No one's going to say "congratulations" when you get engaged

...They're going to say, "it's about time!" This is probably true--when you've chosen your wedding party, made a guest list, planned the seating arrangements, fallen in love with a gown designer, compiled a play list, and set a date, most people figure an engagement ring is just an after-thought.

But oh, that damned date! For the past year and a half people have been asking "Why October of 2011 and not October of 2010?" and today Sean and I finally came up with a good answer, which is this: Because we are complete idiots.

Sean and I had little use for the get-to-know-you stage of our relationship. We started dating at the end of January 2008, were using the the "L" word by the middle of May, and had picked a date for our wedding (albeit in a round-about sort of way) by the end of June. Let me say that again: Sean and I picked October 15, 2011 when I was planning on finishing grad school in May of 2011 and Sean had dreams of going to Washington and working for a senator AND WE NEVER CHANGED IT. Sean says it's like this--when you're in college, the words "three years" actually mean "six semesters," which is code for "a cake walk on vodka that mom and dad are buying," and when you look at it that way, the gap between graduation and wedding seems relatively small. But then you hit the real world and all of a sudden the gap between graduation and wedding seems like the Grand Canyon, because six semesters of drinking and sleeping until noon on Monday is NOT the same as three years of working five days a week and sleeping until 8:30(!) on Saturday. Put another way, the date that we picked when we were full of youthful ignorance now feels like an eternity away.

Sean and I discussed things today and determined that we've had enough of living separately and only seeing each other on the weekends (and those rare weeknights that crop up three or four times a month). We're ready to greet each other after work, eat dinner together in the evenings, go to bed together at night, and fight over sink access in the morning until death do us part. So we've started looking at ways we could move the date up. Unfortunately, we don't see ourselves as a spring or summer couple, which doesn't give us much of a window. Anyway, the point is that we've received permission from the financiers (read: mom and dad) to move the date up and proceed with wedding plans at warp speed if possible. (I wish we'd moved our date up last April because warp speed makes me nauseous.) Don't quote me on this, friends--I dream big and execute WAAAAAAY smaller--but we'll see what happens when we go venue shopping this weekend.