Engagement

Life never turns out how you expect it to. If you were to tell me that I would spend my entire engagement over 100 miles away from my fiance, with 4 dogs, 2 rats and all my stuff in one bedroom, planning a wedding alone, I would have told you that you were crazy. That’s my life and it’s really starting to hit me. I’m getting married in less than 3 months. I see Blaine a day and a half a week. We never had an engagement party or engagement photos taken. This is supposed to be a time in our lives where we just enjoy each other before we get married. Weekend getaways and nights snuggled up on the couch just watching TV, happy that we’re about to make a huge commitment to each other. We aren’t supposed to be spending it alone.

We based our decision to live apart on the fact that we didn’t want to move into his house and bombard his family with my pets and he didn’t want to quit his job because when he told them he was leaving, they promoted him and gave him a huge raise. We’re apart right now because of money. Because we decided he should stay for the money so that we could pay for our own wedding and get a head start on saving for the future. Because we can never rent an apartment with all the pets we have and it would mean living with my parents for another year or two before buying a house or living on minimum wage paying to rent a house and never being able to save up to buy our own. We made this decision because it was a logical, smart one. But we never really took into consideration how we would look back on this time. We got engaged on Christmas eve and in mid February I moved away with my family. Chances are he won’t even be able to live here, in the house we’re buying, until after we’re married. We’ll have spent our entire engagement 100 miles away.

We missed the chance to look at wedding sites, go cake tasting, pick out invitations, etc. because we’re far away and because we picked a unique site. I know that’s not what weddings are about, but it’s hard to watch other people go through all of those exciting and expected steps. We got engaged, we moved apart, we spent months and months of hell trying to buy a house and now we’ll spend the few months before the wedding trying to plan a wedding and fix up a house all while 100 miles apart.

I’m not a clinggy person. Time away from each other isn’t that big of a deal for me, I am secure in our relationship and I know he’ll be here eventually. I miss and love him, but I make it work. I like alone time and I’m getting my fill. But after running through all of these life events in my head since I was a kid, I had different expectations of what it would be like after we got engaged, after I finally got that ring on my finger and the love of my life promising to love me forever.