In the latest in our series of life-changing summers, Katie Newton recalls the marriage proposal that was to change her life but not in the way she expected.
Most of the summers of my twenties are indistinguishable from one another. Drinking beer on the verandahs of shabby flats, working various jobs for minimum wage, spending New Year’s Eve at some music festival, in a tent that was inevitably sweltering or flooded. Those years are a big blur of not enough money and way too much fun. Nothing I did was of huge consequence.
Towards the end of that decade, everyone around me began doing things of huge consequence. Making decisions, good ones, the ones society told us we should be making. Getting married, choosing stable, sensible jobs, buying houses in up-and-coming areas. But I still wasn’t ready to think about any of those things, I was more interested in trying, and failing, to recreate Carrie Bradshaw’s wardrobe at Save Mart and staying up all night dancing to Drum n Bass (it was the 2000s).
Then, one summer, unexpectedly, my boyfriend proposed. We had been together for over a decade so it wasn’t completely out of the blue, but we hadn’t discussed it and I didn’t know it was coming. The proposal was sweet; fish n chips and champagne and a beautiful ring, in a spot overlooking the ocean. I said yes, and meant it, because I loved him. And getting married was the thing to do.
A couple of weeks later, we went away on long-planned holiday. Eight weeks backpacking through Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, the longest trip we’d ever taken together. We’d saved a princely sum (I think it was five grand each, including flights) and we set off, giddy with how romantic the whole thing was.
We had a blast – touring temples and lounging on beaches by day, necking 50c beers by night – our Lonely Planet shedding its pages from overuse. We were getting on famously, through the sketchy accommodation and the tummy complaints, the wrong turns and the missed busses. That is, until we’d try and discuss The Wedding. Then we’d fight like a sack of angry cats.
Guest lists. Venues. Suits and white dresses? Fraught, confusing, no and Hell No.
The budget. Oh god, the budget. How much was a cake? Unnervingly, my boyfriend revealed that he hated cake. What kind of person hates cake? Perhaps we could do it on the cheap in the garden of our flat. We’d have to mow the lawn. Could we elope? Would anyone ever speak to us again if we did?
Stress, disagreements, rolling over without saying goodnight. Long, silent bus rides and loud angry dinners. One day we had the The Wedding Argument in a designer fakes market in Siem Reap, which ended with me stalking off down the road, only stopping because I ran out of road to stalk off down. I sat under a large shady tree, seething about how unreasonable it was for him to expect me to invite everyone to our wedding who’d ever invited us to theirs. Then, a bat shat in my hair.
It went on for weeks. Every time we started talking about The Wedding we would argue. Every time we stopped talking about The Wedding, we’d have a lovely time. Eventually we began avoiding the topic. I figured we would get around to discussing it some other day.
Then we got to our last stop. Phu Quoc island off the coast of Cambodia, with only two small restaurants nearby, a handful of beach bungalows and no wifi anywhere (it is not like that anymore). We’d set off on our scooter to go gibbon-spotting in the morning, get lost and have to barter with someone for a few litres of petrol to get home that night. I don’t remember seeing another tourist for days. We were hardly Hillary and Tenzing, but it turned out to be one of those unexpected, truly exciting adventures you could still have before everything was Google-able.
Sitting on a beach on our final night, we both felt altered somehow. Closer, more settled, more sure that we were ready to do big, consequential things. But, we could still not agree on one single aspect of the wedding. It was getting ridiculous.
A baby then?
One of us suggested it, I can’t recall who. But we looked at each other, and instantly agreed. Costly, stressful, easy to muck up? Sure. But it was what we wanted to do next.
Choosing to have that baby was, of course, a life-altering decision, like it is for everyone who’s fortunate enough to get to have a say in such things. But, looking back, choosing to do it before getting married, or buying a house, or having a stable, sensible job, was what really changed me. It might not seem particularly radical, but it showed me that I could do things on my own terms, to trust those gut-deep feelings, and to not worry about what everyone else was doing. It’s really simple stuff but, as the years have rolled on, I’ve found that they are excellent lessons to live by.
This story (so far) has a happy, if unremarkable, ending. We are still together after 26 years, unmarried, with two kids and a dog. We still don’t have sensible, stable jobs; we do have a mortgage on a house in the suburbs. We talk about all sorts of things, and mostly agree. But, even to this day, we do not discuss The Wedding. Some things are just better left unsaid.
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