ETC : the 8 year engagement

i’m not sure what’s going on guys !
seems like lately, all my posts have been about david and romance and all that pink fluffy stuff. not sure if it’s because summer’s in the air making me all sentimental or what’s going on. but i felt like i just had to write about david today, because today’s our 8 year engagement anniversary.

don’t fret, i’ll leave the romance alone for a while after today. or at least i’ll try my best.

so we’ve been engaged for 8 years today. i wonder if this is some sort of record ? it’s strange thinking about who we were back then and how different our life looked. a lot can happen in 8 years.

getting engaged in sweden isn’t the same as in other countries. we can get engaged for the sake of engagement, it doesn’t have to be connected to getting married. so we ask each other to get engaged first. we usually don’t pop the marriage question before we’ve been engaged for a while. i find that neat. that we let the engagement be something precious in itself.

the thing is, since getting engaged isn’t necessarily connected to marriage, a lot of very young people get engaged in sweden, after just seeing each other for a short while. me and david had made that into a sort of joke. i knew he thought it silly to get engaged after just dating for a little while, and so did i. so i would ask him to get engaged all the time that first year, as a sort of in-joke.

then we went to greece on holiday. we were having a drink in the harbour one night and i jokingly asked david if he wanted to get engaged, like i had so many times before.
the only thing was, this time he said yes.
i almost choked on my drink from the shock. i had meant it as nothing more than a joke, but it didn’t matter – i wanted us to get engaged as soon as he said it. so we did !

we went to the closest little tourist shop and bought two black elastic plastic rings. then some champagne. and that was that. we still have those black rings, and it always makes me smile when i see them.

and today, 8 years later, i can honestly say that i’m loving him on a whole other level. we’ve changed so much the both of us, but for some reason we’ve been able to both grow separately and together. one of my favourite things about our relationship is that we never hold each other back, or try to keep each other from growing or transforming. we encourage each other to evolve. and looking back – i’m so grateful that we’ve done that, since we’re both so much happier and more content than we were back then. and living a life that fits us perfectly. that we’ve consciously chosen for ourselves. there’s really no comparison.

so happy anniversary david babe.

love // jenny