engagement

I’ve gone back and forth over the years about whether or not I want to get married. At times, I’ve thought marriage was a pointless patriarchal relic, or at least a bureaucratic process that sought to legitimize love through paperwork and ceremonies – none of which sounded very appealing to me. But as I’ve continued to grow, learn, and change, I’ve come to realize that – like many other modern-day traditions – weddings and marriage largely mean a very different thing now than they did at their inception, and that’s a good thing. Creating our own meanings for age-old rituals is one of the most powerful skills I’ve picked up from being a queer feminist.

Matt and I started talking about marriage a little over a year ago. I remember we were in a dimly-lit French restaurant, eating dinner at the bar, and they said something like: “Last week I was chatting with the woman next to me at the Gramercy Tavern, and I told her that my girlfriend lives in Canada, and she said, ‘Why don’t you just get married? It’ll make immigration easier.’ And I thought, why don’t we just get married?”

I was so surprised that I started literally crying into my food and Matt had to calm me down 😂  It was so affirming to hear this because I’d already basically accepted that me and Matt weren’t ever going to get married or be “life partners,” for a variety of life-circumstance reasons – but in my heart, I felt conflicted and sad about it. Of all the people I’ve dated, Matt seemed like the best long-term partner for me I could possibly imagine: we “get” each other on practically every level, make each other laugh all day every day, support each other when times are tough, and had already proven ourselves capable of working through relationship issues as they came up. Part of me had started to feel like, if I couldn’t marry the person I really wanted to marry, maybe I shouldn’t/wouldn’t marry anyone at all. That made me a bit sad, but also, as a queer non-monogamous kinky feminist, I felt I should probably just accept it, and continue living my unconventional life.

So obviously, I felt a lot of feelings when they brought up marriage as not only something we could do but something they wanted to do. This was also shortly after they came out as nonbinary, and they asked me later that night – tearfully, over tiki cocktails – whether I’d have any problem being spouses/life partners with “a gender-weirdo.” My answer: Of course not. They are the gender-weirdo that I love, and want to be with.

It was unclear for a long time exactly when we’d be able to get engaged and then get married, because of complications involving borders, work, and family, among other things – and then when the coronavirus hit, everything was even more up-in-the-air. Fearing oncoming border closures between our two countries (which did indeed happen), we spent 4 months quarantined together in my tiny Toronto apartment (along with my excellent sweetheart of a roommate and her two adorable cats), and it confirmed for us what we already suspected from shorter stretches of time we’d spent together: that we were indeed a good match, even in close quarters, even under dire circumstances.

Matt went back home in mid-July, and by mid-September we were missing each other so much it hurt. We’d never spent that much time apart in the entire course of our relationship (we’ve been blessed to always live only 500 miles apart, or about a 90-minute flight, which we do not take for granted, knowing that many other long-distance couples are not nearly that lucky). One night, on the phone, Matt said, “I’ve been doing research all day, and I have a romantic plan I’d like to propose. Would you like to hear it?” Their voice shook with nerves. I said yes.

They’d discovered a loophole of sorts in the border closure rules. While they were not allowed to fly up to Toronto, I was for some reason allowed to fly to New York (albeit with all the proper precautions, like pre-flight temperature screening, post-flight quarantining, masks, and contact tracing). They could only visit me if we were legal spouses (although this rule has since been overturned, LOL), so they suggested I fly down to see them and we get married. It would be a tiny, COVID-era wedding – just a few guests, socially distanced, with masks on, in a park somewhere. Sometime in the future, post-pandemic (if such a thing exists), we would have a bigger, more traditional wedding, with friends and family and catering and first dances and tossing the bouquet and so on.

I was nervous at first, and took a couple days to think about it – but upon pondering it more, it just made more and more sense to me. We’d wanted this for ages anyway – why not let the pandemic speed it up a little? Why not look the curveball that was COVID dead in the eye and knock it out of the park?

After I booked my plane tickets, we started plotting and planning. Being queer and progressive, we wanted to look critically at the trappings of marriage and decide which pieces we actually cared about and which we wanted to toss out. We talked about rings – I wanted an aquamarine as the central stone, not a traditional diamond (even though diamonds are, weirdly, my birthstone), both because blue has always been a significant color in our relationship and because I just… like blue. We talked about proposals – Matt wanted to do the asking, and I wanted to be asked, which worked out well. (We joked that they’re a “proposal top” and I’m a “proposal bottom.”) They asked what kind of proposal I ideally wanted – public or private? Surprising, or not at all? Lavish or low-key?

We both sorta disdained the whole “asking for your daughter’s hand in marriage” tradition, but I wanted to check with my parents incase it was important to them. (I know a lot of these way-old traditions feel important even if you know they’re irrational or even in direct conflict with your ethics.) I called them and asked, and they both said they didn’t care about that tradition at all because I am my own woman and I get to make my own choices, but that they adored Matt and knew we’d be happy together.

As I prepared for travel, Matt kept dropping inscrutable hints about the plans they were putting into motion. They told me they’d talked to a few jewellers; when they decided on the final ring, they texted photos to several of my friends and sent me screenshots of everyone’s reactions. (My favorite was Brent‘s; he said the ring looked like it had “mythical powers”!) One Saturday, they texted me, “I maybe am standing in the exact spot where I’m gonna propose to you…” I pried for details, but they wouldn’t tell me anything useful. So sneaky!

The day they actually proposed to me was Friday, October 23rd. In the afternoon, we had a Zoom meeting with a New York city clerk, whose job it was to check that we were physically in the same place and had our marriage documentation ready to go. Matt seemed super nervous beforehand, which was very out of character, so I should’ve guessed something was up! The clerk issued us our marriage license over the internet; it was very weird. Then Matt said, “We should go on a date tonight to celebrate! I’ll make some reservations.” Them handling our plans is the norm in our relationship, and part of our D/s dynamic, so it didn’t seem out of the ordinary to me at all that they were planning us a date without asking me for input or telling me where we’d be going.

It also wasn’t out of the ordinary that they picked my outfit. For the Zoom call, they’d put on a nice blue dress shirt that happened to be the same one they were wearing when we met. The dress they chose for me was also the same thing I was wearing on our first date… Again, I should have known something was going on! They put my collar on me, we applied matching lipstick (Tom Ford’s Cherry Lush, a fave), and then we got in an Uber.

I was a bit confused when we pulled up to the High Line, an elevated public park built on an old railway line, because I’d been under the impression we’d be going to a bar or restaurant. “There’s a bar up there,” Matt assured me (reader, there was not). We got into line and there’d been some technical problem with Matt’s reservation (they must’ve been SO freaked out!) but fortunately, the staff let us go up anyway.

The High Line is a special place for us because we hung out there the morning after our 2nd date, chatting, laughing, and basking in New Relationship Energy. At one point we were sitting on a bench and this little girl ran by; pointing at the railway, she asked her parents loudly, “Why are there train tracks?” and we spent a few minutes giggling over the philosophical rabbit hole that that question could be if viewed through a particular lens.

Back in the present, we strolled across the park, holding hands and marvelling at art, architecture, and autumn foliage we saw along the way. Eventually we reached a particularly beautiful lookout point, and Matt stopped walking. I stopped too, assuming they just wanted to take a moment to admire the view. (Although, honestly, a little bit of me was like, “Where’s that bar, tho?!”)

They asked if they could take off my mask for a sec, and they took theirs off too; I assumed they wanted a kiss. But then they got down on one knee. “HEY!” I yelled, caught off-guard.

Kneeling in front of me, they said, “I don’t know why there are train tracks, but I’m glad they led me to you, and to this moment. I’ve got you, I love you, and I want to be with you forever. Kate Sparkle Sloan, will you marry me?” They took out a Tiffany-blue ring box (I remember thinking, “Huh, that’s funny, that jeweller uses the same color as Tiffany’s does,” never once imagining the ring might actually be by Tiffany’s!) and showed me the ring. It was so completely stunning that I gasped. A vivid ice-blue aquamarine, surrounded by two sparkling diamond halos, set on a shining platinum band. Wow! I started crying, obviously. That’s a lot of information to process at once – that the love of your life not only wants to marry you but also bought you the most beautiful piece of jewelry you’ve ever seen!

Memories of this magnitude are really strange in the way the brain encodes them. I felt simultaneously like the entire image would be burned into my brain forever and like I was missing so many important details because I was just too gobsmacked to process anything properly. It’s funny how, even though I already knew they planned on proposing at some point, the actual event still felt shocking and exciting like it had been a total surprise.

I said yes (of course!!), and they tried to slip the ring onto my right hand, so I said, “Doesn’t it go on the other hand?” and we had a funny moment of confusion until we got it right. They stood up and we hugged and kissed. “Bex and Ashe are here somewhere, but I think they got a bit turned around,” Matt said. Indeed, my best friend Bex and his partner Ashe – who is also a pal of ours and happens to be a professional photographer with a lot of proposals/weddings in their portfolio – had come to surprise me! The plan had been for Ashe to photograph the actual proposal, but the High Line is a super confusing place so they hadn’t actually made it there in time. But, by some ridiculous stroke of luck, a woman who happened to be walking by had snapped a few shots of the proposal on her phone, and came up to us a couple minutes afterward to ask if we’d like to have them. She AirDropped them to me and I was so grateful for her kindness!

Ashe and Bex finally caught up with us, and I cried even more when I saw them. Ashe, who is super professional, skilled, and brilliant, directed us through a re-creation of the proposal, which fortunately we were able to pull off pretty well, perhaps because of both having grown up doing theatre…! Then we strolled along the rest of the High Line doing an impromptu engagement photoshoot (well, I guess it was only impromptu from my perspective), Ashe directing us the whole way and making us feel cute as hell.

At some point, a random man came up to us (wearing a mask) and yelled, “Congratulations!!! …from six feet away, of course.” It was so funny. I love New Yorkers.

After that, the four of us went to La Bain – the rooftop bar on top of the Standard High Line hotel, where we stayed on our second date – and got celebratory drinks and snacks. (Matt had champagne, I had a dirty martini, we split some oysters, yummm.) I carefully crafted an Instagram post announcing the engagement, and it immediately started to get a lot of, um, engagement. We both called our parents and told them the good news. I also talked to my brother, who told me Matt had showed him the ring a while back and that he’d thought it was perfect for me. (It is!)

After drinks, we said good night to our pals and made our way to Upland, the glowy golden restaurant where we had dinner on our second date. It was so special and magical to revisit a place that has taken on such massive mythological meaning in my mind over the years. I felt just as nervous and excited as I did on that date, just in altogether different ways. We spent much of our meal giggling over proposal logistics and swilling champagne that the restaurant thoughtfully brought over for us.

The whole night made me feel incredibly loved and valued – by Matt, and by our friends and family. It was such a wonderful evening of closeness and joy in a year that has otherwise been defined (for me and for everyone) by distance and worry. I’m overcome with gratitude to Matt for loving me this much and showing me their love so tangibly and frequently. I’m excited I get to spend forever showing them my love too! ❤️