Category Archives: engaged in the d

[engaged in the D] Agnes and Ken – Engaged in Corktown

by Steph | Leave a comment

I was so excited to hear from Agnes, the photographer from the LoveintheD + Peacock Room vintage wedding photoshoot, recently! She and Ken recently became engaged.

Below is the proposal story, as told by Ken:

From the beginning of our relationship, Agnes has been showing me around the city. I’ve lived in and around Detroit most of my life, but I never fully appreciated it. On top of that, she’s an artist (a photographer); she sees the world through a different lens. And, through her lens, I’ve seen things I’ve never seen before. There’s beauty all around Detroit, and I’ve been missing out. I’m grateful to her for opening my eyes.

One of her great loves is for the graffiti around the city (something we now share). So, when thinking of a way to propose to her, her love for the city and her love of graffiti led to the grand idea of “tagging” my proposal to her somewhere downtown. There was, however, one minor problem: I have NO artistic ability. None. Whatsoever. So, to approach this seemingly insurmountable problem, I did what any left-brain person would do: I researched, organized and planned my way through it. After all of that, one cold Fall night, after the bars had closed, I went downtown and sacrificed a night of sleep to try to impress my girlfriend enough to say “yes”. She would NOT have been impressed with how ridiculous I looked (ski mask, thermal gear, miner’s light, the whole nine yards).

proposal_agnes_ken

The result of all of this work can be found in a 40-foot strip in the parking lot just south of Mercury Burger Bar in Corktown. Corktown was where we had our second date, and many dates since. Good restaurants, good vibe, up and coming. It’s a microcosm of all of the good that’s going on in the city. If we’re not in our home towns, that’s likely where you’ll find us. Now, my heart was in the right place, but I did vandalize that parking lot.

So, in trying to make things right, I reached out to the owner of the lot, who is also the owner of Slows Bar-B-Q and told him what I had done. I expected a harsh reprimand, but what I got was graciousness. He was more concerned about Agnes’s answer to my proposal than he was about his lot. Needless to say, through that act of kindness, Slows Bar-B-Q has won itself two patrons for life.

By the way, she said yes.
Processed with VSCOcam with c1 preset

[engaged in the D] Meet Sarah and Nick, rooftop wedding couple!

by Steph | 1 Comment

Apologies for the long long long gap in between blog posts. There is a reason why, I promise! Anyway, here is a great post for you. Sarah and Nick are planning their Detroit wedding for next year, and LoveintheD was able to interview them about their planning process! Sarah is also blogging about all the steps in her planning process – check it out here.

Sarah and Nick, tell us about your engagement! How long have you known each other? How did the proposal take place?

We met when we were 16 while camping in Port Huron and found out we lived only a few miles from each other. We became instant friends, and continued to keep in contact throughout college. It wasn’t until we were 21 that we started dating, and found out that we’d secretly liked each other the whole time. Two and a half years later I convinced him to conquer one of his greatest fears and go skydiving with me. He is currently attending medical school in the Caribbean so we had to plan it during one of his breaks between semesters. This poor guy flew home all day Thursday and Friday, and less than 24 hours after landing was sent on another plane to jump out of.

We strapped in, ascended, and leapt from 10,000 feet in the air – and had the most exhilarating experience! Nick had jumped first, and when he landed was struggling to take the ring out of his pocket. His harness made it impossible, and he wasn’t able to ask me when I landed. 
Once we broke free of our harnesses, Nick asked to take a little walk to the top of the hill next to the field. I’d assumed it was because he needed to walk off his adrenaline rush. It wasn’t until he started babbling at the top while holding my hands that I knew – and he dropped to one knee with the ring of my dreams. I said yes and pulled him back up to kiss me!
It’s hard to believe that the day we went skydiving, it wasn’t jumping out of a plane which was the most exciting.

Sarah_Nick_

Why did you decide to get married in Detroit? What does Detroit mean to you?

Location was actually a difficult decision for us. With him currently in medical school, we could be anywhere in the country next year. It came down to the decision of having either a small wedding with our guests traveling to us, or a bigger wedding with us traveling to our guests. Family and friends are the most important things to us, and we decided to keep it where they are. And that’s exactly what Detroit means to us – family and friends.

How has supporting local businesses factored into your process of exploring vendors so far? What have been some challenges?

Local businesses have been a huge part of planning for us. When exploring vendors, it seems local businesses are the only ones that have something truly unique to offer! We have yet to book with anyone yet though as we are still hashing out venue details, so I can’t speak to challenges quite yet. But here are our considerations:

  • Nick and I have some weird/unique hopes for what our wedding will be, so we have been searching for vendors that can help us along with that. Him and I are both big nerds, so for the shower (themed all things geek) we’ve found someone who actually lives down the street from my parents who makes amazing and elaborate cakes.
  • We’re also looking into a student videographer who has amazing talent but still needs to build their portfolio for life after graduation. We’ll be reaching out to CCS as well as other local colleges to help our search.
For music, we have our hearts set on a live band (but have yet to pick one). We’ve started countless Google and YouTube searches for local bands and, once we have the location/date set, will be reaching out to a few.
  • The ceremony/reception venues up for consideration (and are currently speaking with) are rooftops in Downtown Detroit. We’re hoping an indoor ceremony in the building, with the reception on the rooftop. Our song since we were 16 has been “Rooftops” by LostProphets, so we have hearts set on making that dance a magical moment.

What other socially conscious elements are you hoping to incorporate into your Detroit wedding?

Neither Nick nor myself are religious people, so we are looking for an officiant who will take the focus away from religion and bring it to the promise between the two of us. We will also have my gay friend standing in our wedding, so it’s important the officiant supports that lifestyle as well. We also do not care about the gender, race, religion, etc. of our vendors – so long as the quality and price align with what we want, we will support any business.

Hooray for blogging! How did you decide to start a blog about your wedding process and how is it going so far? Any update on your venue search?

There were multiple reasons I decided to start a blog! First, I wanted some way to document this whole process; as I’ve heard over and over about how much effort it takes and how quickly it flies by. Second, I realized that Nick and I would not be having your typical church-hall wedding and thought my planning experiences could help anyone going through the same thing. Third (tacking on to the second point), since we would not be having a typical wedding, I knew we wouldn’t be having typical vendors. My blog could help them gain some business for the future, and I loved the idea of being able to help them out. Lastly, blogging is a great way to connect with a close-knit community and I’ve always wanted to be a part of that.

And so far, I think it’s going pretty well! I only have 10 subscribers so far, but I’ve caught on really quickly with the design capabilities and the voice I want to have. I’ll admit, my posts are pretty long and no-good for our Twitter-snippet information processing these days, but I’m proud of them. I try to incorporate pictures, memes, and gifs anywhere I can – all of which are my favorite part of any blog.

So what’s the update on the venue search?

The choices are now down to the Detroit Opera House or Music Hall. Both offer theater weddings and the rooftop reception we want. After tomorrow I will have met with both, and we will start the comparison process to see which is our best fit.

For anyone else looking at rooftops, we’ve checked out a bunch and found most won’t accept the wedding business. One was residents only, one was corporate only, one didn’t take private weekend events, one even specifically didn’t allow weddings.

[engaged in the D] How I made my own lace wedding dress

by Steph | 2 Comments

Welcome guest blogger Katherine back to LoveintheD! To read her first guest post, click here. Curious about how Katherine made her own wedding dress for her Detroit wedding? Read on for her dress story!

When I told people about my intentions to make my own wedding dress, despite never having made any kind of dress ever in my life, they thought I was a little nuts. They said totally logical things like “I would be scared!” and “what will you do if it doesn’t work?” and “that sounds stressful and complicated!”

“I just don’t want you to be in a panic a week before the wedding because you have nothing to wear…” said my sweet, and extremely reasonable, fiancee.

• •

Despite it being a very large project, I can honestly say that the wedding dress was the least stressful of my many DIY projects for the wedding (aside: just because you’ve seen other people screen print, that does not mean you are ready to screen print your wedding invites). One of the reasons it was so low-stress is that I started very early. Another is that my wedding dress was never going to be exactly “traditional.” So go ahead and get that big white cake of a dress out of your head right now.

I actually didn’t set out to make my own wedding dress, and first found a seller on Etsy who made dresses that I thought might fit my criteria (eco-friendly, not white, dripping with sentimentality, LACE, budget-friendly) but one night while pursuing my options and dreaming I suddenly thought: “Wait. I can do that!”

Wedding dress1

Left: Dress base made of a slip and a loose skirt dyed green / Right: Early sample layout for dress that was ultimately abandoned as too busy 

My dress (much like the ones I liked on Etsy) uses a slip as a base, which eliminated a lot (though not all) of the complicated fitting process. I also relied heavily on trusted friends with more experience than me to consult me. Garment creation is often more complicated than it looks on the outside, so it was great to be able to call friends and ask: “Will this work?” Sometimes, the answer was: “Not exactly…” and I had to modify my plan slightly.

I did not use a pattern. Instead, I collected the pieces (shout out to Amy at Smallcraft for helping me get lace!) the dress would be made of and worked on the layout by pinning them together over and over again.

By far the most tedious portion was the lace sewing. Most lace needs to be sewn by hand in order to avoid unattractive bunching. I actually love hand-sewing, so this wasn’t a huge problem for me. I also found that a lot of wedding planning feels rushed, so it was great (for me) to have some forced downtime making slow and steady progress. It felt very romantic! However, if you are thinking of doing this yourself, be forewarned that I probably clocked at least 50 hours with a needle and thread in my hand.

wedding dress 2

My finished dress pictured with my partner Chelsea’s dress

Readers: Have you ever sewn your own clothing? Would you consider making your own wedding dress?

Meet Dana & Joe – Engaged in the D

by Steph | 5 Comments

I am excited to introduce a new guest LoveintheD blogger – Dana! She and Joe were engaged on June 8 and have started to plan their Detroit wedding. Dana is also a Detroit blogger: check out the Miss Detroit blog!

Dana_Joe

Dana shares the engagement story:

For months, I had been pestering Joe about getting engaged, or at least getting a hint for when he was planning to do it. He kept putting me off, telling me he couldn’t afford it now and it would happen when the time was right. Even our friends kept telling me that he was trying hard to save his money and that I needed to be patient. They did such a great job at convincing me that it wouldn’t happen for another year or two, so I began to settle down. Little did I know, they were all in on the planning…

The week leading up to Saturday, June 8th, Joe kept asking if I would go for a walk with him on the Dequindre Cut when I got off of work at my weekend retail job, where I was schedule to work Saturday afternoon. Since I knew I would be on my feet for six straight hours, I was not committing to this walk he had been trying to plan.

The day of June 8th, Joe begged me to call into work and take the afternoon off to spend with him, but I insisted on going.  When I arrived home that evening, Joe asked again if I wanted to go for a walk on the Dequindre Cut, and I finally relented. We began a nice stroll where Joe kept mentioning the murals along our walk. We approached one that he said was his favorite, and knowing that I was brainstorming for blog posts on Miss Detroit, asked if he could take my photo in front of this mural.

Once I was standing in front of the mural and had turned around to face him, I saw Joe with his phone out, as though he was going to take my picture, but there was a white box in his hand. I realized he was recording the moment, when he kept his phone up and got down on one knee. I was shocked as I heard the words I’d been longing to hear exit his mouth: “Will you marry me?”

Of course, I said yes! Afterward, he instructed me to call my parents, who were waiting to hear from me and planning to have dinner with us. Joe also mentioned that after dinner we would be meeting our friends for drinks at the Old Miami. It still puts a big smile on my face to think about this amazing evening he surprised me with!

We are still in the process of setting a date; because we love Detroit so much, location rather than date is more important to us. We want to provide our guests with a uniquely Detroit wedding experience that will exemplify our love for the city and each other.

Readers: Share your Detroit engagement stories in the comments section!

Psssst. Are you following LoveintheD on Twitter? Check out the twitter feed.

 

Forging wedding bands, forging a new path together (Part Two)

by Steph | 3 Comments

Today’s Engaged in the D blog post is by Christopher Holt, who is engaged to Melissa Damaschke. Check out Part One here and read about their engagement story here.

Jewelry is delicate and precious. However, I’ve come to admire the brute force that goes into its making. It’s a bit like childbirth: there’s grunting, careful monitoring, blood, placenta, the force of contractions and labor, the smacking of a newborn bum, crying and all that, but in the end you have this precious delicate life. Minus the blood and a few other things there is an element of brutality in making jewelry.

ringd

How do you think the ring gets that nice round shape? You hammer the sucker. You hammer it into that ring-like shape and hammer the ends as close together as possible. Did they get out of line with each other? Put the metal in the vice and tap the sides ’till they’re even with each other. Then repeat. Then you solder the ends together. Now this piece of metal that once looked like, well just a piece of tiny metal, is starting to look more and more like an actual ring. I’ve seen ultrasound images of fetuses in the womb and thought, “Ok. Where the hell is the baby?”  Not until later does the freakish cluster of cells become recognizably human.  Up to this point, one might ask, “Ok. Where the hell is the ring?”

We  now arrive at the point where Melissa took my ring-fetus and hammered it into a ring-baby.

Our Mistress of Metallurgy introduced us to this thick metal rod that was tapered to a point. It was a little shorter than my forearm. Using her demonstration ring, she slid it ‘round the tapered the end and wedged it a few inches onto the rod.  Ring sizes were engraved up and down this tool. She demonstrated what we had to do and Melissa was first.

ringe

With the grace of a ballet dancer, the muscle of a valkyrie, and the focus of a laser-beam, Melissa hammered my ring into existence. She slid it off the rod and I slid it onto my finger. I shook my hand wildly to see if it would fall off. It flew across the store. This act was repeated about four times before the ring fit my finger comfortably.

Upon my turn, I raised the tool with my left hand and the hammer with my right.  Like the Greek god Hephaestus, I brought my hammer down upon the ring not once, not twice, but several times. Many, many times in fact.

Repeatedly.

Until finally, the gold and silver that were once divorced, were once again united in a perfect, perpetual circle, soldered together by the suave hunk that is marrying Melissa Damaschke.

We spent the next 10-20 minutes sanding and polishing the rings giving them a slightly grey finish. (Neither of us wanted anything too shiny or glossy).  Julie permitted us to use the photo set-up she has to take the picture you see here.  When all was said and done we were there for about five hours with a break for lunch.  We can’t thank Julie Sanford of Studio JSD enough for her patient guidance, talent, and encouragement.  If there are any couples considering doing such an activity together for their rings, we highly recommend doing it.

And we didn’t have to forge our rings in Mordor.

ringf

Readers: What do you think of the idea of making rings for one another as an engaged couple? How would you design your own unique ring?

Forging wedding bands, forging a new path together (Part One)

by Steph | 3 Comments

This week’s Engaged in the D guest post is by Christopher Holt, who is engaged to Melissa Damaschke. Read about their engagement story here.

Part One

Melissa doesn’t have an engagement ring. Not because I’m a cheap jerk but because 1) She doesn’t wear much jewelry in the first place and 2) She takes issue with the diamond industry.

So, instead of buying wedding bands, we thought it’d be more meaningful and rewarding to make each other’s rings. Now, by “make” I don’t mean “have someone make it for us.” Rather, I make her wedding band and she makes mine. Melissa was quick to research our options and found the only place in Michigan that offers couples the opportunity to do just, which is Studio JSD located in Grand Haven.  Julie Sanford, owner of Studio JSD, was more than accommodating to our purpose. In fact, we were able to have the entire studio and her attention all to ourselves. Julie makes all kinds of jewelry and we can’t recommend her and her artwork enough. I shall call her our Mistress of Metallurgy.

Melissa’s ring carries a second layer of meaning. Her parents divorced when she was 13 thereby rendering their wedding rings moot. However, they had the forethought (or respect) to keep them. Melissa’s mom is remarried.  After her dad died a few years ago, Melissa took to wearing his wedding ring on occasion. While it’s not really her style, it still holds sentiment. Despite having each of her parents’ defunct wedding rings, she didn’t know what to do with them.  It wasn’t until the night before we left for Grand Haven that it occurred to her that she should melt them down and recast them into her own wedding ring.  She got the OK from her mom and brother (out of respect for their feelings) and the decision was made.

My ring would be cast from new material. Melissa would make mine and I would make hers. We agreed that the other would approve of the ring each step of the way so there would be no surprises.

Our Mistress of Metallurgy guided us step-by-step through the entire process. Given the fact that Melissa’s ring was to come from two existing pieces of jewelry, my tasks required a little more time, so the three of us started on the rings together. I admit I was uneasy about sawing the diamond off of my future mother-in-law’s gold wedding ring. However, as I was doing that, Melissa was busy removing/tapping/bending/hammering out the small stones that were epoxied into her dad’s silver ring. This put things into perspective and I proceeded with confidence.

Hammers and saws are fun but blow-torches are more fun.

ringa

We took our turns melting the other’s metals into liquid form inside a crucible.  Melting-down metals is nothing new of course but if you have never altered the physical properties of a piece of metal before, you’re missing out.  Sure, there’d be soldering involved later on, but in this case we take something recognizable, admired, worn, and cherished, and reduce it to a scalding hot blister. At risk of sounding overdramatic:  these rings were on the fingers of two people figuratively inside a crucible.  And now, some twenty years later, these same rings are literally inside a crucible only to experience a very different outcome.  There’s something even more profound going on here.  Melissa hasn’t come out and said it directly, but there’s the clear suggestion of forging a new beginning; a way to acknowledge and learn from the past and how she can perceive herself and future decisions in relation to that. She is the sole owner of her destiny.

Melissa is my sweet, sweet, Nitzschean Übermensch. Or ÜberFrau.

ringb

Melted into small tiny rods the size of pretzels a president might choke on while watching a football game, these metals lack all the glamour and emotion associated with their purpose. There is a mechanical device – not unlike a penny stretching machine – through which these tiny rods are cranked and thereby stretched.  We crank our metal rods through this device several times.  Sometimes, however, the rods resist our efforts and must be taken to be blowtorched. This does something to the atoms inside the metal that makes it easier to crank them through the machine.  When the metal is glowing red from the blowtorch, we pick-up the metal with tweezers and drop it into a bowl of cool water. This makes a sound not unlike the one you might imagine is produced when a portal to another dimension seizes shut.

ringc

The anvil we used was not manufactured by the Acme Company, nor was it dropped on anyone’s head. It was satisfying, though, to lay the rod (or in my case, two rods) of metal and tap the texture into it.  Melissa is an environmentalist – a tree hugger. So, for my ring,  I asked her to create a texture similar to tree bark. She liked the idea so much, that that’s how I textured hers.  We used hammers designed for such work, carefully holding the metal in place and even more carefully not hammering our fingers.

Want to check out the rest of Chris & Melissa’s ring-making process and the beautiful end results? Part Two is coming next week!

[engaged in the d] Bride on Bride – Part Two

by Steph | Leave a comment

Bride on Bride: Patriarchy, Bride Culture, and Space to Be Queer
Part Two

Engaged in the D blog post by Katherine [Read Part One]

…So we had to find other ways to plan our wedding, ways that didn’t require us to designate one partner as the bride and the other as secondary. We had to try to figure out how to play to our individual strengths while supporting each other and checking in with each other. Because we both identify as “brides” and neither of us feels like a “groom”, this might have been easier for us than for some straight couples. I’m not actually sure. Like I said, I’ve never gotten married before.

We’ve been taking on individual tasks where we can, doing a lot together, and trying to be honest about what we are capable of. I’ve heard it said that nothing will test the staying power of your relationship quite like planning a wedding, and that might be true. I’ll be honest – it isn’t all lovey-dovey. We’ve certainly had our share of disagreements. We try to remember that our wedding, like our marriage, isn’t something one person is doing and the other is going along with. It’s something we are doing together. It should reflect that.

That doesn’t mean that we both have to do every single thing. For example, Chelsea gets kind of freaked out by numbers, and I get kind of freaked out by making phone calls. One of our first agreements about the wedding was that she is in charge of calling people, and I’m in charge of drawing up the budget. Sometimes I’m a bit more planning-oriented than she is, which means that often times I’ve been the one bringing ideas to the table, and then we make decisions together. But it’s not exclusively like that, and I don’t make decisions about the wedding without her, or vice versa. I won’t sign up for any site that offers me a “community of other brides” and asks me to list us as “Katherine” first and “and her partner Chelsea” second. It may seem like a little thing, but language matters.

• •

It feels particularly important because we are trying to do this whole getting married thing as ethically as possible. One of our biggest values as a couple is being in an egalitarian partnership, and one of the best things about our particular egalitarian partnership (we’ve both said this, at various points) is that we help to push each other to live according to our values. So when we discussed the possibility of hiring a caterer, we needed to talk to each other about what our ethical requirements would be for that (local business? locally sourced ingredients? plant-based foods? where is it ok to compromise and where is compromise off the table?) and how that would play out before we could look into any specific options. We aren’t either of us perfect, and our wedding won’t be perfect either.

But for it to be the best that it can be, we need to be doing it together.

 • •

Readers: Are you and your fiancé/e splitting up the wedding planning tasks? If so, how?

[engaged in the d] Bride on Bride – Part One

by Steph | 1 Comment

Bride on Bride: Patriarchy, Bride Culture, and Space to Be Queer
Part One

Engaged in the D blog post by Katherine

First, a confession: Sometimes I spend a lot of time on Facebook. It can be both a useful tool for staying connected with people, and a time-suck that drains all of one’s emotional energy and leaves one sort of generically angry and displeased with the world, and yeah, I use it for both. Now that that’s out of the way.

Last year, before I was engaged, nearly all the ads I saw on Facebook were for engagement rings. That’s not particularly surprising, I’m a mid-late twenty-something, and I listed myself as “in a relationship”, I’m sure without knowing anything else about me, that made me part of the prime market for such a thing as far as the algorithms were concerned. It did feel a little eerie, though, to see those ads all the time, while I was nervously ordering Chelsea’s ring and planning the proposal.

And then, I proposed. And then, yeah, we had to change our relationship status on the internet. It was easier than calling every single person we know.

And then, like magic, the ring ads disappeared.

What came next was an awful lot of ads to help us plan our wedding. I’ve never planned a wedding before (first and only time doing this!) and so I found myself wondering which, if any, of these sites that were being advertised would be helpful to me. I even clicked a couple of them.

And then the problem became apparent. Did I say “ads to help us plan our wedding?” because that isn’t actually correct. I meant “ads to help me plan my wedding.” That’s when I discovered what I now refer to as “Bride Culture.”

Bride Culture is the culture of immense pressure put specifically on engaged women. It was that the wedding is mostly about the woman, mostly about the dress. It says that everything has to be perfect, and by perfect, we of course mean perfect according to your 8-year-old self who watched too many princess movies, regardless of whether or not your values and goals have changed since then. Bride Culture assumes that your wedding is the most important day of your life, and that it is planned by the Bride (and maybe her mother) with very limited input from whom she is marrying.

And just in case it isn’t obvious, Bride Culture is definitely part of patriarchy.

• •

Now I don’t have a problem with how anyone else has their relationship, or how anyone else plans their wedding. If you determine that one partner has more interest in or time for planning the event than the other partner, cool, that person should probably plan it! If that person happens to be a lady, that’s cool too. The problem that I have is the cultural assumption that women are the ones planning weddings, and the implication that there are these crowds of disinterested partners (mostly grooms, but I found the same assumptions on plenty of gay wedding sites as well) just waiting in the wings for their blushing brides to finish making all the decisions.

Put quite simply, it just wasn’t us.

• •

Want to learn how Katherine and Chelsea have shifted away from the Bride Culture paradigm in their wedding planning process? Come back to LoveintheD next week to read more!

Engaged in the D – Meet the LoveintheD guest bloggers!

by Steph | 4 Comments

I am excited to announce that LoveintheD has four new guest bloggers! All of them are engaged people planning their weddings in Detroit. Katherine will be one of the guest bloggers, Roland will be another, and Chris and Melissa are planning to write some posts together as a team!

Are you as excited as I am to hear what they have to say about their wedding planning experience? I anticipate that you, the LoveintheD readers, will get to read all about making weddings as close to zero waste as possible, learning how to make a wedding dress, and ways to keep costs down and support local vendors.

Meet the “Engaged in the D” guest bloggers for Loveinthe D.

Katherine and Chelsea engagement pic

Katherine & Chelsea

Wedding date: Friday, September 6, 2013

Katherine tells the engagement story:

It was the end of December, the last full moon of the year. Shortly after Chelsea and I started dating, we started celebrating full moons together as often as possible. In the summer, sometimes we’d pack a picnic. In the colder months, typically we’d take a walk. So, two days after Christmas, I came home from visiting my family in Lansing, and I asked her if she would like to take a walk with me. The sky was perfectly clear. My heart was about to fly out of my chest. She said that sounded nice.

I mulled some wine and we set out. I am not very good at keeping secrets or surprises, especially with people I am close to, because I want to tell them everything. I was so certain I would give my purposes away at any moment, but somehow it didn’t happen. On the walk we talked about past full moons, about how we’ve grown together, about how funny it now seems that we were once shy and nervous around one and other all the time, and about the idea of building a future on this foundation of love and support. I steered us towards one of my favorite pedestrian bridges, so we could look at the moon. Then I took a candle out of my pocket, only to discover that my lighter was broken.

So I had to read my speech by moonlight.

I won’t reproduce it here or anywhere, but it was about how being with her has made me a better person, and I want to keep growing with her. She smiled, just thinking I was being romantic and sweet, until the end. At the end, I offered to spend all of my days with her, and asked for the favor of getting to share hers. I watched her hands creep up over her face. And it was at that romantic moment that I realized, I hadn’t got out the ring yet, and in all of my planning, I’d never decided if I was going to kneel! The ring is beautiful (plug for Emily Wiser, who made the ring and is making my engagement ring, and our wedding bands as well) and also ethical and personal. It’s all recycled gold, and the stone is a small moonstone. One of the old legends about moonstones is that, if you give one to your lover on the full moon, it will strengthen your bond and make your relationship more enduring.

She said yes. We’re getting married on September Sixth, Two Thousand Thirteen.

Chris_Melissa beach

Chris & Melissa

Wedding date: Saturday, July 20, 2013 at the Detroit Yacht Club 

Chris tells the engagement story:

I didn’t propose to Melissa. We arrived at a consensus. Melissa Damaschke, enivronmentalist, feminist, progressive, and protector of the Great Lakes, did not want to be “asked” to be a man’s wife. I knew this and other things from the many discussions we’ve had on the subject for the last six years. However, the term “consensus” was a recent development. Nonetheless, in October 2012, recognizing a marriage would be somewhere in our near future, we fell into a life of Sinful Living with all its temptations: sharing an address, splitting bills, and passive/aggresively leaving dishes in the sink. I don’t make enough money as a piano teacher and part-time art teacher to have surprised her with a really nice diamond ring.   This is acceptable, however, as Melissa didn’t want a diamond given the complicated and violent world of the diamond trade. Infact, lucky me, she’s not really into jewelry.

Saturday morning, November 3rd 2012, Melissa and I were running errands one of which was a stop at SOCCRA (the recycling center in Troy/Royal Oak on Coolidge). After we dumped a few boxes of paper, plastic, and glass we returned to the car. I turned down the volume of the stereo and reached for her hands. I said, “I’d like to put forth a vote on us getting married.” She laughed and said, “Seriously, Holt? You’re doing this here?!” I replied in the affirmative. “Where else does one reach a consensus with Melissa Damaschke?”  She laughed again and said yes. No ring, just a simple question put forth to the vote.  When we got home, I pulled-out a twist tie.  Wrapping it around her finger I said, “This is what you get for marrying a poor musician. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Now, we’re looking forward to our Green Detroit wedding!

matthew and roland

Roland and Matthew

Engagement story coming soon!

Engaged readers: What are the highlights from your wedding planning process thus far?