Holding hands through the Detroit Institute of Art, people seemed to turn and look at us as if we were like those mementos of great art lining the walls, like the huge mural painted in the atrium of the great hall. I caught eyes with one woman who looked first at him and then gave a soft smile at me, as if in the middle of her day, we had reminded her of something. I wondered if we reminded her that true love has little to do with the element of feigned perfection and more to do with the way we walked, talked, laughed, fingers intertwined.
Maybe it was just me, paying attention to how his handsome face and beautiful smile that brings me back to the center, to the reality, to the promise that God made me when I lost love before, has that same impact on anyone that sees him. He doesn't really believe any of this. And that's okay because I am meant to spend the rest of my life with him helping him see his own brilliance.
That is my mission, anyway.
When the ring is slipped on the finger, the stars glitter in the eyes, and the fairytale infiltrates a cold world, there has to be beauty. There has to be violins and angels and love songs. There has to be the hatred of being alone at night wishing for the shared bedroom and pajamas (maybe). There has to be the daydreams. After the browsing through bridal books and thoughts of a shared existence and after the chosen attire, flowers, and festive decor of a reception is long over, there has to be the understanding that love is still very much there. It exists with the frou-frou beginnings into the supposed mundane nature of everyday life - what all this is really for.
That is what I think about now. We are engaged. We are together when before being singly focused on life had been an accustomed state of mind. And here we are...fingers intertwined, his laughter at something silly I've done or said and my gaze on his profile when he doesn't know that I am looking. He has me - hook, line, and sinker.
I gaze at the ring on my finger everyday...cannot leave the house without it now. And that is a gorgeous change for a person that never wears rings and always said she would only wear her wedding ring, should she ever be given one. I notice people looking at it, especially other women, and I think haughtily that their engagement or wedding bands are much plainer than mine. Mine sparkles in the sun like I'm the Queen of England.
The beginning of this thing was strange because, quite frankly, we had no idea what being really engaged looked like. There had been others in and out of our worlds that I think we knew at those times would never share our entire lives when the game-playing ended. But, now? We had rings, a date, a venue for a dance-off reception. We had ideas about a house and three bedrooms/two bathrooms and a fenced in backyard for our five-pound dog. We had meetings and conversations and phone calls with our parents that probably deep down (excuse the French) wondered what the hell we were doing, moving so fast. And then there was us, staring each other down when the raw-ugly humanity surfaced and we realized we hadn't actually met the quintessential perfect partner.
I refused to lose my grip on my umbrella while all this change rained down on our heads. I told him to duck under and ride it out. Because no matter what, after life's raw beauty, there is still beauty - after all.
This is why the engagement cannot lose the romantic. It cannot be shelved so we can treat all this like a contractual agreement. It is why we cannot trade the God designed intent for the humanistic rationalization that downgrades what we and a lot of others are doing and still want to do into a piece of paper with signatures that actually doesn't mean that much.
"A piece of paper doesn't mean that much," I have heard some say. Maybe not, I want to tell them. But what about when you've been co-habitating with someone forever but have no legal justification or standing when something serious happens...or when you think your personal definition of marriage equates to a glorified "friendship with benefits" but still no legal merit (and likely never will be)...or when one of you gets sick and the other just stands back, crying from a hospital corner, left out of decision-making if death is standing in the other corner, inching closer.
On July 24th, while sitting outside at 6 a.m. watching the sunrise in communion with God, I wrote these words:
"The thing that has made this relationship so important in the whole scheme of things, but also so strange, is the need to do what we are both meant to do. We cannot escape what God is mandating. We have approached it wrong...from the side instead of dead on...from the side of the flesh, from the place that cannot enter into a spiritual union. What is it we want from this? Do we want the beautiful, exquisite, unconventional; or do we want the hybrid, the dangerous,the alternative?"
When a thing that is meant to be beautiful, like the paintings in the DIA that are worth more than the building itself, is reduced to simply the human compostion of that thing...broken down into mere brush strokes, grid lines, representations only...the beauty is lost. But when people turn and look, smiling softly, reminded of the grip of love between intertwined fingers, life returns to what it is meant to be.
The artistic touch of a loving and creative God...
We are engaged. Loved. Beautiful. Ready.
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