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Something amazing has just happened! Donny proposed! We’re getting married! No dates or plans yet, but we just wanted to share the news. Chris x
– From a text message sent to Chris’s parents, Sunday, 13 November 2011
Chris – 29 November 2011
As we start to tell people our news, we can’t help but notice that all our male friends tend towards giving us hearty hugs and offers of congratulations, but our female friends tend to squeal and immediately demand details about how we got engaged. So in order to satisfy the requirement for details, here they are:
I never thought in a million years that Donny would ever propose. I’ve always been the sentimental one in our relationship, who was keen on the idea of marriage. But whenever I mentioned the idea to Donny in the past he would just pull a face and accuse me of wanting to be a bridezilla. We’ve been together for almost four years now, and have been living together in London for the last one of those years, and I had pretty much resigned myself to the fact that this was how it was going to be. We were a committed part of each other’s lives, but there wouldn’t be any kind of public ceremony or legal commitment. And I had become OK with that.
But there we were on holiday in Thailand, when something amazing happened. We were outside our little hut, on a balcony with a view through the jungle and out to the sea, above which the moon had just started to rise. We had just finished off the last of a bottle of scotch we had with us (I hasten to point out this was now the fourth night there) and I was just thinking about turning in when BAM! – Donny gets down on one knee and asks me to marry him. As you can imagine, my answer was a massive yes!
You see, growing up I was convinced it was my destiny to never marry anyone.
I never went out with anyone as a kid or a teenager. In fact, I didn’t even kiss anyone until I was well into my twenties. I could never properly face up to the fact that I was gay, so I simply ignored the romantic part of me and focussed on spending time with friends and trying to avoid the bullies in my school who would pick on any kid that was a bit ‘different’ – which would often mean I became their target for the day.
The added complication with all this was that I grew up as part of a tight Christian community, which meant I firmly believed that fancying men would lead to a one-way trip to hell. I hated the fact that I was gay, hated myself that I wasn’t strong enough to change how I felt, and I was terrified that people would find out the truth and cast me out of the church and the community. This was my secret problem, my sin, and I earnestly hoped and prayed nearly every day of my life that it would be taken away from me. But, of course, because it was an intrinsic part of me (albeit a part that I hadn’t yet come to embrace), I was never able to pray the gay away.
Looking back now, I realise how lonely I was during my teenage and young adult years. I had lots of friends and acquaintances, but I was too scared to ever open up and tell anyone my secret. I was convinced that being a good Christian meant that I was destined for a life of celibacy and bachelorhood, since the alternative would be to sin – and therefore I would never find true love. But I also believed that God was watching over me and wanted me to be happy – so would He really want me to live a life of loneliness?
That all began to change in my mid-twenties when I finally took the decision to come out and start seeing being gay as part of who I was, rather than as a terrible affliction I needed to hide away. I began to accept myself, and made lots of friends through gay Christian support groups. I even started learning the language of romance for the first time. When I was in my late twenties, I met this wonderful guy and fell head over heels in love. Because he was my first boyfriend, I was convinced that this was the person for me, and we were destined to be together for ever. Sadly, he didn’t feel the same way and ended our relationship. He said he wanted to become an Anglican vicar, and informed me that I was standing in the way of him fulfilling his ambition. (Never mind that, six months later, I found out he was dating someone else … but that’s another story.)
I met Donny a couple of years after that, but I’ll save that happier story for later.
Right now, it’s time to get back up to date, and to Donny’s proposal. What happened next? Actually, I remember very clearly what was going through my head at the time: ‘When do we tell people? When should we have the wedding? What sort of event do we want to organise?’
I was practically picking out table centrepieces already!
You see, I’ve never been very good at focussing on the present – I guess you can call me a chronic daydreamer. But back then I had to stop fretting about the future and just get on with enjoying the rest of our holiday, and to treasure the fact that we were engaged.
But now that we’re back in London, it’s time for the wedding planning to begin!
Donny – 30 November 2011
OK, so I gave in to the whole marriage thing. And happily, I might add.
Although Chris had professed many times early in our relationship how important it was for him to get married one day, I never saw marriage as something I needed in order to feel fulfilled in life. In fact, I was always vehemently anti-marriage (for both gay and straight people), and thought it was nothing more than feeding into an exploitative wedding industry – a relic of a time when marriage was a business deal between families, when women were considered to be property. Also, I’ve always prided myself in being an independent thinker, and to me there was nothing worse than to follow a crowd and do things just because everyone else was doing it, or because it was expected of me by my family or society. Also, with so many stories out there of people spending tens of thousands of pounds for what amounts to just a big party, at the end of the day, I felt the money would be better spent as a down payment for a house. And lastly, having previously been in a long-term 14-year relationship that ended badly, I knew only too well about the statistics showing that over half of all marriages end in divorce.
So what changed?
It all started at the wedding of one of Chris’s cousins last summer. The bride and groom cornered me at some point to ask whether Chris and I were going to be the next ones to get married. I responded with my normal thoughts about weddings and marriage (but I did it tactfully, since I was talking to a couple who had just tied the knot!). But it did start me thinking, why not?
And that one thought kept growing and growing in my head. Last month I had to go to Boston on the east coast of the US for work, and I also had a side trip to California planned to visit my family. I came very close to telling my friends in Boston that I was going to propose to Chris – but I didn’t do it. I chickened out. I hadn’t yet convinced myself that it was something I was definitely going to do, and I didn’t want to commit to it until I knew that I was fully ready.
These thoughts and feelings intensified even further the next week, when I got to San Francisco, where if I was going to make the announcement to my family, I would have had the extra challenge of needing to gain