You know how when something happens to you, suddenly you start to notice it happening all over your little personal universe? Like when you learn a new word and all of a sudden it’s everywhere, or when you discover a new plant you love and immediately start to recognize it in places you’ve always frequented but never really noticed?

That’s kind of how I feel about being a lesbian who is engaged!

For so long, I felt like none of my friends or community members were engaged or married, and suddenly when I became engaged it felt like everyone was getting engaged and/or married! I’m sure this was already happening in the background of my life and I just didn’t notice, but it’s been really fun to connect with other queers who are engaged because everyone does things so differently and it’s helpful and interesting to learn other people’s reasoning and thought processes around things that the mainstream (heteronormative, patriarchal) culture assumes are just set in stone. Nothing is set in stone! You can do whatever you want!

So if you’re wondering what some queer people who aren’t me are thinking about when it comes to getting engaged and wedding planning (or not wedding planning), this installment of Blush and Bashful is for you.

Adrienne & Jenny

Do what YOU want to do! Have a long engagement if you want! Elope if you want! Have a chihuahua walk you down the aisle!

Did you expect to get married in your life?

I never expected to get married! I’ve never been very conventional and never had dreams or fantasies of marriage when I was younger, a wedding, having kids, the whole thing. I am still very happily childless (other than my two chihuahua sons) and rather indifferent about marriage. Additionally, I have been out since I was 15, and while I have had some queer friends get married, I have also escaped being inundated with the Marriage Industrial Complex. I’ve been in exactly one wedding, which was a queer wedding and involved me as a member of the wedding party walking down the aisle in a dress that I selected with a chihuahua in a tuxedo as my companion. I am a university professor, and one of my graduate students was telling me she had three weddings to travel to and spend money on just in Winter Term alone! I find the whole normative pressure of needing to have weddings be a certain way to be incredibly stressful!

Tell me about the proposal.

The proposal was very special and meaningful. I have been fortunate and privileged enough to have access to potentially the most beautiful place on earth — a slice of farmland on the Umpqua River in Roseburg, Oregon. I spent my childhood summers there with my grandparents and have been traveling there annually every year to camp out for my birthday. 2020 was the last summer I had access to the ranch before it was sold, which is a huge loss I am still processing today. My partner Jenny and I traveled there for our birthdays (Leo Femme 4 Leo Femme) in 2020 and she planned a huge surprise and had me spend time down at the river while she decorated the popup tent trailer. When I came back up, she proposed to me. It was the sweetest and most heartfelt thing ever. It was so deeply meaningful to have the proposal take place somewhere that is the most important place in the world to me.

What’s the most surprising thing so far about being engaged?

Other people’s expectations! We have had a long engagement, which I feel great about, and do not want to have a wedding. People have been really perplexed about us not wanting to have a wedding.

Are you planning a wedding?

No, we are going to elope and take a trip to Mexico in June. We have many reasons for not wanting a wedding, but I would say the most prescient are finances and both of us being introverted. We will be self-funding anything we do, without family support, so it just made the most sense for us to spend money traveling instead of on a big party for other people. I have had so much fun at other people’s weddings, it makes sense when people have them! It just isn’t for us. In my former life, I was a social butterfly party girl and may have really liked having a wedding. A combination of the lasting effects of chronic illness, sobriety from alcohol, and pandemic stunting socialization have made me introverted!

What would you say is your “reasoning” for getting engaged?

Wanting the legal protections of a marriage and wanting to say “my wife” in an aggressively homosexual way!

If you could give One Hot Tip to other queers before they got engaged, what would it be?

Do what YOU want to do! If wearing a fluffy white dress and having a more traditional wedding is what you want, then do it! But do not feel pressured to have the queer version of Say Yes To The Dress if that does not resonate. Have a long engagement if you want! Elope if you want! Have a chihuahua walk you down the aisle!

Kayla & Kristen

My very wise friend Christina keeps saying during the wedding planning process: “You are never gonna make everyone happy, so why not make yourselves happy?”

Did you expect to get married in your life?

I rather actively insisted I would never get married during the period of my life when I was closeted. I even wrote about it in an op-ed for my college’s newspaper. It’s funny, because the surface level interpretation there is that sure, I didn’t want to get married to a man. But when I look back on that piece, I see a more nuanced thing happening where the subtext was that I was uncomfortable with the heteronormative institution of marriage. I couldn’t imagine other possibilities yet, because I hadn’t come out as queer. Once I came out, I was like oh yeah, I want this. And I won’t pretend like I’m embarking on some radical alt wedding path, but I am doing things in a way that feel specific to me and my partner, our relationship, and the queer communities we belong to. I never could have imagined that for myself before. Coming out unlocked my queer imagination.

Tell me about the proposal.

I had no idea it was happening, even for the first two seconds of it happening. We had talked about getting engaged, as all couples should. And we both knew Kristen would be the one to propose. But we didn’t have any kind of established timeline or expectations outside of that. Just like… a proposal is coming… one day… who knows when or where or how! So yeah, I was surprised! She debated between doing it at Christmas or at our fourth anniversary trip a couple months later. She texted my sister to ask what she thought about a Christmas proposal, because she knew my scary Scorpio sister would be honest with her, and she knows I care about my sister’s thoughts a lot. In scary Scorpio fashion, my sister took two full days to get back to her but ultimately gave her the green light for a Christmas proposal. It was a perfect setting honestly, because it meant we didn’t have to spend two hours on our proposal day FaceTiming all my relatives lol — we could tell them irl! I wrote a short essay about some of the other proposal details, but something that stands out to me about it that I don’t go into there is how lost for words she was when she gave me the ring. Kristen is someone who is never lost for words, but she was nervous! She’d been having stress dreams about it for weeks! It was honestly so cute, and I’d take that over a rehearsed/carefully scripted proposal any day. It was so real and also signified to me how big of a deal it was for her.

What’s the most surprising thing so far about being engaged?

How quickly people ask you about wedding plans! I get it, it’s typically the “next step,” but I think I mistakenly thought maybe because we’re queer, people wouldn’t have had these normative timeline expectations locked and loaded for us. This didn’t just come from my family (expected!); it came from other queer people, too. Also, I think neither of us has necessarily fallen in love with the word “fiancé” haha. We LOVE being engaged; I like to talk about it all the time, but something about that word! We liked “girlfriend” and we really like “wife” and like yeah who cares we should just use the words we wanna use and don’t HAVE to use fiancé if we don’t want to, but I find it funny that neither of us has super taken to it.

Are you planning a wedding?

Haha yes, I know I just complained about this question, but YES! We are. We’re in the earlyish stages of it, but knock on wood, it’s going well so far. We have a venue, a date, a caterer (who is a queer friend!). Sometimes it feels stressful, but most of the time it feels good, especially since I’ve made a point to be like we have to talk about it as much as possible. It’s going to be complicated in a few ways that are relatable to most queer folks; we’ll both have family members who won’t be in attendance, but she has significantly fewer who will be invited. But so far, we’ve been navigating all these things really well together. The stress doesn’t come from us but from outside sources.

What would you say is your “reasoning” for getting engaged?

We’ve both known we wanted to marry each other for a while. I can’t remember the exact first time we talked about it, but it was something we were on the same page about early on. I don’t think she necessarily thought she’d marry again after her last marriage, but that shifted when we started dating. For me, I’ve wanted to be a wife for a while now haha. Once I came out as a lesbian, I knew I wanted to be married. I’m deeply monogamous; I’m deeply drawn to domestic life. Not that either of those things are required for wanting to get engaged, but it just really fits my desires for relationship structures and life. I knew I wanted to specifically marry Kristen pretty early on in our relationship and can even remember the first time I thought it, but I don’t wanna say it here in case it’s something I wanna save for my vows, and she reads every Autostraddle article lol.

If you could give One Hot Tip to other queers before they got engaged, what would it be?

Obvs find a way to talk about it ahead of time. Get on the same page about whether you want to have a wedding or not before the engagement happens. Be open to changing your mind about specific details though. It’s not a big deal if you think you want a big wedding and then realize you actually wanna elope, so long as you’re talking about it. I think even for queer folks there can be a pressure as to how you’re supposed to do things. Do what you want! My very wise friend Christina keeps saying during the wedding planning process: “You are never gonna make everyone happy, so why not make yourselves happy?”

Sa’iyda & Beth

Start doing your research as soon as possible!

Did you expect to get married in your life?

Yes! I didn’t think I’d marry a woman, but I always knew that marriage was in my future.

Tell me about the proposal.

My fiancee Beth and I had talked about proposing to each other. She’s been married before, but she did the proposing. I felt like she deserved to know how it felt to be proposed to. My original plan fell through because of COVID, so I proposed on Thanksgiving 2020, sitting on our bed while we watched TV after dinner. She proposed to me on Christmas 2020 using a book that she had commissioned by a friend who’s an artist. It told our love story and had “Will you marry me?” at the end. When I finished reading it, she was in front of me on one knee.

What’s the most surprising thing so far about being engaged?

How little things have changed, lol. We’ve been engaged for two years now, and honestly, it hasn’t changed our lives that much.

Are you planning a wedding?

Yes! We’re still figuring out the financial aspect of things, but we’ve got our plan mostly solidified.

What would you say is your “reasoning” for getting engaged?

It felt important to me to get engaged because I’m surprisingly traditional. Getting engaged is the natural progression to getting married. Plus, I really wanted a pretty ring and to celebrate the fact that I’ve found my person.

If you could give One Hot Tip to other queers before they got engaged, what would it be?

Start doing your research as soon as possible! You may think you know, but it’s so nice to be able to hit the ground running when you start planning.

Yasmeen & Clio & Their Polycule

I want to get married to emphasize to each other and to our community that commitments like this can extend to more than just one person, more than just romantic relationships, and that the four of us are a family, that this is something a family can look like.

Did you expect to get married in your life?

Yasmeen: I definitely hoped to! I had a childhood with a lot of change in it, so to me marriage and home ownership were markers of a stability I really longed for. When things first started becoming serious with me and Soren, the partner who brought me into our polycule, it was important to me to know if (non legal) marriage between us was within the realm of possibility so I could temper my expectations early on.

Clio: Not really! It wasn’t something I was particularly expecting until I was asked (the first time around, with my husband Soren — with the four of us, I was the one doing the asking). Growing up, my parents were divorced and so were the parents of most of my friends, and it just never really seemed like a particularly good idea. In high school and college, I developed more political objections to marriage as an institution, so it took some convincing to get me to think that it was possible to approach it in a way that didn’t feel so straight and patriarchal. Everyone in my life was pretty surprised when they found out *I* was getting married, especially so young.

Tell me about the proposal.

Yasmeen: My polycule was already all living together and committed to each other when I met Soren, so I’d always said that if there was a proposal, I wanted it to be from all three of them, since we’d be living one life together. We’d already had talks as a family about heading toward marriage/building a life together, but I wasn’t expecting a proposal for another year or more when Soren asked my ring size. Clio, Soren, our other partner and I were at Clio’s family lakeside cottage on a road trip around the East Coast and Canada when they proposed to me. Before we left, they let me know that the ring wasn’t going to arrive before our trip, so I really wasn’t expecting it to happen when it did! They suggested playing some guitar on the dock one afternoon just before sunset, so we were all sitting down there singing along when Clio said “I think I’m going to grab a folding chair to sit in instead.” Then they came back without the folding chair and I thought, I guess they changed their mind, and they went “actually I think this would be a better way to sit” and everyone was on one knee with the ring!

Clio: ^Ditto the above. It wasn’t that sly — we really didn’t think the ring was going to arrive in time, and then it arrived in the mail early the *night before* we left on the East Coast trip! So, we decided at the last minute to bring it anyway and propose in Canada even though we told Yasmeen we wouldn’t — we figured a surprise would be fun and she probably wouldn’t be too mad about it. The rest we figured out via text in our groupchat during the trip.

Yasmeen: I was not at all mad! There were so many emotionally touching moments on that trip, even before the proposal, that if I knew it was coming I think the anticipation would have taken me out.

What’s the most surprising thing so far about being engaged?

Yasmeen: For me, it was that it didn’t magically fix my insecurities or fear of abandonment — I’d always thought that if I reached a certain threshold of commitment I would suddenly be totally chill, but it’s really brought home for me that that stuff is way more internal than situation-based.

Clio: This really shouldn’t be a surprise, but — how big a deal it is, how much weight everyone puts on it, especially people who aren’t the ones getting married (family, etc). I haven’t known that many people who have gotten married, and I tend to be pretty hands-off with my friends’ and family’s relationships, so it can feel strange to suddenly have everyone all up in mine. It’s stressful but it’s also nice — getting engaged lends a sense of legitimacy to things, and it feels nice to be celebrated by others.

Are you planning a wedding?

Yasmeen: We have a Pinterest board, but that’s about it! We want to get married in whatever new town we move to on the east coast, and that move won’t be for a couple years.

What would you say is your “reasoning” for getting engaged?

Yasmeen: I wanted to get engaged as a marker of intent toward lifelong commitment before we started making steps like moving in together or (Soren’s favorite thing to do with loved ones) getting matching tattoos. One value I think we all place a high priority on is doing things with intention and being very clear in our commitments, so having a moment where all our conversations around what being married would mean to us (especially because being legally married to multiple people isn’t currently possible) came to fruition was super useful.

Clio: With Soren, I wanted two things: (1) our family and friends to know how serious we were, and (2) a party. I also wanted to be able to put him on my health insurance. That’s pretty much it — we already had the lifelong commitment to each other, and marriage didn’t really change or enhance that for me.

With Soren, Yasmeen, and our other partner, I want to get married to emphasize to each other and to our community that commitments like this can extend to more than just one person, more than just romantic relationships, and that the four of us are a family, that this is something a family can look like. Another party sounds fun, too.

If you could give One Hot Tip to other queers before they got engaged, what would it be?

Yasmeen: That being engaged is more a change of label than one of substance! Day to day, there’s not a huge difference between my life when we were making long-term plans but not engaged and now, other than I have a very pretty ring and very sweet memories. ❤️

Clio: These are good questions to have to answer. My hot tip is to answer the questions in this interview, haha — what are you expecting from marriage? What do you want? How do you want this to affect your relationship with your partner(s), or with other family/friends? It doesn’t have to be the typical responses, but it’s good to know what they are going in.

Nico & Sadie

Honestly, getting married is like the easiest way to take care of a lot of legal business.

Did you expect to get married in your life?

Nico: Well, I am divorced, so, yes. And as I always say, you can get married as many times as you want.

Sadie: I wanted to get married, but I didn’t think it was a possibility before 2015. In general, long-term relationships are something that’s very important to me.

Tell me about the proposal.

Sadie: We talked about proposing to each other, and we picked out rings ahead of time, and we knew we were going to get engaged on Christmas because you [Nico] really love Christmas. We had picked a location, a city park that had been designed by Louise Bourgeois, who’s an artist who is very important to us. We also thought that getting engaged on Christmas meant that downtown wouldn’t be as full of people and random spectators.

Nico: So it was 10 degrees F, and we had to thaw the car with a hair dryer and a portable battery. The fountain had completely frozen over and also the overflow water had frozen into a treacherous sheet of ice in the park. We held hands and made our way across the ice. We were going to sit on one of the benches that is a giant marble eyeball, but the seat had a sheet of ice, so we used the eyeball for support. Sadie went first and knelt down and said sweet things and proposed. I went second. I knelt down, and that was when about a dozen people approached the park wearing Steelers gear. I could see them but Sadie’s back was to them, so I had to propose with an audience Sadie did not know was there, balanced on a sheet of ice. One lady filmed it.

Sadie: I felt that there were eyes on me, so I turn around and see one woman was filming. They were waiting for us to finish so they could go look at the fountain I guess. We were obviously getting engaged, and no one cheered.

Nico: We awkwardly escaped into an alley downtown.

What’s the most surprising thing so far about being engaged?

Nico: How excited Sadie’s mom got! It was really sweet.

Are you planning a wedding?

Sadie: LOL

Nico: We are planning to elope. We’re torn between Ireland and Reno, NV.

What would you say is your “reasoning” for getting engaged?

Nico: Because our actual marriage is not yet scheduled until we have the means to go on our trip, we wanted to do something to symbolize our commitment to each other.

Sadie: Honestly, getting married is like the easiest way to take care of a lot of legal business.

Nico: We’ve been together for five years, and we’ve been talking about and imagining our private little wedding ceremony for some time, and I’m really looking forward to it! I love Sadie!

Sadie: When we talk about our future, it seemed like the next logical step. Who wouldn’t want to wake up to you every day? (Unless we’re at residencies or something.)

If you could give One Hot Tip to other queers before they got engaged, what would it be?

Nico: Have all the hard conversations (money, kids, end-of-life/dying, parents and family, debt, future plans and career) before you get engaged so that after you get engaged, it’s about planning the fun part (eloping to a beautiful green island or the desert!).

Amanda-Faye & Jo

My views on marriage, for myself at least, have fluctuated through many different forms of not feeling necessary due to my queerness and politics to wanting the same protections in my relationship that other people have.

Did you expect to get married in your life?

Not really! I never dreamed about it as a little girl or anything like that. Then, once I was old enough to understand marriage and feminism but wasn’t out to myself yet, I definitely knew I didn’t want to be a man’s wife (lol). I grew up Catholic, and nothing about a Catholic wedding or marriage ever appealed to me.

I came out when I was 17, which is sadly (for me) a VERY long time ago at this point, so my views on marriage, for myself at least, have fluctuated through many different forms of not feeling necessary due to my queerness and politics to wanting the same protections in my relationship that other people have. At the end of the day, though, it has come down to really liking my partner a lot and wanting to have a ceremony with them.

Tell me about the proposal.

We had been talking a bit about the ring, so I knew it was coming at some point in the near future, but I was very surprised by the proposal moment, which is difficult to do for me, as I am very clever and intuitive (nosy and annoying).

Jo took me to tea at The Huntington Library and Botanical Gardens in Pasadena, which I had been wanting to do for a while. While we were waiting for our reservation, we walked around the rose garden. I found a rose that matched my coral-colored gel manicure and Jo saw me taking a photo of my hand next to the rose and said, “wait, I have something that will make the photo even better” got down on one knee and proposed with the ring. Then there was crying and laughing and a tea lunch I don’t remember because I was buzzing with excitement, and also it was like nine years ago, hahaha!

What’s the most surprising thing so far about being engaged?

I can’t really think of anything here, or maybe I don’t remember! Mostly I guess I was surprised by how quickly the novelty of saying “my finacé” wears off and makes you feel kinda douchey when you have a long engagement ahead. I was so ready to shed “boyfriend/girlfriend” for something that felt like a greater nod to the time we had been together (almost 7 years) and was more gender-neutral, as “partner” didn’t roll off the tongue as easily then, but fiancé was only fun for a little while before I felt like a straight gal in a romcom. I pretty much only use it now when I don’t want to come out in conversation with a random.

Are you planning a wedding?

Real planning or perpetually mentally planning? It’s the second thing! By the time this wedding happens, it better be amazing because we have ideas for days! The long engagement has been mostly for financial and timing reasons, but at this point we also really want it to be exactly what we want, which is pretty modest but also specific… and changes a lot for something so specific.

What would you say is your “reasoning” for getting engaged?

Yeah, just the boring answer. We wanted to have a ceremony to celebrate our commitment to each other and I want to have a very fun semi-destination situation in which my aging queer friends are forced to party with and pay attention to me for two solid days at least! That’s the plan so far, anyway.

If you could give One Hot Tip to other queers before they got engaged, what would it be?

This isn’t necessarily queer-specific. I loved our surprise proposal, so I’m not totally sure about this, but I think if we could do it again, I would have liked us to exchange rings mutually. I see a lot more queer couples doing that now and I really like it. I didn’t really expect my partner to want a ring other than a wedding band because they aren’t much of a jewelry person, but the more we have talked about it over the years, I think they would have liked that as well.

Evette & Teré

Don’t ever give up on love! And, most important, advocate for the type of love you deserve.

Did you expect to get married in your life?

Evette: No, I never expected to get married. I’ve also never been engaged before now. Before I met Teré, I’d been writing and thinking a lot about what it means to be intentionally single in a world that prioritizes romantic relationships. I’d even gone through the egg-freezing process as a single woman. For years, I’d been really investing in other important relationships in my life, and, in turn, I was able to invest in myself and better understand my desires and needs. By the time I met Teré on a dating app in January 2022, I was pretty disinterested in a partnership that didn’t allow me to pour into the other relationships I value. Teré understood that notion from the start, and he also modeled it in his own life. Our relationship felt effortless from the first day, so by the time Teré proposed, I knew this was the kind of relationship I could invest in day after day for the rest of our lives.

Teré: I’ve been married once, and I never thought I would get married again. My therapist encouraged me to start dating after a period of time focusing on myself, so I created a dating profile. After a couple of failed attempts, it kind of reaffirmed my expectations of never marrying again. Then, I met Evette, and I think what made it so successful is that we spent so much time getting to know each other. Of course, we were attracted to each other. We’re both beautiful people, but I think the first spark was this kindred-spirited, ancestral friendship. Through the good, the bad, and the ugly, Evette’s my best friend. I trust her with anything. For me, that’s a first.

Tell me about the proposal.

Teré: I know that family is really big for Evette, so I knew I wanted to do it in a way that included her family, specifically her nieces. I think it’s really important that we set generational examples of what Black love can be. Anyway, I was falling in love, and I knew I wanted to marry her, so the first thing I did was ask her parents and her closest friends. I talked to my little sister as well. Once I got the blessing from everyone, I knew it was a done deal. My grandfather taught me that if you’re serious about someone, start saving a little bit of money each month while you’re getting to know them. That’s how you can afford the ring. And, if the relationship doesn’t work out, you then have a lump sum of money to really take care of yourself.

I’ve been saving money from the first month I met Evette. Once I secured the bag and got the ring, I decided on a Christmas proposal. Winter is really hard for Evette, and I thought it would be really cool to tie the engagement to what is typically a tough time mentally. On Christmas Day, picture it: Black family around the Christmas tree, mysterious gift box, handwritten letter, and kaboom! I was on one knee, and she said yes.

Evette: I sure did! Teré tricked me. A couple of nights before Christmas, he’d said that we should wait to get engaged, so I wasn’t expecting it at all. I bought my dad and Teré designer boots for Christmas, but I got them in two separate colors. When we were about to leave to have dinner with my family, Teré said he wanted to take his boots to show them to my dad. I thought that was strange, but I didn’t think much more about it. After we’d all opened our gifts, Teré passed me the shoe box and asked me to open it. Inside was a series of decoy boxes that ultimately opened into a beautiful, handwritten letter. I knew something was going on when he told me the read the letter out loud. It was such an amazing moment. I’m so glad I got to share it with my family and that Teré was so thoughtful about the engagement. It’s a memory I will cherish forever.

What’s the most surprising thing so far about being engaged?

Evette: I guess what’s been most surprising is that we haven’t really been able to enjoy our engagement because people keep asking when we’re getting married.

Teré: I know, it’s wild! One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned in life is to go at godspeed. I don’t know when we’re going to get married, but we’ll both know when the time is right, just like with the engagement.

Are you planning a wedding?

Teré: See what I mean? LOL. Just kidding.

Evette: No, we haven’t started planning the wedding, but we do intend to have one. We’d love to have a destination wedding, but we haven’t decided where yet.

What would you say is your “reasoning” for getting engaged?

Teré: I feel like I’m a part of one of the last generations that remembers what it was like to live and love in a time when it was illegal to get married. Not to be rude, but my first immediate reaction is I got engaged because I can — and that feels important to me. I never really had a close-knit bio family, and even when I didn’t want to get married again, I always desired to create a family. I come from a pretty intense broken home, so, as an adult, I wanted to create a better family representation for my inner child.

Evette: That is a beautiful answer, babe. For me, getting engaged feels like a natural extension of our relationship. Everything in my body and in my spirit tells me that Teré is my soulmate. I want to share Teré’s last name and have children with him, so becoming engaged and eventually getting married, just feels right.

If you could give One Hot Tip to other queers before they got engaged, what would it be?

Evette: My One Hot Tip would be to only get engaged because you desire to. Don’t get engaged because you feel pressured to or because you’re getting older and everyone else is doing it. That’s a surefire way to set yourself up for misery.

Teré: Don’t ever give up on love! And, most important, advocate for the type of love you deserve.

Blush and Bashful is a biweekly queer wedding planning column.

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