1. How long you were dating?
I'm a guy. Am I supposed to remember?
The scary thing is... I'm half serious... I mean, I can work backwards and try to figure out roughly when it would've had to have been, but for the exact date, I'd have to check with my wife (there, gave away the ending).
OK, so doing the math... we got married (takes ring off and looks at date) about 5 years ago, so we'd been together for 4 years before the marriage... we were engaged about a year, so we'd been together 3 years when I popped the question.
She was caught completely by surprise. I did the traditional stuff. Didn't ask her dad, though... no poetry either. I was never in doubt about the answer. I knew she was the one for me less than a month after I met her. She took a bit more time, but I'd say within a year both of us knew that we wanted to get married someday, although it wasn't anything we really discussed. Sure, very vague hints were dropped every now and then, but I pretended to completely ignored them.
The proposal itself went off pretty much exactly as I had planned, except for one thing. I needed to get some champagne glasses at the last moment, which meant getting her out of her place, because that's where they were. I told her that I'd left something at the laundromat and asked if she'd go check for me (it was *very* close, took her all of 5 minutes). The request certainly confused her (why the f*ck didn't I go check myself), but since I'm not in the habit of asking her to do stuff for me, she figured I must've had a good reason (which I did, of course).
I did make one significant mistake: Because I proposed at my place and because she had no clue what was coming, she wasn't dressed for the occasion. That didn't bother me one bit and it certainly wasn't something that had even remotely entered into my mind. It did bother her, though, so with 20/20 hindsight, I probably should have taken her out first - or maybe invited her out, asked her to meet me at my place and then popped the question.
I'm actually not 100% sure she ever answered the question. I do remember a lot of crying, though.
We didn't live together until right before we got married. We spent a good portion of the 6 months leading up to our marriage trying to find a good place.
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