At Last, an Engagement Story
I want a Sunday kind of Love
On Sunday, December 10th, in a quiet corner of Morococo Cafe, Dae-Han Song and I became officially engaged.
After a day spent together first at a cafe on the West Sea outside of Seoul, then at my favorite used bookstore, and then at the sweetest tiny chocolate shop, we arrived for dinner at the restaurant where we had our first date on October 9, 2021. I had a sense that this would be “the place.”
To be candid, after my grandma had brought Dae-Han her engagement ring — the ring I had asked for this past summer — when she came to visit with my parents in October, after he had had this ring in his keeping for weeks, I took a deep breath while we ate dinner one night and said, “I will be really sad if we aren’t engaged by the time I go home for Christmas.” “Yes, of course,” Dae-Han replied. “We will be.”
It is a bit funny, I suppose, that in 2023, as part of a progressive partnership, I was waiting for him to propose to me. But I was. Roxane Gay, one of my favorite authors, has a book called Bad Feminist. In one of the essays within the book, she “confesses” that pink is her favorite color and that she reads Vogue. Do these things make her a bad feminist? I think not. And I can see why that even while I am building an egalitarian partnership with Dae-Han, I wanted something of an old-fashioned proposal.
It ended up being “something old, something new” nothing borrowed, nothing blue. Dae-Han chose to stick to tradition in so much as he planned the day and he presented me with the ring, but he did put his own new spin on the proposal. He did not get down on one knee or say, “Will you marry me?”
As a couple, we had been talking about our wedding and marriage explicitly for some months. There wasn’t any mystery or surprise around getting married, and to my mind, there shouldn’t be, at least not for me. So rather than take a traditional approach to proposing, Dae-Han began a beautiful speech with “Well, this is where we had our first date …” After sharing heart-felt words with me, he took out the ring and said, “I want to marry you” to which I rather quickly replied, “I want to marry you, too.”
Somewhere, someone must have been playing Etta James because this moment embodied her lyrics:
And my arms need someone
Someone to enfold
To keep me warm when Mondays and Tuesdays grow cold
Love for all my life, to have and to hold
Oh, and I want a Sunday kind of love
After we toasted to us, our love, and a lifetime of Sundays, we shared with Morococo’s manager, Wahid, just how special his cafe had become for us.
Wahid was thrilled for us, and we took pictures together, but this photo was especially for Gram, who he had met with she and Mom and Dad were in town. (Grandma be crushing.)
Love is here to stay
While this night was our official engagement, I look back now at the number of months leading up to it, noting that our engagement really was something that happened over time, just like falling in love. Merriam-Webster may define engagement as a fixed event or plan, but to me, it seems to have been something more cumulative.
Over the course of our relationship, we have been engaging in open, honest, candid conversations about what we have wanted as single people and how these visions could shift for us to co-create a life together. Dae-Han seems to have come to me as a man who was already so skilled at evenly and respectfully addressing things that may be bothering him; I continued to engage in conversations with my therapist about how to avoid being passive-aggressive (a skill I had inadvertently honed) and being direct about my wants and needs.
Over the past few months, we had engaged in quite a few trips between Dae-Han’s former apartment and the newly coined Baci-Song Abode. This move meant manoeuvring furniture and bags and boxes down steep steal and cement steps. I held feelings of fear that Dae-Han was going to crash down the steps bearing heavy weights and seriously injure himself while also harboring feelings of frustration that he had chosen to live in an apartment that would now force us to engage in such “risky business.”
For his part, Dae-Han calmly told me that I did not need to help with the move, that he could do it himself or with a friend, if I was going to feel so upset every time we went to move a load. Bless this man who is able to share words so peacefully when I have lost my words and commenced giving off less than “good vibes only.”
I do credit myself for bringing an abundance of good vibes, too, though. Most of the time, I’ve got nothing but love, laughter, and besos to give.
Really, the ease and beauty that marks most of our moments and most of our days is credited to both of us. We have chosen to engage with each other, to be present with each other. Dae-Han and I have chosen to not let our grievances fester. We do not harbor anger or resentment because we have made a conscious choice to engage in the work of our relationship together.
These choices are what have allowed for love to grow between us, the trust in our firm foundation to be laid. All of these moments of engagement have led us both to the understanding that love is here to stay, like Sinatra sang.
It's very clear
Our love is here to stay
Not for a year
But ever and a day
The radio and the telephone
And the movies that we know
May just be passing fancies
And in time may go
But, oh my dear,
Our love is here to stay
Together we're going a long, long way
At last
Before I met Dae-Han, I felt that I had been walking a long, long way — well, walking and crying and pouting and crawling and crying a long, long way — in and out of casual, semi-committed, and committed relationships, but that true partnership was just going to be forever allusive in my life.
It may be cliche, but all of those steps and stumbles that led Dae-Han and I to find each other, they were really worth it. If we both needed this much time to live and learn and mold ourselves to be ready for each other, well, We were worth the wait.
Since that first date in October, 2021, there has been no soulful wailing about how I guess I was just meant to live a Single Lady Life (no one should wail about being a life-time Sexy Drifter anyway — perspective is everything). No, since Dae-Han and I met, it’s not that I “just knew” he was the one from that first date, but I did know he, and We, were different. When I was home for Christmas, Gram said to me over an old-fashioned at Oliver’s, “You two are so compatible, it’s almost scary.”
Before Gram had noted it, this thought had also crossed my mind, how wildly compatible we are and how wild it is that in this expansive world we now will walk together for all of our days.
After finishing our dinner at Morococo on that Sunday night, Dae-Han and I walked to the metro and then walked from the metro nearest our home back to our apartment. Even if I see our engagement as a series of moments strung together, I was of course giddy about our official moment. Now wearing a ring that Grandpa had given Grandma in 1957, a ring with one love story twinkling up at me with every sparkle of the diamond, I put my hand in Dae-Han’s and swung it as we walked. I dug into my coat pocket with my other hand for my phone and pressed play on the Spotify. You can’t make this up: Etta James started to sing:
At last
My love has come along
My “At Last” — my very favorite Song — and I dancing at the Seoul Foreign School holiday party, a prelude of the days to come for the Baci-Songs.
