Facebook Engaged Once Again

I wrote this a month ago during a brief period of romantic uncertainty. I am once again Facebook engaged, and so I thought I would post this now.

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How I came to be de facto engaged, then Facebook engaged, then Facebook heartbroken and finally philosophically engaged with plans to go traditional.

It all began months ago in a little bar off Dupont Circle in our nation’s capitol. A towering goddess of a woman saw my amazing skills on the pool table and decided “there’s a man I need to make out with.” Who can blame her really? Sometimes after a particularly masterful game even I am affected and have to go home early to spend a private moment with myself.

She played coy at first with talk of books and grad schools and whatnot, but I could tell what was what. Under the clever pretext of sharing book recommendations, I got her e-mail address and a budding romance was born.

Well, it was almost born. My girlfriend of the previous year would likely have not appreciated that particular turn of phrase.

Conveniently, mine and McK’s somewhat rocky relationship was in another rough spot. We had run aground yet again on a fundamental disagreement as to the proper role of drunken shenanigans in an adult life. She held the reasonable opinions on a variety of issues, for example that peeing in a sink is never justified regardless of how badly one needs to go, and I, empirically, considered there to exist valid mitigating circumstances.

She was disappointed again following my lack of a realization that a fancy dinner for an anniversary did not diminish the emotional significance of Valentine’s Day three days later. With this intriguing new woman from the bar playing in my mind, I went this round of relationship negations with a different frame of mind: call a dead horse a dead horse and stop trying to ride it.

So, having recommended to McK to get involved with someone a bit less of an alcoholic, a budding romance was born.

Almost.

I lost the e-mail address. The only person with the ability to contact the stunning beauty I met in the bar was whoever stole my wallet the day after McK and I called it quits.

Thanks to our electronic overlord, we live in an age where we no longer have to date strangers. I was able to retrieve the mystery girl’s address from the Google search I ran on her the day after we met.

Wit and charm in full engaged, I turned on the full Holcomb effect — a combination of quirk and awkwardness guaranteed to make the most resilient woman weak in the knees. I even had my dad fax me a copy of my passport so I could gain entrance to the bar where we would meet a week later and I would make my move. She would be mine!

Plans went somewhat awry when I arrive at the bar heart aflutter and positively glowing with charm to find that she hadn’t bothered to show up that week.

To add insult to injury, she stole my manpants and asked me out on a date. I stormed about breaking things, grunting and generally asserting my masculine dominance over the world. Outraged as I was, I couldn’t overlook a certain something that she had. A little something the French like to call, “being really fucking hot.”

So, I sucked it up, and over vodka and Thai food we reminisced running booze over international borders and hitting cows with airplanes, you know, Peace Corps stuff.

The coming months saw a variety of changes to our relationship; not least among them moving 700 miles apart from each other.

The distance was certainly not pleasant, but it didn’t really put too much stress on the relationship. We distracted ourselves from the longing by having our asses handed to us by our respective graduate schools.

Things were going very well in fact. Well in a way I’d never experienced before. In all honestly I’d grown accustomed to friends who could, at best, understand either my drive for spiritual growth or my enjoyment of adventure or the occasional shenanigans. Finding a girl who I could learn scuba diving with, meditate with, and get crunk and fool around with was pretty damn cool.

I felt like she could do as well as me if we weren’t together. I didn’t feel like I had to hide a part of who I was in order for us to get along.

During our adventures, the plans we discussed started getting farther and farther in the future.

For a while I’d said that in my old age I would like to go to Asia and do Peace Corps again. That slowly changed to, “when we get old, I think we should do Peace Corps again.”

Children slowly entered the picture. We didn’t want just one because not all only children are socially dysfunctional, but a hell of a lot of socially dysfunctional people are only children. If we might raise them in the South or go back to the West. How much land we wanted to try to own.

A life was slowly agreed upon. A life built out of the now immediately apparent fact that our lives were better when we were sharing them. That I would likely not be as much of a complete person without her as my companion, and that she felt the same. Some version of what he romantics call “love.”

Not just the groping desiring kind of love, but a quieter thing as well. A knowledge of having found another soul striving to be good. Not to knock the groping desiring type of love. I’ve never been so publicly or sickeningly sweet as I am with Jenni. It’s so much fun. When I say I love her though that’s only the tip of what I’m talking about. I love her because I believe that she has the strength and the character to be counted on when I need her. I trust her.

Trying to put words to it always makes it sound like so much less than how it feels. I’m going to stop trying.

The effect though of our love is our marriage was something of an assumption.

I remember the point that it became official for me. I was standing in the little yard of mine and Wayne’s house when she said something about our wedding. She stopped and said, “You know, we never actually got engaged. I want to marry you. You want to marry me… Right?”

It wasn’t a proposal really, more of a statement. And one I was comfortable with.

I was talking to a guy at work last week about his engagement. He and his wife cohabitated for for six months and placed an actual moratorium on discussion of engagements. Not just for themselves, but for everyone. I’d much rather have my relationship where I’m so in love that I forgot that not getting married was an option.

It became even more real a few weeks later as Jenni and my mom hung out making plans for the wedding ceremony (which is going to be awesomeness incarnate, fyi).

When Sun was setting me up for an apartment for the summer, I could get non-shared housing if I was married or had a domestic partner. It was in talking to Sun that I really became comfortable with the word “fiancée.”

Once I started using it, “girlfriend” just seemed a bit tawdry.

It was in this mindset, and following after a recent discussion of going ahead and getting rings and just exchanging vows at our wedding, that I set my status to “Engaged” when I created a Facebook profile.

In all honesty, I didn’t particularly want to do it. Facebook is how I keep up with bunches of people I only have cursory relationships with. Some of those relationships are with girls where we have a kinda open (or explicit) possibility that we might sleep together at some point in the future.

Being engaged means all those dynamics change. It means that people who were staying in communication with me as a “maybe someday” might lose interest.

I was deciding it was time to move beyond that. That relationships based around the possibility of sex are either going to have to learn to stand on the basis of an actual friendship, or they’re going to go away. Not that it’s not nice having people treat you sexy. I’m certainly not going to say I dislike it. Especially when I’ve got a woman that I love and there’s no real possibility I’m actually going to actually going to have to put myself out there and do anything. It’s just admiration for free.

Flirting with no intention to do anything is kind of what is sometimes called a “dick move.” So, I figured I’d go ahead and stop doing that.

I didn’t really think about the real implications of the world wideness of the world wide web. It turns out pretty much everyone I know is on Facebook. All of a sudden pretty much everyone I know knew I am engaged.

Which, in all honesty, I was fine with. I feel confident in my assessment of myself and Jenni — that the people we are and the people we are trying to become could be together for fifty years. I was ready the commitment of marriage and really didn’t care if the internet knew.

In other words, it was pretty much all about me. I mean I thought about Jenni and what she would think, but beyond that I wasn’t really concerned with much of anyone else.

I’m a guy. I can buy a t-shirt with a smiling bride, pouting groom and “Game Over” written across the bottom. At no point in my young life was I ever asked to consider my engagement or wedding. I never put on a faux ceremony binding myself and my teddy bear in eternal matrimony.

Unfortunately, the engagement involves two people, the other of whom has a slightly different picture of how an engagement is supposed to take place, and Facebook wasn’t really a part of her fairy tale romance.

I actually got the first call I’ve ever gotten from Marc asking me why the hell I hadn’t told him previously. It was at that point that I started to realize the reach of what exactly I’d done. I called Jenni shortly after that and told her that I’d accidentally publicly engaged us. She wasn’t particularly thrilled, but could tell I was a well-meaning sort and hadn’t meant any harm.

About five hours later at 1am as I slumbered, she left a message saying that upon further reflection she actually did have a problem with it and wanted me to de-engage us on Facebook.

Which, I think is fair. This romance thing is actually pretty entertaining. I’m only going to get to get engaged once. I would like it to be something nice.

Ever helpful, Facebook has a running commentary for all your friends when you change stuff. That’s how, when I put I was engaged, so many people found out. When you get de-engaged, there’s a cute little message with a little heart split in two that goes to everyone you know. So, not so subtle.

I’m in the somewhat awkward situation now of being engaged to someone who wants to be engaged to me but wants me to not call it being engaged at times.

But who also, thankfully, recognizes that I can’t tell people who think I’m engaged that I’m not engaged without having an explanation, and who recognizes I’ll sound henpecked if I can’t come up with something better than “Jenni doesn’t want me to use that word.”

So right now I’m going with “we are engaged, but we’re keeping it quiet until we’ve found rings.” Which makes it sound far more mutual.

I still certainly consider myself engaged. I’m not sure exactly how high the romance factor needs to be in a situation for it to qualify as a binding engagement moment, but I really thought a hell of a lot about this decision and I’m not giving it up. I’m engaged goddammit.

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We were more officially engaged sans rings about four days after we were pseudo de-engaged. It turns out that once Jenni was faced with a proposal she decided she wanted to be engaged for reals even without the physical symbols.

In hanging out with my family recently at a wedding I recognized just how much pressure she’s under to have the wedding fit a certain form. Both as a guy, and having a reputation for arrogance, they mostly leave me alone, but being with her I got to hear the tiny notes of question and judgment the twenty some odd times she was asked, “so where’s your ring?”

That she puts up with it rather than making me spend $2,000 on an overpriced rock is but one of the many reasons this is the woman I’m going to spend the rest of my life with.