My Wedding & Mental Health Journey | The Proposal
My name is Aimee, I’m 27 and live in Northumberland. I write a lifestyle blog at www.imnotdisordered.co.uk and got engaged to my partner Ronnie in November 2016.
Welcome to the first of my monthly blog posts for weddingplanner.co.uk and join me as I use the site to help plan my wedding! This month we’ll be talking about getting engaged and how you can choose to let it shape The Big Day!
I don’t think I was ever the kind of girl who dreamt about her wedding from a young age. I didn’t have a scrapbook with cut outs from catalogues and pictures of men in suits haphazardly glued to the cardboard paper. I didn’t have a single idea in mind as to how I might want my ‘Big Day’ to be.
But I did have ideas about the proposal.
I pictured a private tour of the Eiffel Tower culminating in a huge firework display as my handsome husband-to-be knelt on bended knee. As I got older, however, I began to wonder whether that was actually society’s idea of an ideal proposal and not really my own.
As my relationship with Ronnie progressed and it seemed that ‘The Big Question’ was imminent, I actually found myself hoping for an entirely different type of proposal. So, when we booked our first little holiday together to stay in a cute, rustic WigWam in the middle of nowhere, I couldn’t help but form a little vision; I hoped for the bent knee and ring to happen at sunset, in our toasty warm WigWam, with muddy wellies at the door and soaking socks drying on the radiators. It would be just us, intimate and ever so special. I think that I must’ve given the right amount of hints to both the scenario and the ring I wanted, because it was almost exactly what I got!
Ronnie later told me that he’d had the proposal planned for the first evening of our break, but, like so many other men in this position his nerves got the better of him and he delayed. As the last night of our trip loomed he began to panic, but thankfully, he pulled it out of the bag just in time!
The proposal summed up our relationship; him lying on the bed (with the ring in hand), me being distracted and stressing over something of nothing and not even noticing him lying there with that great big sparkly ring of mine. After the tears and, of course, the ‘yes’ we fell asleep in each other’s arms exhausted from the emotion of the day. I woke up the next morning to my ring shining in the light of the sunrise over the mountains (how poetic!), before we began doing the rounds of phone calls to loved ones!
Over a year on and I realise that our proposal has totally shaped our wedding. We’ve timed the date around the date Ronnie proposed (November 23rd) and have set the theme (hessian and lace) around the whole rustic, woodland setting that our WigWam was in.
I haven’t heard of many couples using their proposal story as inspiration for their wedding, but for Ronnie and me it’s the perfect reflection of our outlook on life. We see this as a journey; our relationship, proposal and wedding. One road leads to another and so, in our wedding, we’d like to show appreciation for the things that have brought us to where we are today – something that we’ll be illustrating in our guest list.
This outlook is probably a result of our story; we met in January 2009 but in June that year I was hospitalised for a deterioration in my mental health (find out more about this on my blog). Things continued like that for a while – me being constantly in and out of hospitals, trying all sorts of treatment and medications. We took a break from our relationship in 2012 when I was sent to a specialist hospital over 100 miles away from home. I needed to focus on myself and not worry that Ronnie and I could hardly speak or see one another. I was in that hospital for over two years and when I was discharged, Ronnie was there for me and our relationship began to flourish once more. We’ve been through so much together and our journey has shaped our relationship so, for us, it makes sense for the engagement to continue to influence the wedding.
Join me next month when I’ll be talking about falling out with your bridesmaids…