked in a woman’s art program, as well as in New Orleans, where she was helping after Katrina. I convinced her to return to SF for Burningman in August 2006 and we were officially dating again. In Feb 2007, I started a 6 month trip around the world, 3 months of which was with shayna. When I returned we moved in together. During my trip around the world, shayna was accepted into grad school in Chicago, but delayed enrollment for a year primarily for me. So in the spring of 2008 the time came for me to decide if i wanted to give up my home of 10+ years in SF to move to Chicago with Shayna. I did. Chicago was a very big transition. Luckily we found some good friends fairly quickly which made some of the very rough patches in fall 2008 easier to swallow. The summer and fall of 2009 were really good to us as a couple. But it wasn’t till she left for Athens a couple weeks before Thanksgiving did i realize she’s the most important thing in my life and that I wanted to be with her forever and ever.
There was no tradtional proposal. Neither one of us are too fond of traditions purely for the sake of traditions. We believe in this day and age its more important to enter marriage with eyes wide open with both people knowing exactly what they are getting into. However, I did get down on one knee in our photo shoot in Athens, which I’ve called Engagementland. A few of these pics were emailed to friends last week. We also met with an artist from athens who is making us custom wedding rings – you can see pictures similar to what we’ll have in the Engagementland set as well.
As soon as we tell people we’re engaged, one of the next questions out of their mouth is “when’s the wedding?” Well, it looks like this summer – July or August 2010. Stay tuned for more on this.