A decent proposal

This week it’s my wedding anniversary, it will have been 5 whole years since me and Mrs Zilla got hitched. We still have to remind each other what the actual date is, for reasons which may or may not become apparent. The next few days will see me posting about it. We haven’t exactly done things in the traditional fashion, but then why should you. I’d been with Mrs Zilla for 3 years when it seemed sensible to save on rent and buy a house instead. By this point we’d discussed a future, and made tentative plans, regarding such things as children (Mrs Zilla wanted to be 28 before we started having kids), but the subject of marriage hadn’t actually been broached. Then came that fateful night when you were meant to go for it if you wanted a Millennium Baby. We even laughed about the couples all desperately trying for one. The laughter stopped about 3 weeks later, when a small blue line appeared. So Mrs Zilla was 23, rather than 28, but these things can’t always be planned meticulously, or at all in our case. When we announced the pregnancy we were startled by some people’s reactions. “So when are you getting married then?” became a regular enquiry. We were left wondering why this expectation suddenly came. It wasn’t even our families who were asking, just friends and acquaintances. We had lived together, bought a house together, and no-one was asking when the marriage was. Get pregnant and the world expects a marriage. We talked about it, it hadn’t figured in our plans before, and we saw no reason to change that now. People’s reactions, if anything, made us more determined not to get married. Neither of us had a problem with the commitment or marriage itself, but we didn’t want to make people think they had influenced our decision. We decided to wait until people stopped asking us when we were going to get married, and then we would do it. Bloody minded us? No. All went quiet on the marriage front, until Godzooky 1 made his appearance. Then the questions started again, so that put things on the back burner again. When he was about a year old I decided that I would ask Mrs Zilla if she was ready to get hitched. I went out to look at rings. I am clearly a jeweller’s favourite kind of customer. I knew Mrs Zilla wasn’t a fan of gold jewellery, so started to look at white gold rings. Then the jeweller pulled his master stroke and mentioned platinum. I got sucked in by the whole spiel about it being stronger than white gold and there only being an amount ever mined big enough to form a cube 6 feet square. Not only did it hit my pocket that day, but I hadn’t thought through the implications of matching wedding bands. Ouch! Still, I came out with a stunning diamond solitaire, nice simple classic mounting that I knew Mrs Zilla liked. The question did come as a shock to her, I think she’d almost given up on the idea of getting married. Once she saw the ring though she knew I was serious. Then came the frightening bit – telling all our friends and family and organising the wedding itself. The concept held no fear for me, the practicalities certainly did.