Chapter 129

To be perfectly clear…the last chapter had a little bit of embellishment. Not with Scottie though. What I’m referring to is with the girlfriend. In truth, the girlfriend and I have been talking about this for a while. There was never any doubt I wanted to marry this woman and honestly, since we’ve been living together for years at this point, the topic came up many many times. 

I’ve met her parents and she’s met my mom. She knows everything there is about me at this point and I can fairly say I felt the same. Sometimes, we’d forget that we weren’t married because we sort of already took that for granted. In fact, when I first asked about marriage, her response was, “aren’t we already married?”. I said “basically yes, but for tax reasons it may be a good idea to do it on paper too”. Knowing you were going to get married to someone you were pretty much already married takes a lot of edge off the whole situation. 

Now, if there are any single gentlemen who may be thinking about proposing reading this passage, listen carefully. Here’s a quick tip. To the untrained eye, no one can really tell the price of a diamond so long as it looks decent enough. The value of the rock is purely based on what value you ascribe to it. So if you “surprise” her with a proposal, the ring selection is fully in your court and that means you can spend as frugally as you’d like. 

All kidding aside, I occasionally still look back and think how ridiculous the entire system is and how I still had student loans that could’ve been paid off by the price of the ring. The ring is an exorbitantly expensive purchase and one that is way too easy to justify. Despite my logical side of the brain telling me how stupid a purchase of a piece of rock for $15,000 CAD, another part of my brain tells me again and again that she deserves that much and if anything, that’s a discount compared to what she’s had to put up with. 

Like an old married couple who are very realist, we went to a ring shop together where she got to pick it so that it wouldn’t be one that she didn’t like. After that, she cut off all communication with the ring makers and I got to pick a day to do a proper proposal. I, being realistic, chose a day that has some significance but not too much significance so that it’ll be easy to remember but not so important that it coincides with another event. Eventually, I landed on 5th of November. It was just related to a movie I watched for English class back in highschool. If you get the reference, you may see how it is easy to “remember remember” it (:P). I proposed that day in 2022 and instead of saying yes she said “wow that ring came out amazing!” then proceeded to snatch it from me. Then, a moment later, “oh yeah, sure, let’s get married”. After that moment , my girlfriend, who had been with me through thick and thin, graduated to being my fiance. 

We told some friends of ours and eventually got to telling my mom about this as well. She was happy for me. I told her that I was making decent money and would not really require too much help from family to pay for the wedding. My mom then said she still wanted to help out. I said that when we wanted to buy a house, we’d definitely need the help, until then though? We’re good.

We were also good because the fiance’s mom was helping and she pretty much took care of everything. Mom in law was sort of in the business of weddings. Being pretty high up in management at a dim sum hall that doubled as a wedding venue, Mom in law not only helped plan everything but also paid for the venue, catering and well…just like everything really. She did, of course, get a huge discount from her bosses and also invited a whole bunch of family and the management team who had to give money to her (hehe) but we didn’t complain. It seemed fair she got to keep all our red pockets since she spent the money on the wedding. We were just happy that we got to enjoy zero stress from wedding planning and zero stress from venue booking. 

After we became officially engaged, my fiance and I would find that with a ring on her finger, nothing had really changed. We were already living together and feeling happy about our current situation. We were financially stable, had each other and I had a career that I loved too. My mom had a house and 2 condos and was financially stable. The fiance’s parents were also doing fine financially. Life was good and we had wanted for nothing. This was my happily ever after. 

This was everything I could have ever wanted and more. This was my perfect ending and I so so so so so wished that this could have been the last chapter of the blog. It would have been a high note…

But…

Well…You’ll see…

The reason for the blog to come into existence hasn’t really surfaced yet. I mean, the reasoning for my writing came about in my past failures and traumas but those were with academia. Failing in academia is not really real life. 

In real life, things are much more cruel. Life is not a disney movie nor is it a Hollywood blockbuster. There are often no vindications of any sort and many many tragic endings. In real life, sometimes the villain wins and the victims just have to live with it.