I am almost twenty years old and I have been engaged for three months. I’m going to give you fair warning this is going to have a whole lot of mushy backstory so if you’re not a romantic, or just ate lunch, this might not be for you. And that’s okay! I know that not everybody wants to hear about this, and frankly I don’t blame you, but I have been asked by so many people since coming back to school about my engagement ring that I just want to put it down on paper for anyone who wants to ask.

So here you go, the story of how I got engaged at nineteen.

My fiancé and I met in middle school. Matthew was a friend of my best friend Trisha and after some not so subtle hints on my part she told me about him. At the time all that entailed was that he had a brother, a sister, and that he was really good at math. But it was enough for sixth grade me to fall head over heels. So the next year when we ended up in the same gym class I knew that this was divine providence interceding on my behalf. It took me months to actually talk to him, and slowly we built up a friendship. I found out that he was horrible at most sports, but he played the piano. He was hilariously funny and made me laugh uncontrollably, even when it wasn’t entirely appropriate. And when we spoke to each other it made me feel special, because when I talked with him he gave his attention so entirely to me and was so enthralled that I felt like he had shifted the world so that I was its new center.

I waited for months for him to say something about how he felt, but nothing happened. I started worrying that maybe he didn’t understand that I liked him, so I became even more overt, which in retrospect was practically a flashing neon sign. On one occasion in particular I brought up the topic of dating in conversation and while staring into his eyes told him that I could only ever see myself with one person. And because he was a teenage boy he still didn’t follow my lead and spent the next four months trying to decide how he could tell me he liked me, when it was very clear I liked someone else.

So on May 3^rd 2010, the end of our seventh grade, Matthew handed me this pretty little red envelope with my name on it and a handwritten poem inside. He had written out a four-page rhyming poem asking me to be his girlfriend. I can practically hear you gagging now, and to make it even more gooey I still have it.

Unfortunately, I had gotten so wrapped up in my plan to steal Matthew’s heart, that I forgot one very important thing. My parents had always told us growing up that our safety was their number one priority, and so when we turned sixteen we could date, or we could drive. But we couldn’t do both and we couldn’t do either until we did turn sixteen. So I stood in the hallway, blushing so profoundly that I looked like a frizzy headed tomato, trying to figure out what I was going to tell Matthew after school. So when I finally saw him coming down the hallway I rushed up to him and in a frenzied slur explained to him that I wanted to date him but wasn’t allowed until I turned 16, and prepared myself for the worst. But instead Matthew just shrugged and said, “okay. I’ll wait.”

And he did.

We spent three years in limbo and during that time he became my best friend. We didn’t go on dates, and he didn’t even hold my hand until a few months after I turned sixteen, but we spent time with each other’s families, talked about what we believed and what we wanted to do with life, and we started to grow up.

So by the time we graduated high school I was in love with my best friend. We were voted class couple, and a few of our friends at school thought we might get engaged before we graduated. Frankly so did I. But we didn’t. High school ended and we prepared to go to our separate colleges, and I waited for him to ask. I knew by then that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him. He was everything I could ask for, and the older I got, the more I saw that he was things that I had never known I needed. I knew he felt the same way, and we had talked about a long engagement during college and waiting to get married until after we graduated. So I couldn’t understand what was holding him back.

Our first year of college was hard, the work was challenging, and the social setting was dramatically different than anything I had ever seen, but the separation was murder. I had grown so accustomed to having him there with me. We had grown up together, and to be on my own was jarring. But as time went on the separation became less palpable and just faded into a dull ache that I still feel now as I’m sitting here typing.

With a full year of college under our belts we spent as much time together over the summer as possible. And as the summer drew to a close and I still wasn’t engaged I realized that I didn’t mind. That I knew that Matthew loved me and I loved him, that our future would be there whenever we got around to it, and finally that there was joy in each stage of our relationship. So I stopped rushing towards the future and relaxed into the present.

Three days after my epiphany, on August 10 2016, Matthew proposed.

We know we’re still young. We have another three to four years before we can even consider getting married. But I look forward to enjoying every minute of it. All of the waiting taught me that I’m not in limbo waiting for my life to start, but I’m in life now, and I get to live it with the most amazing person I could ever ask for by my side.