Читать книгу The Bumpy Road to Married Bliss - Chris Dicken - Страница 7

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 their approval and acceptance of our relationship. I’ll write more about my family a bit later, but I’ll just state at this point that they are a fairly traditional Chinese-American family, and that my brother and his family were also born-again evangelical Christians, so there were quite a few challenges to gaining everyone’s full acceptance.

Now, bear in mind, despite my personal views on marriage, at this point in my life I was also no stranger to being engaged. I was previously in a 14-year relationship when I was living in the US, and my ex had proposed to me after civil partnerships were legalised in the state of Massachusetts, where we were living. But it was a long engagement and we broke up before we even got around to setting a date. And another guy I dated for seven months in London before I got together with Chris had actually got down on one knee and proposed to me when we were just four months into the relationship! I must have made an impression on him, but I had to squash his aspirations since really we were still in the beginning phases of getting to know one another. (In contrast, my ex in the US didn’t propose until we had already been together for over 10 years.)

So, marriage was not something that I took lightly, and hence there was a lot of anxiety about whether or not it was a step I wanted to take.

But countering all of this anxiety was also the knowledge that getting married was still something very important to Chris, and the realisation that Chris was the best thing that had happened to me so far in my life. Therefore proposing to Chris was not only something that I wanted to do, but the more I got to know Chris, something that I felt like I had to do.

And so, underneath the light of the full moon while we were on holiday on an island off the coast of Thailand, I got down on one knee and spoke the words that would set us off on yet another journey.